French and Greek electors voted at the weekend against austerity regimes and for promises of growth and jobs. You can see what the hoi polloi are unhappy about: severe pension cuts, loss of public sector jobs, unemployment now at an average of 10.9 per cent across the eurozone, and youth unemployment over 20 per cent. But wouldn’t biting the austerity bullet for a few years be better than riding another wave of debt?
The global debt crisis does seem to call for a new realism about the relationship between effort and lifestyle. The EU Commissioner in charge of education, culture, multilingualism and youth is calling for European schools to turn out students who are more entrepreneurial and with a positive attitude to risk-taking. Cypriot Andoulla Vassiliou told EurActiv.com:
"Educational systems should continue to embed entrepreneurship. We need to instil our young people with a positive attitude towards risk-taking and not…
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The effects of daycare on very young children are controversial. Added to that is the effect of before and after school care once the children have started primary school. Commuter parents are taking to putting their children in care before school opens in the morning, but an Australian study finds that, for school beginners at least, this can lead to problems such as hyperactivity and aggression:
A controversial study by Kay Margetts of Melbourne University's Graduate School of Education suggests the increasing trend towards putting children in before-school care while parents commute to work has a damaging impact on their performance, both academic and social.
"Based on this result, I think it's important to limit the number of changes children have to experience when they start school," Associate Professor Margetts told The Australian.
Surely it is a mark of civilized society to sit down as a family and have intelligent, stimulating and courteous discourse at the evening dinner table. One (unintentionally) hilarious blogger has gone ever farther and suggested that in order to restore some decorum to middle class society, North Americans should also "dress" for dinner. She suggests, much to the amusement of my sister (who has two sons), that boys over the age of nine be required to wear formal dinner jackets.
I found this NY Times Fashion and Stylepiece interesting, since the author talks about her own childhood experiences of table talk: with her family of origin (practically non-existent: “benign neglect”), and with her friend’s family (invigorating but occasionally terrifying). She also discusses the dinner-conversation styles of various other families, from the obscure to the famous: the Kennedys, Tiger Mom Amy Chua, and the Obamas (who have a “rose…
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We have talked a fair bit on this website about cohabitation. Indeed, the custom of living together before marriage is now so widespread, and problematic, that even the New York Times recently carried a warning about its downside.
Young people, however, are going to take a lot of convincing that it is not the best way to prepare for marriage. Perhaps that's why the video above, posted on YouTube by someone called PastorPope, takes the viewer by the scruff of the neck and forces him/her to look at the sub-text of the cohabitors' contract.
Yes, it's a bit brutal, but maybe a wake-up call for some...
My youngest child (7) is crazy about babies. We can’t pass by a magazine rack, a TV commercial for baby products, a display of baby clothing, never mind a real live baby in church or on the street, without pausing to ooh and ah, admire or coo.
The other day, I posted a comment on a Facebook photograph featuring three of my beautiful married nieces with their three beautiful babies. Much to my surprise, one of my FB "friends" (actually now former) immediately posted a response to my comment, asking me if babies were “good” and hinting obliquely about overpopulation, suffering children etc. A subsequent message revealed that no one should have more than three children (and this person knows I have seven—tact apparently not a strong suit).
This NY Times piece discusses last month’s first-ever Sex Week at Harvard, a student-run program of lectures, displays and conversations about “all things sexual,” including: how to talk to your doctor about sex; careers in sexual health, the ethics of pornography; sex and religion; kinky practices like bondage; how to “talk dirty”; gay and lesbian sex.“After every event, organizers raffled off vibrators.”
Why are university resources being used in this way, you may ask? Brace yourself: students today feel they are not being adequately prepared for sex.
Despite the busy national debate over contraception and financing for reproductive health, Sex Week…has veered away from politics, emerging instead as a response to concern among students that classroom lessons in sexuality — whether in junior high school or beyond — fall short of preparing them for the experience itself.
Some of the most interesting debates on family policies are taking place in the European countries of the former Soviet bloc. In 2008, Lithuania passed legislation to define “family” as the married union of a man and a woman together with their children, adopted or biological. The point was key in terms of who gets the money the state earmarks to support families.
In 2009 the Baltic nation passed a law banning public information “that encourages [any type of] sexual relations among minors that denigrates family values or that promotes any concept of marriage and the family other than that defined in the Lithuanian Constitution and Code of Civil Law” (which states that marriage is between a man and a woman).
Business Insider presents quotes from 22 executives admitting the biggest mistakes they have ever made. This one is from Carol Bartz, former president and CEO of Yahoo:
"I've made a lot of mistakes. There isn't one that stands out. I make mistakes every week, every month, every year.
"I would say. . . I actually wish I had started having children younger. I was 40 when I had my daughter. And I wish I would have started that younger so I could have had more children."
From an interview with the Tech Museum -- where she also has a comment on the idea of work-life balance.
With Mother's Day not far off in many countries (May 13) Proctor & Gamble -- a Fortune 500 US firm associated with many household products and a major sponsor of the London Olympics this year -- has released this terrific video. In case you did not notice it on our Video Choice spot or on our Facebook page, here it is again. The following is P&G's spiel:
Being a mom is the hardest job in the world. But it's also the best.
This Procter & Gamble commercial honors everything that all moms do to help their children succeed by showcasing the amazing moms behind Olympic athletes at the London 2012 Olympic Games. The hardest job in the world is truly the best job in the world.
Melinda Gates was holding forth at a conference in Berlin earlier this month about the necessity of universal access to contraception in the developing world, claiming that it is the only way that 200 million people who do not already have “access” will have a choice about how many children they will have and when.
Mrs Gates was one of five speakers on a TEDxChange platform addressing an international audience on global health and development issues. Her 20-minute address, on video as a TED Talk, is linked to the Gates Foundation’s “No controversy” campaign to get the global birth control juggernaut on track again after the slow-down imposed by the Bush administration and the diversion of resources over the last couple of decades to AIDS work. A page on the TEDxChange website informs us:
A thought experiment about marriage
24 May 2012
A world in which sexual intimacy could not produce children would never have come up with the idea of marriage.
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The effects of daycare on very young children are controversial. Added to that is the effect of before and after school care once the children have started primary school. Commuter parents are taking to putting their children in care before school opens in the morning, but an Australian study finds that, for school beginners at least, this can lead to problems such as hyperactivity and aggression:
Some of the most interesting debates on family policies are taking place in the European countries of the former Soviet bloc. In 2008, Lithuania passed legislation to define “family” as the married union of a man and a woman together with their children, adopted or biological. The point was key in terms of who gets the money the state earmarks to support families.
Business Insider 