Parenting teens

Whenever I smell certain spices, I think of my great grandmother. Big Mama we called her, indeed a large woman whose parents immigrated from Lebanon to South Carolina in the early 1900s, bringing with them the rich food of the Middle East and a passion for cooking it. I smell turmeric or cumin, and I am transported to Big Mama’s kitchen, a cavernous room that contained not one, but two refrigerators, not one, but two stoves, on top of which always sat two jars wrapped in towels, fermenting... Read Full Story

The generation gap never was so vast, nor so symptomatic, as the one created by technology. Truly. It’s not like I’m some whiny Baby Boomer, convinced that we parents today have it worse than every generation before us. It’s that in a world where access is power, we are the trainees. Our status has been downgraded simply by virtue of the fact that when it’s time to download photos and send eCards, we have to ask our teenagers how. In a serious reversal of roles, they hold all the... Read Full Story

The school year is over and yet the cruel Tactics of Exclusion among the preteen girls continues. The 12 Year Old is now facing the unending stream of information (via text message, Facebook and the old fashioned telephone) about which end-of-year parties she is invited, un-invited or re-invited to. If we could harness the effort this pack of girls expends daily on crushing the hopes of their classmates, we could re-forest the Sahara with enough energy left over to boost the Seattle Mariners... Read Full Story

I have actually found a mother that is doing more damage to their child than the nambie pambie frumps over at the sewing circle. In fact, I believe I may have stumbled across the worst Mom on the face of the planet. When Sophia Elam's sixteen year old son is not suspended he plays for the Silverado High School football team. The problem the kid has is there are a number of players from a rival gang on the team. And they are not always nice to little Elam. So one day he called in some... Read Full Story

Our daughter was seduced by a man in cyberspace and then she disappeared... By ANGELA CARLESS When 15-year-old Samantha found a boyfriend in an internet chatroom, her parents were worried. Then they discovered he was a 20-year-old man. And [in April 2007] their beloved daughter vanished into thin air... The news that one of Princess Beatrice's teachers, Richard Findley, is facing jail on charges of grooming a girl of 12 on the internet underlines the growing menace of online sexual predators... Read Full Story