Sheep and wolves

Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 Posted in Faith and Life, The Art of Parenting | 10 Comments »

Because I am a father I think about the parents of that boy torn to pieces, of his sister whose leg was taken. I think about those parents in Newtown, whose biggest Christmas purchases were coffins for their sons and ...

On the imperative of baby swaddling

Wednesday, September 26th, 2012 Posted in The Art of Parenting | 6 Comments »

Hey you, with the crying baby. I understand that this little person is, in deeply emotional, psychological, physiological, theological senses of the term, an extension of your person. Please recognize, however, that this is not literally the case. In other words, the ...

Abandoning children

Friday, September 21st, 2012 Posted in The Art of Parenting | 13 Comments »

The intellectual consensus seems to be that having children is miserable business. This consensus is built on shoddy thinking and shoddier statistics. The latest example is brought to us by Why Have Kids? author Jessica Valenti, who notes that in the ...

An Apple in time

Friday, August 24th, 2012 Posted in Business Behaving Badly, The Art of Parenting | 3 Comments »

Another working road trip. My colleague needs a piece of equipment from the Apple store, which is in a mall. The Apple store is swarming with people, but in less than 30 seconds, a salesman comes alongside to take us ...

A pox on this house

Monday, August 20th, 2012 Posted in Faith and Life, The Art of Parenting | 3 Comments »

The last fortnight was chicken pox time for the Woodlief boys. I have acquaintances who are apostles of all things scientific and modern, and who are therefore appalled that my boys never received the chicken pox vaccine. It seemed like ...

Words

Friday, August 17th, 2012 Posted in The Art of Parenting | No Comments »

Some of you might like my recent essay at Image's Good Letters channel. Here's an excerpt: "The vicissitudes of life may chink or scorch or even crack that die, but if your child doesn’t come with the self-restraint app, for example, ...

Homecoming

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012 Posted in The Art of Parenting | No Comments »

Some of you may like my latest essay at Image Journal's section of Patheos, "Coming Home to Fatherhood." Here's an excerpt: "Or perhaps it’s closer to truth to say that nearly everything we do, so long as we love our children, ...

Imagination destruction

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012 Posted in The Art of Parenting | No Comments »

From my review of Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: "And the Mordor of our time, one gathers from Esolen, is a utilitarian educational culture administered by small-minded bureaucrats in thrall to materialism, scientism, and social ...

More than bread

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 Posted in Faith and Life, The Art of Parenting | No Comments »

When we don't think we can control some things we take charge of what we can. This is why the functionary fastidiously maintains a constant distance between his stapler and his tape dispenser, and why the abused child has a ...

Father’s Day

Sunday, June 19th, 2011 Posted in Faith and Life, The Art of Parenting | 1 Comment »

There's certainly no distinction to breeding, and so Father's Day must be intended to celebrate something other than one's ability to procreate. It began in tragedy, which is maybe the truth of too many things, the world's way of daring ...

Possibility

Friday, January 28th, 2011 Posted in The Art of Parenting | 7 Comments »

My work with non-profits over the years has given me the opportunity to sit down with a number of philanthropists. I'm just now flying home from visiting Tucson, Arizona, where I met with several people who have led very different ...

On Tiger Mamas, bad art, and the heart of a child

Monday, January 24th, 2011 Posted in The Art of Parenting | 13 Comments »

My first thought, upon hearing of Amy Chua's now famous (or infamous) essay about the superiority of Chinese mothers, is that it's irrelevant to me. The odds that I will go out and father a child with a Chinese woman are ...

Throwing apples back at the trees

Sunday, November 14th, 2010 Posted in The Art of Parenting | 1 Comment »

The Iowa Supreme Court agrees that city officials in Davenport are within their authority to penalize parents of juvenile criminals. I'm not sure if the reason parents raise rotten kids is simply because there's no penalty for doing otherwise, but ...

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray my phone a text to beep

Monday, November 1st, 2010 Posted in The Art of Parenting | 1 Comment »

When your teenagers go to bed, are they unplugged for the night? A new study finds that teenagers receive an average 34 texts after bedtime, and are awakened once a night on average by a text. Girls were more likely ...

Halloween safety

Saturday, October 30th, 2010 Posted in The Art of Parenting | No Comments »

Regarding my previous post on the safety of Halloween, Motherlode points out the real Halloween danger to children.

Halloween: safe as kittens

Thursday, October 28th, 2010 Posted in The Art of Parenting | 3 Comments »

Parents from my generation probably remember Halloween II, also known as "Michael Myers and the Future of Socialized Medicine." There's a scene towards the beginning, in which an anguished parent walks her son into the emergency room because he's bitten ...

Test overkill?

Thursday, October 28th, 2010 Posted in Education, The Art of Parenting | 1 Comment »

One parent's experience with schooling in a test-heavy, No Child Left Behind environment: "Then third grade--an absolute disaster. Worksheet after worksheet after worksheet. My smart little boy was slowly disappearing. I am totally against medicating a child to concentrate - but ...

Watchful eye

Thursday, October 28th, 2010 Posted in The Art of Parenting | No Comments »

From Big Brother to Big Mama/Papa, new Japanese technology promises to let parents track everything their children see, as well as their heart rates in response to stimuli: "Parents can find out if their kid’s eyes waver from the blackboard, and ...

Preparation

Friday, October 22nd, 2010 Posted in The Art of Parenting | 1 Comment »

Does it strike anyone else as odd that a man can write no less than four books about God, yet be unprepared to answer his five year-old when she asks him whether God listens when she prays? "In my panic, I ...

On the confessional parent

Monday, October 18th, 2010 Posted in The Art of Parenting | No Comments »

Susan Stiffelman writes at ParentDish about the indignation some readers of mamapundit felt upon learning that, in the midst of writing about parenting, she was privately coping with a teenaged son's drug addiction, which recently took his life: "The shame of ...

The brokenness of homes

Monday, October 18th, 2010 Posted in The Art of Parenting | No Comments »

A new study finds that children of divorced or never-married parents are considerably more likely to have behavioral problems than children in natural-parent homes. Those displeased with the results are calling for . . . . . . wait for it ...

On parenting with a broken heart

Friday, October 15th, 2010 Posted in The Art of Parenting | No Comments »

Leo has hydranencephaly. This is some of what his father has to say: "From the beginning he has asked me to put my desires to death, so to speak. What I want for him is basically out of reach. I find ...

Do as I do and don’t let them listen to what I say

Friday, October 15th, 2010 Posted in The Art of Parenting | No Comments »

Eminem doesn't curse around his children. And apparently he believes good parents won't let their children listen to his music. I wonder if his record label agrees?

Because your business empire won’t gather round you at your deathbed

Friday, October 15th, 2010 Posted in Irritations, The Art of Parenting | No Comments »

Carrie Lukas takes a former Planned Parenthood president to task for treating stay-at-home mothers as traitors to the cause of women's liberation: "Feldt may consider raising children “a necessary task” — much like taking out the trash or scrubbing the bathroom ...

Turn off the internet just as soon as you’re done reading this

Thursday, October 14th, 2010 Posted in The Art of Parenting | 1 Comment »

Still more evidence that, when one hears a politician (or increasingly, some hack shilling for an IT company) go on about the need to plop every schoolchild in America down in front of a computer screen, it's best to kick ...

A picture used to be worth 1,000 words, but with inflation…

Monday, October 11th, 2010 Posted in The Art of Parenting | 1 Comment »

Parents of small children, says The New York Times, are pushing them away from picture books toward prose-heavy books at earlier ages. Teacher Monica Edinger disagrees, arguing that parents are exposing their children to both kinds of books in fair ...

The Dad’s Life

Friday, October 8th, 2010 Posted in The Art of Parenting | No Comments »

I don't want my previous post to imply that I'm opposed to all hip-hop.  

It must be true; it was on the Internet

Friday, October 8th, 2010 Posted in Irritations, The Art of Parenting | 4 Comments »

It's how an ill-educated sophomore might construct an argument: load down your opponents with propositions they don't in fact hold (in the case of this idiotic essay attacking the two-parent family, that both parents should be white, that happy children should ...

The battlefield for self-control

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010 Posted in The Art of Parenting | 2 Comments »

My self-controlled friend Jon points me to this outstanding article on the connection between self-control and life success. It might lead one to despair, simply looking at the studies showing how children with low self-control are far more likely to ...

The pedagogy of the fart

Monday, September 27th, 2010 Posted in The Art of Parenting, The Artful Life | 8 Comments »

Thomas Spence, president of Spence Publishing, has a must-read piece in last week's Wall Street Journal, titled "How to Raise Boys Who Read." He takes aim at the latest fad, which is to get the video-game and television-besotted little cretins ...