7 parenting behaviors that stunt children’s growth

This is a worthy seven-point article from Forbes. The topic is 7 parenting behaviors that stunt their children's growth. Here are the titles to the sections: 1. We don’t let our children experience risk 2. We rescue too quickly 3. We rave too easily 4. We let guilt get in the way of leading well 5. We don’t share our past mistakes 6. We mistake intelligence, giftedness and influence for maturity 7. We don’t practice what we preach. Immediately after reading this Forbes article, I stumbled upon this parenting article from The Atlantic: "How to Land Your Kid in Therapy." Lots of common ground between the two articles.

[U]nderlying all this parental angst is the hopeful belief that if we just make the right choices, that if we just do things a certain way, our kids will turn out to be not just happy adults, but adults that make us happy. This is a misguided notion, because while nurture certainly matters, it doesn’t completely trump nature, and different kinds of nurture work for different kinds of kids (which explains why siblings can have very different experiences of their childhoods under the same roof). We can expose our kids to art, but we can’t teach them creativity. We can try to protect them from nasty classmates and bad grades and all kinds of rejection and their own limitations, but eventually they will bump up against these things anyway. In fact, by trying so hard to provide the perfectly happy childhood, we’re just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up. Maybe we parents are the ones who have some growing up to do—and some letting go.

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Koch money buys the right to screen new faculty at public university

Nothing new here, in a way. Big money getting its way. On the other hand, it is outrageous that anyone should be able to invade a public university's hiring process, yes, even in return for donations. This is shameful. Rachel Maddow reports.

Apparently unsatisfied with simply buying politicians, the Koch Brothers have turned their attention and pocketbooks to purchasing economics professors of supposedly “public” universities and funding economic studies which support their extreme right-wing economic theories.

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Catching brown recluse spiders without chemical pesticides

We had been finding lots of spiders in our old brick house, and didn't think much of it. We stepped on some and captured others and took them outside. That was before 13 year old daughter Charlotte pointed out that these spiders appeared to be brown recluse spiders. We took macro photos of them and looked at them closely and, indeed, they mostly seemed to be brown recluse spiders. Our neighbor Joe is a pest control guy who talked about chemical pesticides, which we've never used because we don't want our children exposed to these. Therefore, Joe recommended sticky pads. You can buy a box of 50 for $20. Spiders walk on the pads and get stuck. We put 20 pads in various parts of the house and we were shocked at how many spiders we caught. Check out the photo above, a typical pad, which caught 10 big and small spiders in 3 days. We don't see any spiders any more other than those caught on the pads. Some of our pads have caught 25 spiders. I'm writing this in case anyone else is having problems with any kind of spider and wants to avoid chemical pesticides.brown recluse

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