Help for Adoptive or Divorced Parents and Teenagers

Sarah Wu almost cried before she outed herself publicly. After all, the previously anonymous and wildly popular school lunch whistleblower had no idea what the fallout would be when she revealed that it was she who has exposed just how terrible school lunches are.

Wu had long been known as Mrs. Q, the undercover chronicler of school lunches. For a full year, the Chicago Public School teacher ate the lunches served to children, snapped cell phone pictures of them and posted them on her blog “Fed Up With Lunch.”

Here’s her video of the almost always unhealthy and sometimes grotesque meals:

It all began on a day Wu forgot her lunch and found herself eating in the cafeteria. She was so disgusted by the meal, she decided to post the evidence publicly from that day on. Word-of-mouth spread and her blog began attracting hundreds, then thousands of viewers. She eventually hit 1 million page views.

Earlier this month, Wu revealed her identity publicly on “Good Morning America” and at the same time published a new book “Fed Up with Lunch: The School Lunch Project: How One Anonymous Teacher Revealed the Truth About School Lunches — And How We Can Change Them!” (Chronicle Books, October 2011).

This week, I asked Wu about her decision to reveal her identity, the reaction to her blog and what happens next in her quest to overhaul school lunch. Our edited QA is below:

Q. What’s your reaction to the huge response to the blog?

 Wu: It was very bizarre for me to get so much attention paid to my blog. When it first got noticed just two weeks into the project, I couldn’t make sense of it… After every new media exposure I felt initial fear and shock, but I would remind myself of the original intent of the blog, which was to raise awareness of school food. And every media exposure did just that. The reveal was oddly anti-climatic because I felt prepared for the media as there had been a lot of online buzz for the better part of 18 months. I will admit that just before I went onstage on “Good Morning America” for my big reveal I was so nervous that I got a little choked up and I told myself, “Don’t cry.” Good thing I held it in!

Q. Why did you decide to come out?

 Wu: Around halfway through the project, I was approached by a literary agent about turning the blog and the experience of eating school lunch into a book. I talked with my agent about it and she believed that an anonymous book would not sell. I had to make a choice. Did I want to write a book and reveal myself or pass and stay anonymous? Ultimately, I decided that I wanted information about school lunch reform to reach a wider audience and so I decided to write a book.  

Q. Any unexpected repercussions?

 Wu: Virtually no member of [Chicago Public Schools] administration has contacted me verbally or via e-mail with one word about the blog or the book. I have to assume they have heard of both. I’m not sure I’m totally “out of the woods” in terms of repercussions. I think it’s too early to say. The book has not been out for two weeks yet and because where I work is such a large system, information about my notoriety/celebrity has not filtered out to individual schools. However, CPS nutrition services sent me a very nice e-mail inviting me to visit and discuss school lunch. I responded immediately that I was interested so we’ll see what happens next.

Q. What happens next for you and for your mission?

 Wu:  I’m still thinking about what I should do next…. I plan on continuing to blog at fedupwithlunch.com. I’m so proud of the book “Fed Up With Lunch” as it offers more than just a regurgitation of the blog. Since it was an anonymous blog, there were so many details about the experience of eating school food for a year that I wasn’t able to share at the time. Additionally, the last part of the book contains a resource guide for parents, teachers, kids, even chefs and nutritionists who would like to help change the food environment at school so that health and wellness are a focus.

Article source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-parenting/post/sarah-wu-fed-up-with-school-lunch-and-with-being-anonymous/2011/10/18/gIQALuMKvL_blog.html

There was a very moving piece in the New York Times on Sunday, written by a mother whose 18-month-old son was born with Tay-Sachs disease and is not likely to see his third birthday.

Emily Rapp writes that Ronan is “slowly regressing into a vegetative state”, will “become paralysed, experience seizures, lose all of his senses before he dies. There’s no treatment and no cure.”

I could not imagine unaided what it feels like to watch your child dying almost from the day he was born, but this writer (and she is a writer by profession) walks us through it in a remarkable way, telling us what she and her husband have learned about parenthood — and, indeed, their humanity.

Ronan won’t prosper or succeed in the way we have come to understand this term in our culture; he will never walk or say “Mama,” and I will never be a tiger mom. The mothers and fathers of terminally ill children are something else entirely. Our goals are simple and terrible: to help our children live with minimal discomfort and maximum dignity. We will not launch our children into a bright and promising future, but see them into early graves. We will prepare to lose them and then, impossibly, to live on after that gutting loss. This requires a new ferocity, a new way of thinking, a new animal. We are dragon parents: fierce and loyal and loving as hell. Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself, though this runs counter to traditional wisdom and advice.

Ms Rapp stresses how parenting is so much oriented towards the future — in particular towards, Tiger Mom style, the child’s achievements, “happy endings, rich futures” — and contrasts this with parenting “for the here and now”.

I have a minor quibble with the kinds of accomplishments she sees as the chief goals of parents (no mention of moral qualities) though perhaps she accurately reflects today’s culture. And there isn’t, or shouldn’t normally be a conflict between “raising adults” as James Stenson would say, and loving one’s children in the here and now, as she seems to imply. Should there?

But she does very well indeed to show how a child who cannot achieve anything humanly speaking, who will never even say “Mama”, can nevertheless bring out the essence of parental love and teach his parents, in a sense, something about being human.

There’s a sad irony in this because the very day after her article was published the news broke that new tests are now becoming available which can detect Down Syndrome in a mother’s blood as early as 10 weeks into pregnancy — the chief effect of which may well be to increase the number of babies with DS being aborted, and deprive the parents of that very lesson.

Ms Rapp says she had the test for Tay-Sachs twice, although she was not at any greater risk for it, because she is “somewhat obsessive about such matters”, and both times the results were negative. I can’t help feeling that she is better off for that “error”.

PS: Sheila Liaugminas has posted on her blog an amazing video interview with a dying 11-year-old boy. It’s a must-see.

Picture (NYT): Emily Rapp and son Ronan.

Article source: http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/9840

 Got Kids? 

When my wife was pregnant with our first child, we started reading the baby books.

The world seemed to be entirely populated with experts on child rearing, and the clamor of their contradictory advice left us stunned and bewildered. Breastfeeding was good; and bad. It should stop at  six months, or continue through grade school. Children should sleep with their parents; and sharing a bed would warp them forever. Or actually it really didn’t matter either way. What mattered was when you began toilet training which should be as soon as possible, and put off as long as you could and every concept of timing in between. Cloth diapers were essential; disposal ones were the only way to go. The whole idea of diapers was constrictive and reactionary. Parents should be permissive and strict, corporal punishment was crucial and cruel. Dr. Spock said “Never hit a child in anger.” But the idea of doing it calmly, in accordance with some steely cold blooded disciplinary master plan felt really crazy to us.

Our pediatrician just shrugged. “Make it up as you go along,” he said. “That’s what everyone else does.”

Cold comfort: we had little faith in our deracinated modern ‘instincts’, and scant belief that we could make the right decision in the clutch.

          But we did. I guess we did, we must have, if the kids are anything to judge by. They turned out great, and I say that with no preening parental pride. Our greatest accomplishment was not screwing them up. Somehow we managed that.  But I’ve seen great young people emerge from abusive, neglectful or just insanely chaotic households, so what’s up with that?  Maybe the whole idea of parenting properly is a kind of publishing scam, and nurture will always lose the “nature-nurture” debate.  The kids blessed with good genes will prosper in any family, while the ones born weak or damaged will fail, despite the best efforts of the best-read and best intentioned Mom and Dad.

          That being said, I think it’s worthwhile, taking a look at some of the ways in which we managed not to screw up our kids. It’s setting the bar low, but it will probably be no more confusing for new parents than the welter of contentious advice we struggled with back in the late summer and fall of 1983. I can’t say that our way is the only way to raise children, or even the best way. I only know it worked for us, and even on paper it seems to make sense. There’s a sort of simple minded logic to it, and simplicity is even better than logic when you have a screaming baby to deal with at midnight, and a job to wake up for the next morning.

          I suppose you could say it boils down to ‘going with the flow’, and staying alert enough to understand what the flow is and which way it’s flowing. Breast feeding? The system is already in place. It works pretty well, why fight it? Toilet training? Kids let you know when they get interested in the potty. Help them stick with it, make them feel good about it. Kids want to grow up. Stay out of the way when you can and cheer them on. B.F. Skinner proved more than sixty years ago that praise works better than punishment. He trained pigeons to play ping-pong with what he called ‘operant conditioning’, a purely rewards-based system.

          Which is not to advocate the creepy praise-for-everything culture I see around us now, with trophies that say “Participant”, and giddy applause for everything a child does. There are real challenges and real failures lurking out there. My Mom helped me with my French subjunctives; I edited my kids’ English papers. They learned the basics of good writing early. They even knew that ‘writing’ was a gerund in that last sentence. Teaching my son to read was an uphill struggle. He just wasn’t interested. The school said he was dumb, which I knew he wasn’t. They said he had ADD, which I knew he didn’t because he was perfectly capable of concentrating on stuff he was interested in, like the workings of my car. The first book he ever read through all the way by himself was the owner’s manual of my Ford Festiva. Giving it to him feels like inspiration looking back; it felt more like desperation at the time. But it worked. Next step: Robert B. Parker … and from it was a quick jump to Hunter B. Thompson and Robert A. Caro. One Christmas I gave him a subscription to Maxim magazine; the next Christmas all he wanted was a massive textbook for studying Arabic. And I wasn’t even surprised.

          Caity knew that she wanted to help people as a life’s work when she was still in High School. That wasn’t my idea or her Mom’s, we didn’t artfully guide her toward a career in social work. We just watched. We watched as she took over the Peers Promoting Aids Awareness organization at the school; we watched as she cut and pasted an essay she’d written for the group into her early admission application to Wheelock; watched as she got in and did brilliantly and we watched as she graduated in the rain, four years later. Our part? Not  being gratuitously discouraging or expecting her do something else like go to law school or marry some rich guy. All we had to do was attend every chorus concert and high school musical (She was a tree in the Wizard of OZ), keep her fed and well-rested, take a seat and watch.

          So what about discipline? They must have acted not and gotten into trouble now and then. Of course they did. But we never spanked anyone or grounded anyone, or even yelled. It’s not necessary. We didn’t have many rules and the ones we did enforce – mostly concerning sanitation and courtesy – made sense even to an eight year old. And when things got out of hand the punishment didn’t just “fit the crime” it was a function of the crime, the logical extension of the crime. That is, if kids are fighting the car, I can’t drive the car. So the car stops. The fact that sitting in a stationary car is something close to a working definition of Hell for most kids was convenient propinquity. The first time they started screaming and crying in a restaurant, we just left … as dinner was being brought to the table. I had to pay for a meal we didn’t eat but the stunned looks on their faces (I had called their bluff… over food) told the whole story: we can’t eat in a restaurant with screaming children,  so we don’t. We never had a problem eating out again.

          When  I was growing up parents were terrified of what my Mom called the ‘evil companion’ syndrome: their kids falling in with the “wrong crowd”, turning to promiscuity and drugs under the influence of some glamorous Svengali. My Mom never worried about that stuff; and when I became a parent, I didn’t either. She trusted her kids and so I trusted mine. I think that basic faith in the essential level-headed goodness of your children, is the ultimate secret to not screwing them up. If your son is secure and happy, he won’t plunge into some self-destructive spiral of drug addiction (though they may experiment with pot just like you did); if your daughter doesn’t have any ‘father issues’ she won’t fall victim to the predators that prey on girls who do. If you’re really there for your kids, giving them quantity time and not just ‘quality time’, they’ll know it. Between the ages of roughly eight and thirteen, I was my son’s primary companion and best friend (the kind of best friend who makes you brush your teeth and clean your room). He was socially isolated, with only one pal at school, but I wasn’t worried about him. He just was ahead of the curve; no one else got his jokes. But he knew he was funny because he kept me laughing, and he knew he was smart because I’d stay up until two in the morning with him (on a school night!) after a read-aloud session from 1984 that had been intended to lull him to sleep, discussing the theory and practice of oligarchical collectivism. Somewhere around the tenth grade, everyone else caught up and he was suddenly one of the most popular kids in school. I used the capital I’d accumulated in those years to push him about college. I was relentless and he was reluctant. Finally he worked with me for a year, humping ladders and pushing paint. That convinced him, even though he had to struggle through a stint at community college before he could begin at UMass.

          Now he’s in DC doing fund raising for Democratic candidates; Caity is in Boston working with HIV positive homeless people, and I’m still watching them, wondering what we did right.  And the memory pops up:  teaching Caity to ride her bike. The rules were the same: keep up, but run behind them, hands off, but ready to steady them if they start to fall, offer sensible encouragement and then take one quick breath when they ride that bike around the corner, out of sight and gone.

          The baby books didn’t tell me that. I wish they had. Learning it myself took twenty years.

Article source: http://open.salon.com/blog/steven_axelrod/2011/10/19/parenting_for_beginners

This week, renowned author and parenting advisor, Michele Borba, Ed.D., joined other experts in praising the free online chore chart, MyJobChart.com. Now used by 110,000, My Job Chart is looked to as a way for young people to track their chores and practices while providing added motivation and encouragement as well as teaching them about money management and the concepts of “save,” “spend,” and share.

(PRWEB) October 19, 2011

According to leading experts, MyJobChart.com is the answer for teaching children to work, to be responsible and to understand the value of money.

“My Job Chart changes the entire conversation about how to teach kids the fundamentals of work and money,” says internationally renowned educator, Michele Borba, Ed.D, whose books, blogs and seminars provide answers to virtually every problem encountered when raising children.

Now, Borba points to the free website, MyJobChart.com, as a solution for some of the most-needed parenting challenges.

From her expert viewpoint—as an NBC contributor who has appeared more than 80 times as parent expert on the Today Show and countless other talk shows and whose recent book, titled The Big Book of Parenting Solutions: 101 Answers to Your Everyday Challenges and Wildest Worries, shares a compilation of her parenting advice—Borba says, with MyJobChart.com, kids have an excellent source of motivation.

With MyJobChart.com, “kids can now be inspired to get off the couch and start achieving more,” Borba says.

This was exactly what My Job Chart founder, Gregg Murset, was seeking for his own six children when he hit upon the idea of the free online chore chart.

Murset said their house, with six kids, ranging in age from 3 to 13, was “out of control. We tried everything from paper on the refrigerator to everything else.”

Nothing seemed to work to really motivate his children to stay on task and none of the existing systems seemed to encourage goal-setting and real achievement.

My Job Chart was an instant hit, not just with Murset’s children, but for the 110,000 who have used the online system over the past year since its inception. “MyJobChart.com is technology,” Murset explains. “That’s what kids like. It’s what they really respond to.”

Site users find added benefits, including:

•     Icons make it possible for even the youngest children to use.
•     Parents and children can personalize the list of chores to meet their needs.
•     MyJobChart.com tracks chores, practices, activities and more.
•     A built-in reward system offers encouragement to “spend,” “save” or “share.”
•     Genuine motivation that makes work and achievement enjoyable.

As the children mark off their jobs on MyJobChart.com, they earn a certain number of points, to be “saved” or “spent” right away to “purchase” a reward supplied by their parents, or to be “shared” as a donation to a charitable organization. While the site allows parents to access an Amazon store link where they can purchase reward items, the site is also set up so families can create “free” rewards—anything from extra TV time, one-on-one time with mom or dad or a family bike ride.

Jennifer Cross, of Fort Worth, Texas, says she was hooked on the free My Job Chart site from the start. Using it with her three children, ages 3, 4 and 6, she has been pleased with the educational aspect of the site.

“I’m a high school teacher and a lot of kids have everything done for them. Parents are not taking the opportunity to teach their kids about work and responsibility,” she said.

She says her children have responded well to the intrinsic rewards and immediate feedback the site offers.

“With My Job Chart, seeing things being checked off and completed is often reward enough for my kids,” she said. “Then we have created ‘extra jobs’ where my boys get most of their points” to earn items from Amazon.

“Now they like to work and they come to me asking what other chores they can do,” Cross said.

Bottom line, Murset said, “MyJobChart.com is just a fun, easy way to instill work ethic and build character over time. And, it works.”

To access the free My Job Chart website and get started tracking your family’s chores, meetings, sports practice and activities, visit http://www.MyJobChart.com.

Media Contact:

Cecily Markland

cecilymarkland(at)gmail(dot)com

480-444-6590 or 480-507-6570

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Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/parenting-expert-michele-borba-endorses-myjobchart-com-excellent-071608037.html