High school was not a happy time for me. I was painfully shy and always felt as though I was on the outside looking in. I knew that I would love college but I also knew that I just had to get through high school as quickly as I could. Toward that end, I went to school every semester, summer, winter, spring, and fall, with no breaks in between. It was during this time that I became aware of the …
There seem to be a lot of opinions about whether we should lower the voting age to sixteen, and some of them have to do with whether teenagers take more risks than adults or whether they are more impulsive than adults. How they tied this all together is anyone’s guess. I doubt if the age of a person has anything to do with being impulsive or taking risks. Every time I hear of an adult, and I don’t mean just …
I remember sex as being magical but, to the best of my recollection, it was never so magical that I would have considered breaking into an empty house just to have sex. But that’s just what two teenagers did a couple of days ago. This is one of those stories that should set a homeowner’s teeth on edge. It seems that the owner of this house lives out of state and she gave the garage security code to the boy …
Men and women enter the dating scene so differently. Men seem to want to nail down a relationship very quickly. He pursues the woman relentlessly, and then, when he is sure that she’s hooked, he withdraws. She might hear him say things like, “We need to take a break . . . We’re going too fast . . . I need space . . . We need to date other people for a while,” etc. And with words like that, …
A friend of mine saw one of my blogs and he emailed me to let me know that he agrees with my observations about the negative affects that modern technology is having on our younger generation but he’s “not sure that because parents are the enablers and have the power to pull the technology that doing so would help.” He went on to say, “These kids are greatly influenced by peer pressure and they certainly are aware of the technology …
We have always known that there is a separate judicial system for the wealthy and the poor. We know that wealthy people, even if they have stolen billions of dollars, will be incarcerated in prisons resembling country clubs, while poor people, who have stolen food for their family, will serve time in prisons with inmates who are hardened criminals. We also know that Texas has always been a lot easier for people who have money, to escape judicial punishment for …
Whenever I see a kid who treats her parents disrespectfully, I can usually see a pattern where the parents have been too permissive. There is usually a breakdown of the boundaries between parent and child where the parent tries to act like the child’s friend instead of like the parent. But sometimes, it’s just a case of a child being immature and abusive, having deep entitlement issues in spite of good parenting. In the old days, kids used to rant …
I just listened to a speech by Madison Kimrey, a twelve-year-old suffragette. She has been very vocal about part of a North Carolina bill, recently signed into law by Governor Pat McCrory, which eliminates voter preregistration for children who are sixteen and seventeen years old. She had some excellent points, one of which showed that Governor Pat McCrory isn’t fit to lead his state. He said that children of that age are confused about their voting rights and that even …
When cell phones first came out, the selling point was that in case of emergency, it would be our safety net. The car breaks down, you’re lost and need directions, there’s been an accident, etc. We didn’t use the cell phone to make idle chitchat. First of all, it was too expensive for idle chitchat and second of all, it hadn’t taken over our lives. During the early years, there were no calling plans and the cost of roaming charges …
Many people who are binge eaters don’t realize that this is an eating disorder that is even more common and more dangerous than bulimia. The difference between bulimia and binge eating is that with bulimia, you know that you have a disorder because it involves bingeing and then sticking your finger down your throat to induce vomiting. With binge eating, you may not even be aware that you are eating excessively because you don’t take laxatives or try to induce …