“Kill Your Parents” was a rallying cry of 1960’s America. We were embroiled in an unpopular war in Vietnam, the world was fighting to change with hope-through-force, and the liberal campus of Columbia University in the City of New York was embroiled in one of it’s worse moments in its history during the Spring of 1968.
It really makes me a happier person to see that in a world full of mothers like the Octomom and mothers trying to commit suicide publicly, and even the most obnoxious mother I have ever seen, there are mothers who not only take care of their own children but also reach out and take care of other children — children who have been abandoned and left for dead. They do it because it is the right thing to do, not because the panopticonic camera will be following them wherever they go, snapping photographs of them as they wander through airports and go grocery shopping and pick up their dry cleaning.
Having children in the simplest sense is a purely biological expression in that all that it takes to make it happen is to have the right conditions. There are no tests or other requirements that need to be met prior to people having children and it is not just the existence of television shows such as “Sixteen and Pregnant” and the like. Then you find out that you can take all the illegal drugs you want and still be allowed to have any number of children, even seven!
Continue reading → Should Drug Abusers Be Banned From Having Children?
My name is Gordon Davidescu, and I am a slowly recovering hypochondriac parent. It has taken me nearly sixteen months to get to this point but I realized that I was making good progress this last weekend when I was in Starbucks. Chaim Yosef was having a grand old time, flirting with the baristas as he tends to do when we go there and just walking around.
The job of childproofing your home does not start when your baby is born or even when the baby starts crawling. Rather, the childproofing of the home really begins when you find out that you are going to be a parent — mentally or otherwise. For example, when we knew that Chaim Yosef Davidescu was going to be joining us in Kew Gardens, we started discussing what kinds of equipment we would need to eventually buy to help protect him against, well, himself.
As you are well aware, I am not at all a fan of backseat parenting — I don’t see parents doing something with which I disagree and rush right over to tell them all about the error of their ways. There are limits to this, of course, and lines in parenting that cannot and should not ever be crossed — that line was crossed by a couple in Arizona who posted photos of their children tied up with Duct tape, mouths taped shut, and hung upside down.
I feel, as a parent, quite fortunate to have stumbled across an excellent article with advice on how to become a patient parent. As a parent, one of the most important qualities one must acquire is patience. Losing ones temper with a son or daughter never goes well and does not help matters in any situation. It is certainly not helpful when it ends with screaming from the parent or, worse, any kind of violence be it in spanking form or otherwise.
