A "snapshot" feature in USA Today listed the five greatest concerns parents and teachers had about children in the '50s: talking o...ut of turn, chewing gum in class, doing homework, stepping out of line, cleaning their rooms. Then it listed the five top concerns of parents today: drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, suicide and homicide, gang violence, anorexia and bulimia. We can also add AIDS, poverty, and homelessness. . . . Between my own childhood and the advent of my motherhood--one short generation--the culture had gone completely mad.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Media mystifications should not obfuscate a simple, perceivable fact; Black teenage girls do not create poverty by having babies. ...Quite the contrary, they have babies at such a young age precisely because they are poor--because they do not have the opportunity to acquire an education, because meaningful, well-paying jobs and creative forms of recreation are not accessible to them ... because safe, effective forms of contraception are not available to them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
psychologist It is through friendships that teenagers learn to take responsibility, provide support, and give their loyalty t...o non- family members. It is also in teenage friendships that young people find confidants with whom to share thoughts and feelings that they are not comfortable sharing with their parents. Such sharing becomes one of the elements of true intimacy, which will be established later.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the continual enterprise of trying to guide appropriately, renegotiate with, listen to and just generally coexist with our teen...age children, we ourselves are changed. We learn even more clearly what our base-line virtues are. We listen to our teenagers and change our minds about some things, stretching our own limits. We learn our own capacity for flexibility, firmness and endurance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's important for all single parents to remember that not everything that goes wrong, from your son's bad attitude toward school ...to the six holes in your teenage daughter's ear, is because you live in a single-parent home. Every family has its problems.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The long discussions and painful arguments of adolescence and the fierce loyalties to teachers, heroes, and gurus during the teena...ge years are simply our children's struggles to ensure that the lifestyles and values they adopt are worthy of their allegiance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today so much rebellion is aimless and demoralizing precisely because children have no values to challenge. Teenage rebellion is a... testing process in which young people try out various values in order to make them their own. But during those years of trial, error, embarrassment, a child needs family standards to fall back on, reliable habits of thought and feeling that provide security and protection.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Toddlerhood resembles adolescence because of the rapidity of physical growth and because of the impulse to break loose of parental... boundaries. At both ages, the struggle for independence exists hand in hand with the often hidden wish to be contained and protected while striving to move forward in the world. How parents and toddlers negotiate their differences sets the stage for their ability to remain partners during childhood and through the rebellions of the teenage years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who we are has been sidetracked by labels for who we aren't. Phrase names have divided us. Stay-at-home mom, new dad, parent of sp...ecial needs child, working mother, job sharer, non-custodial parent, single parent, empty nesters, spouse caring for spouse, parent with teens, teenage parent, elder caregiver--these and so many other titles have put us in little niches and kept us thinking that we can't help each other because ... we are so different. But we are not a collection of separate sub-species. We caregivers are more like one another than not, no matter how we spend our days.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »