Some parents shouldn’t have children. When I see parents who let their children run loose in public places or in someone else’s house, I wonder if they are allowed to wreck their own house. When I was growing up, my father took us to every museum in every city or state we visited. He loved museums and he instilled that love in us and that is why this story about parents looking on and encouraging their two toddlers to use …
With all that is going on in the news, nationally and globally, it’s amazing that the White House is considering deporting Justin Bieber to Canada. But it seems to be true. The White House has promised to review any petition that has garnered more than 100,000 signatures within thirty days, and the petition to send Bieber back to Canada has already gotten 102,000 signatures in six days. As far as political red herrings go, this one beats them all. Instead …
Society’s standards have changed greatly since my childhood. In centuries past, children were expected to perform certain chores and to achieve different goals, and no fuss was made when tasks were completed. Praise was meted out for extraordinary accomplishments, not for jobs that were expected of them. We’re now living in a “feel-good” society where people expect praise for merely doing their job. It’s not enough to thank someone; if you don’t also praise him for doing what he was …
Almost everyone has something they would like to forget. Perhaps a humiliating experience, a painful one, or any number of do-overs that plague us. We all make mistakes and some of them continue to haunt us for many years. If there were such a thing as a mental eraser, veterans could escape Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and victims of physical, mental, and sexual abuse could go on to lead normal lives after their horrific experiences are behind them. With …
I wonder if a large part of the Christmas spirit isn’t the anticipation of the gifts they will be buying and receiving. For some, it’s the anticipation of giving gifts to loved ones and to people they will never meet, the recipients of charity. For others, it’s the anticipation of receiving something they have been wanting. If this feeling of anticipation is responsible for lifting the mood of people at Christmas, why couldn’t we use that same strategy for the …
Over the last several decades, it has felt like the heart has been taken out of medicine. A human body cannot function without a heart and neither can medicine. Sixty years ago, we might not have known how to cure certain diseases or their etymology, but our doctors cared more about us as human beings. No matter how busy they were, they took time to listen to us. Our family GP made house calls; his car had the initials MD …
Most people like compliments but they would rather overhear someone saying something nice about them than to them. It can be easier to handle someone making a nasty remark to you than when they compliment you. Perhaps it’s because we’re more accustomed to falling short in someone’s eyes that we know what to say when someone insults us than knowing what to say when we’re complimented. If a man tells a woman she’s beautiful and she hasn’t heard anyone else …
It used to be that you went to the library to borrow books. Now you can go to the library to get your high school diploma. Lately, there are so few people standing in line to borrow books that neighborhood libraries have been closing their doors. For one thing, people are reading much less than they used to and for another thing, they can download library books onto their laptops and reading devices without ever having to come into the …
I have watched people being emotionally abused try to justify their inaction. When asked why they allow it, they will say something like, “I’m just too kind.” Wrong. They are not being too kind; they are being cowardly. They lack the courage to handle confrontation. They shrivel up inside at the thought of conflict and run away from any sort of argument. These are the people who will roll over and play dead and let you rob them of their …
I used to think that research studies meant something but the criteria that is being used by some Australian researchers to debunk ESP, are just plain silly. The ESP study, which is led by Dr Piers Howe from the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, has concluded that there is no such thing as sixth sense. They used a criteria that is not too dissimilar from the playing cards that were used many decades ago to debunk psychic …