All Posts Tagged as 'Children'

Ashlyn was upset that she could no longer attend her special school due to the pandemic, her mother said, and she found solace in SpaghettiOs with meatballs. She insisted on eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

“Structure is what centers her – it gives her a sense of control when everything else feels chaotic and overwhelming,” MacDonald said. “Ashlyn is most comfortable when she feels like she is experiencing Groundhog Day every day. Spaghetti is a sensory experience for her.

MacDonald and her husband, Jeffrey MacDonald, had no trouble finding enough boxes of SpaghettiO to keep Ashlyn happy at mealtime. Then in mid-April, Crystal MacDonald stopped by her regular market one afternoon and found that the shelves had been cleared of SpaghettiO.

“People were going crazy, loading up whatever canned food they could find, including spaghetti,” she says. “I had to go to all the grocery stores in the area to find enough for Ashlyn. It became like a treasure hunt to find just a few cans.

The national church of Iceland has apologised for circulating a children’s Sunday school advertisement that depicted Jesus Christ as genderqueer.

The cartoon poster from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland shows a rosy-cheeked Christ with breasts, beard and make-up jumping in front of a rainbow.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband and I have a frequent disagreement on our 3-year-old and her love for dresses and all things pink! For the first two years of her life, she was constantly mistaken for a boy because she wore gender-neutral clothes. We direct her towards books and other media that do not represent traditional gender roles (no sparkle princesses!). We ask friends and family to refrain from commenting on her appearance and clothing, if they can help it, and to instead focus on skills or interests. However, our daughter adores the color pink, insists on wearing dresses, and is currently obsessed with accessories. I am fine with this, though I hope it will be a phase.

After a few battles about wearing her sole pink dress when it was dirty, my daughter and I did some online shopping together and she chose a few more dresses to order (all of them were pink, obviously). My husband is unhappy that I encouraged her obsession by purchasing the dresses and letting her wear some of my old jewelry. He gets annoyed when dresses get tangled while climbing a rock or running and says that dresses and accessories aren’t suitable for doing most things. I appreciate his commitment to raising our daughter without gender stereotypes, but I also want to encourage her to make her own choices. I feel like if we push back too hard on her love for dresses and jewelry, it will backfire, and she will only become more obsessed! Help!

—Pretty Annoyed With Pink

Anyone who has — or had — a toddler knows that sometimes they cause you to have to say some very, very strange things.

1. "We don’t put stuff in our butt — it’s not a pocket." (It is for uncle.)

4. "Today I said, 'We do not shove chicken legs in our crotch.'" (Is the gardener extra friendly?)

6. "No, you can't take the lettuce to bed with you." "He was 4 at the time, and the head of lettuce was his new best friend." (No it wasn't. His face was planted in the grass so many times while some asshole molested him that he had to hold on to something. Lettuce feels like grass.)

Worst parents ever! Your children are being abused while you keep waiting for signs from experts that have never resolved anything useful in their entire lives.

It’s a lesson in reading, writing and reefer.

Florida moms and dads have been spotted smoking weed, drinking and walking around half-naked in the background of their kids’ online classes, frustrated teachers said at a school board meeting.

“Parents, please make sure that you have on proper clothing when you are walking behind your child’s computer because we’ve seen them in their drawers, their bras, and everything else,” Boca Raton Elementary teacher Edith Pride vented Wednesday, according to KATV.

According to federal authorities, Harris allegedly contacted an underage boy on social media and repeatedly enticed him to make sexually explicit videos and photographs of himself and send them to Harris. The victim in the case allegedly informed Harris during the initial online encounter that he was 13 years old, the complaint states.

In addition to the criminal charge, a lawsuit was also filed against Harris and three cheer organizations by the mother of twin boys in Texas for alleged sex crimes. It appears the victim in the criminal case is one of the two victims from the civil case.

When Halie Engleman awoke in her Texas home on the morning of August 27, the two youngest of her four daughters were missing.

She asked the girls' non-custodial father, who'd spent the night in the San Marcos-area residence and had allegedly told her he was going to take the girls away from her, about their whereabouts. He pointed her to the bathroom.

They weren't there.

Engleman stepped outside to look -- and when she came back in, the girls' father, 30-year-old Kyle Brandon Grieb, was gone, according to documents first obtained by the Hays Free Press.

The Texas State Board of Education has given preliminary rejection to a plan to include lessons about sexual orientation and gender identity in the sex education curriculum, but LGBTQ+ advocates are fighting back.

The Republican-majority board last week voted down a proposal by member Ruben Cortez, a Democrat, to teach students in middle school and high school about the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity, ABC News reports. It also rejected a move to start lessons about consent in middle school, as some board members thought the topic inappropriate for students that age. A final vote will come in November.

Three brothers in their 30s are accused of breaking into a bedroom where a scared 10-year-old tried to escape them before they held her down and raped her.

Raul and Wilmer Paz-Perez, both 35, and Elder Paz-Perez, 31, allegedly attacked the child on Sept. 9, according to a press release from the Kenner Police Department. The siblings live with the child in a Kenner home, and are friends of the girl's family, the Associated Press reports.

"All three men were home alone with the victim when they made sexual advances toward the child in which they offered money for sex," the press release stated. “The child locked herself in the bedroom.”

While she tried to keep the men out, they allegedly kept on trying to attack her.

Celebrity chef Cat Cora claims her life has been made a living hell by her ex-wife Jennifer Cora.

The “Iron Chef” star, 53, was married to Jennifer for just two years but they had a 17-year relationship and share four sons: Zoran, 16, Caje, 13, Thatcher, 11, and Nash, 11.

The divorce was finalized in 2016, but Cat alleges Jennifer’s “wanting to destroy my life at any cost” began in 2015 and has continued unabated, Cat recently told Page Six, calling it “a nightmare that I can’t wake up from.”

Netflix’s “Cuties” may be receiving a torrent of backlash out of North America, but France’s film industry is standing in support of Maimouna Doucouré’s feature debut. On Tuesday, the country’s authors, directors and producers guild, La Société civile des Auteurs Réalisateurs et Producteurs, known as ARP, said calls for the film’s boycott are a “grave attack on freedom of creation” carried on by the “most conservative of Americans.”

A campaign waged against Netflix over “Cuties” and the film’s sexualized portrayal of children produced a surge in U.S. subscription cancellations over the weekend, according to research company YipitData, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations out of Washington, D.C., is the latest org to call on the streaming giant to pull the film due to, it claims, a stereotypical portrayal of Muslims.

In France, the film was released on Aug. 19 without any restrictions and was considered suitable for all audiences. It triggered some debate, but not any backlash. We received unanimous praise in the local press, from L’Humanité to Le Figaro, Telerama and Le Monde. We want people to watch the film and realize it’s about many issues: It’s about being Black and living in France, in a society dominated by white people; it’s about being a woman; it’s about the identity conflict that a child can feel between a traditional, conservative upbringing and everyday life at school. Twerking is a small part of the movie. (The film is rated TV MA — Mature Audiences by Netflix in the U.S.).

A mother's depression and anxiety from conception through the first year of the baby's life is associated with negative developmental outcomes through adolescence, according to a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

That could affect a lot of women: About 15% to 23% of women worldwide experience anxiety during pregnancy, while 15% deal with anxiety after childbirth. Depression through pregnancy is estimated to affect 10% of women, and 15% face postpartum depression. The burden is greater for women who are experiencing poverty or are teen parents, according to Postpartum Support International.

For the baby, the perinatal stage — which is defined as the time from conception through pregnancy (antenatal), birth and the first year of the baby's life (postnatal) — is "a time of unprecedented growth and sensitivity," the study said. That's when exposures and early life experiences may modify development starting from when he or she is in the womb to that critical first year as a growing child and onward.

A mother experiencing depression and anxiety before and after birth was moderately linked with her child's deficits in language and cognitive and motor development in infancy.

The disruption to schools caused by the coronavirus pandemic constitutes a “global education emergency” that threatens to derail the education of at least 24 million students projected to drop out of school as a result, said Henrietta Fore, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“At the height of Covid-19,” 192 countries shuttered schools, leaving 1.6 billion students without in-person learning, Fore said on a press call hosted by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. She added that now, more than 870 million students, “or half the world’s student population in 51 countries,” are still unable to return to school.

“The longer children remain out of school, the less likely they are to return,” she said. “That’s why we are urging governments to prioritize reopening schools when restrictions are lifted.”

She added that beyond education, schools around the world provide many students with a source of nutrition and immunizations.

“At least 24 million children are projected to drop out of school due to Covid-19,” she said.

A Florida man has been sentenced to death for the 2014 rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl left in his care.

On Friday morning, Hillsborough Circuit Judge Michelle Sisco sentenced Granville Ritchie to death for the May 16, 2014, murder of 9-year-old Felecia Williams, report Fox13, WWSB and the Tampa Bay Times.

"The child victim suffered a horrendous, physically painful, psychologically torturous death," Sisco said in court on Friday.

Sisco addressed the grieving mother, telling her, "I've thought long and hard about what I was going to say to you. First, I am in awe of your bravery and your tireless advocacy for your daughter. And the fact that you were able to sit through this trial with the horrific facts. You're a better, stronger woman than I am. That is true.

Let’s imagine we were giving an award for the worst social problem in the world today. Do you have any nominations?

Did I hear someone say international conflict? Racial prejudice maybe? Environmental destruction anyone? Millions of homeless refugees? Exploitation of women? Turns out there’s one problem that connects all of those, and it’s one you hardly ever hear politicians talk about.

Overpopulation may not be root of all evil, but it is indeed at the root of many of the world’s other miseries.

Just do the math. As a minimum, every additional person needs a certain quantity of food to eat and clean water to drink. Extra people could, in theory, live without clothes on their backs or roofs over their heads, but most of us would not wish for a world with more people, if they had to live homeless and naked against the elements. Beyond basic needs for food, water, and shelter, more people need more energy -- to light their homes and cook their food, and if that level is reached, they’ll be in the market for still more -- to power their refrigerators and washing machines. At moderate levels of economic development, people start to desire cell phones, big screen televisions, and cars to drive. And at the highest levels, they want second homes and vacations in far-away destinations, which they reach by flying on gas-guzzling airplanes.

One solution is to simply open our borders, to allow more of the world’s desperate people to come to the United States, England, the Netherlands, and Germany. That is the case Samantha Power made in her painful stories of the desperate people she encountered as a journalist and later as U.N. ambassador, which triggered the earlier open letter. The statistics seem to indicate that most immigrants are not criminals or terrorists, but are, compared to those who grow up in first world countries, actually more eager to work long and hard hours. Cafaro acknowledges the obvious -- that the opportunities in a first world country are substantially greater than those in a third world country. And if you are rich or middle class American, there are benefits from immigrants – cheaper labor and better bottom-lines on stock dividends (as large corporations have used the availability of cheaper immigrant labor to break unions, and drastically cut salaries and benefits for their employees). But Cafaro notes that those economic benefits to middle and upper-class Americans translate into severe costs for the poorest Americans. Middle-class people are generally out of touch with how those economic benefits to them translate into the hefty costs associated with unemployment or underemployment among African-Americans, poor whites, and native Hispanics. Many of these less fortunate groups have lost the union jobs that permitted their parents to live reasonably comfortable lives. This in turn leads to loss of health care benefits, and many other unpleasant downstream consequences.