GoDaddy.com's Super Bowl commercial caused super squirming for this blogger's kids. (Associated Press/Go Daddy)

Super Bowl GoDaddy kiss commercial: How much did your kids squirm?

By Lisa Suhay, Guest Blogger / 02.04.13

When a website hosting-service’s Super Bowl commercial asked “Who’s your GoDaddy?” via a gusty kiss between gorgeous Bar Refaeli and actor Jesse Heiman, the nation united to wail, “Not that guy!” While the socially awkward spot didn’t actually cause the Superdome blackout, it lit a fire under my sons who fled the room, taking with them a potential urban dictionary term that may become the signal of either taunt or triumph.

The kiss, or as I like to call it the world’s most visceral nerd snog, heard 'round the world, between Refaeli and Heiman, was meant to show us what happens when sexy meets smart. Apparently, people run away screaming, “AIEEEEEEEEEE! My eyes!” 

In fact, according to ABC news: “Barb Rechterman, the chief marketing officer for GoDaddy, said CBS, the television network that is broadcasting the Super Bowl this year, rejected the first version of the ad....They had to scale down the kissing a bit.” I can only imagine the carbon half-life of that socially awkward bombshell. As it was, the commercial had 45 takes.

However, even “scaled down,” less than an hour after the "kisspocalips" my sons, ages 13 and 17 groaned and chuckled over what they were already joking would surely become a new cultural reference.

In the kitchen I caught snippets of conversation and one saying to the other, “OK, people are seriously going to be saying, 'That’s a GoDaddy right there…' in reference to some poor pair. I wonder how fast it will catch fire in every middle and high school this week as a comparison moniker for what people consider to be a mismatched couple?   

According to ABC News, Heiman has had cameos in over 100 popular films and TV shows including, but not limited to: “Parks and Recreation,” “The Mindy Project,” “The Social Network,” “Old School,” “Austin Powers: Goldmember,” “Spider-Man,” “Catch Me If You Can” and “Bones.”

This can only do good things for Heiman’s life, and Bar Refaeli will definitely survive the "kisspocalips," but those who are not as attractive or cashing-in on their nerd-factor will be less fortunate.

As the mother of a son, 9, who while cute to look at, has Aspergers Syndrome and is set upon daily for being the socially awkward “nerd” who likes a popular girl, but is missing the social cues that she’s not interested in math, science, Minecraft games, or him. The mockery has become a daily grind. So as I sent him off to school today I hope none of the kids decides to hit him with The GoDaddy slam. 

On the other hand, the Twittersphere, while roundly bashing GoDaddy in Tweets calling the spot everything from “uncomfortable” to “icky” as people spoke of “recovering from it” Heiman was hailed as the real winner of the Super Bowl.

Therefore, I’ll offer two versions for the Urban Dictionary entry for “That’s a GoDaddy”: 1. A severely mismatched couple. 2. The underdog who gets the girl. I prefer the latter. Let the verbal games begin.

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Groundhog Day is tomorrow, Feb. 2. What are you doing to commemorate the day with your children? Groundhog handler John Griffith holds famed weather prognosticating groundhog Punxsutawney Phil in 2012. (Reuters)

Groundhog Day: Parenting odds and ends for a secondary holiday (+video)

By Susan Sachs Lipman, Guest Blogger / 02.01.13

Groundhog Day, Feb. 2, has basically everything going for it that I love in a holiday:  It marks a point in a season; it’s full of folklore and wisdom, superstition, ceremony, civic charm, science, mystery, agrarian history, and weather; and it was featured in perhaps my all-time favorite movie of the same name, which itself is a study in acceptance and inner calm while being outright hilarious in nearly every frame.

Altogether now: It’s Groundhog Day!

In an early morning ceremony, groundhog Punxsutawney Phil will rise as he has for 125 years from his heated burrow at Gobbler’s Knob, Pa., and signal to his handlers whether or not he sees his shadow. No shadow means an early end to winter. And if the groundhog does see his shadow? Six more long weeks of the season. Over the years that the ceremony has taken place, Phil has seen his shadow 98 times and not seen it only 17. (Records don’t exist for every year.) In 2008, the crowd heartily booed the prospect of “six more weeks of winter”.

Some have stated that Phil’s “handlers” make the prediction for him. What do we think of that?

History and science of Groundhog Day

According to this excellent Groundhog Day site, German settlers arrived in the 1700s to an area northeast of Pittsburgh, Pa. that had been settled previously by the Delaware Native Americans. The Germans celebrated Candlemas Day, originally a Medieval Catholic holiday, to mark the mid-point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. The holiday also has roots in Celtic-Gaelic and Pagan cultures, where it is celebrated as St. Brigid’s Day and Imbolc, and is a time of festivals, feasting, parades, and weather prediction, as well as candles and even bonfires to mark the sun’s return.

According to Wikipedia, “Imbolc” comes from an Old Irish word meaning “in the belly.” Among agrarian people, Imbolc was associated with the onset of the lambing season.

The German settlers of Pennsylvania put candles in their windows and believed that if the weather was fair on Candlemas Day then the second half of winter would be stormy and cold. While this has always seemed counter-intuitive to me, this site explains the science of Groundhog Day and that cloudy weather is actually milder than clear and cold. It makes sense, then, that the shadow would portend six more weeks of winter. (A lifelong mystery is solved.)

The English and Scottish had wonderful sayings to mark this occasion:

The serpent will come from the hole

On the brown Day of Bride,

Though there should be three feet of snow

On the flat surface of the ground.

– Scottish saying

(Note the serpent instead of the groundhog.)

If Candlemas be fair and bright,

Winter has another flight.

If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,

Winter will not come again.

– English saying

Punxsutawney’s first Groundhog Day celebration was in 1886, and though other towns, particularly in the eastern US, have Groundhog Day ceremonies — Staten Island Chuck, anyone? — none are as famous as Punxsutawney’s. Some of this may lie with the groundhog’s official name, “Punxsutawney Phil, Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators, and Weather Prophet Extraordinary”. Still more popularity, and tourists, has come as a result of the movie Groundhog Day. The first official Groundhog Day prediction in Punxsutawney? No shadow – early Spring.

Groundhog activities and crafts

It’s fun to play with shadows in honor of Punxsutawney Phil and his. Try making hand shadow puppets, something people have been doing since 2,000 years ago in China, where puppet shows were performed by oil-lamp light.

Have someone project a flashlight onto a wall or other surface. Hold your hands between the light and the wall in various shapes to create shadow puppets. Here are some classic ones to try:

Rabbit—Make a fist with one hand. Place the other palm over it and make a peace sign (for ears) with two fingers.

Hawk—Link your thumbs together, with your hands facing away from you. Stretch out your fingers and hands and flutter them like wings.

Spider—With palms facing up, cross your hands at the wrist. Press your thumbs together to form the spider’s head. Wiggle your fingers in a climbing motion.

Wolf or dog—Place your palms together, fingers facing outward. Put your thumbs up to form ears. Let your pinkie drop to form a mouth. Bend your index fingers to create a forehead.

Camel—Lift one arm. Hold your hand in a loosely curved position. Hold the pinkie and ring finger together. Hold the other two fingers together, thumb pressed in. Curve both sets of fingers and hold them wide apart to form a mouth. Your arm, from the elbow up, will be the camel’s neck.

There are also a lot of very appealing shadow and groundhog crafts for Groundhog Day, like this one and others from Motherhood on a Dime.

Shadow or no, here’s wishing you a happy remainder of the winter, a ceremony or two, a dash of lore and wonder, and a fruitful spring.

Kate Middleton's nose has caused quite a stink in the UK. Women have been getting plastic surgery to modify their own noses to look like the Duchess of Cambridge's, according to the Daily Mail. File/2012. (Associated Press)

Kate Middleton's nose: Latest plastic surgery inspiration

By Lisa Suhay, Guest Blogger / 02.01.13

What’s in a nose? That which we call a nose on any other face would be able to smell as sweet and yet women are paying through the nose to have theirs altered to look like the one on the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton.

In the land of William Shakespeare the number of women getting nose jobs in order to look like Middleton has tripled since 2011, according to Plastic surgeon Maurizio Persico in the Daily Mail.

It’s not as if women haven’t spent decades shouting “in your face!” at Mother nature as they reach for the phone to ring-up a rhinoplasty. However,  plastic surgeons are getting more and more requests from women who want to replace their own look with that of a celebrity.

I begin to wonder if face patents can’t be far off. If it were my nose I’m not sure I’d want to see it walking around on someone else, much less thousands of others. Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships, but Middleton appears to be ahead of her by a prow or two.

In 2010, Kim Kardashian reached out to a Twitter follower, asking her not to undergo plastic surgery to try to look like her. "Don't try 2 b someone else," she tweeted. Adding she shouldn’t "change yourself for anybody but yourself."

This is somewhere just North of the usual body image issues which drive people to the knife, Botulism toxin injections, and unhealthy weight-loss schemes. This is in the realm of shedding one’s own face in pursuit of a dream becoming more commonly held that if beauty is good, celebrity beauty is better.

As British Actress Jane Seymore once pointed out, “I find it interesting that 16-year-olds are having plastic surgery. People in their 40s used to think, 'I'm aging, I have to do something about it.' Now children are deciding they don't like the way they look.”

Dr. Tony Youn, a plastic surgeon in Troy, Michigan, told CNN, "It's a red flag. This person has psychological problems and is not a good candidate for any kind of plastic surgery. Plastic surgery is meant to make you look like a better, younger version of yourself, not to look like somebody else."

Wanting to look like someone famous isn’t new, in fact MTV ran an entire reality series called “I Want a Famous Face” which followed the transformations of 12 young people who chose to use plastic surgery to look exactly like their celebrity idols such as Pamela Anderson and Janet Jackson. It was a cautionary tale full of risk and woe.

Then of course there is the young Ukrainian who has girls begging for contact lenses that make their pupils larger so they can be Barbie using the non-surgical tactics of Valeria Lukyanova, a teen who became an Internet sensation earlier this year. The lacquered look is all over teens and young women who want to be someone they view as perfection personified.

In the case of grown women making these choices the key word is choice, but when teens begin to fixate on the Barbie or Anime-alike videos, makeup, and contact lenses it may be time to seek help for a burgeoning emotional issue that is unlikely to be solved from the outside in.

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Pop Star Pink’s song “Perfect” seems to have fallen on deaf ears when she crooned: "Pretty, pretty please, don't you ever, ever feel/Like you're less than, less than perfect/Pretty, pretty please, if you ever, ever feel/Like you're nothing you are perfect to me."

Maybe we need to start singing new nursery songs, a reprise of vintage Billy Joel’s, “I love you just the way you are.” We need to get something stuck in our heads, other than someone else’s features.

The number of kids online is increasing, but research on the effects, benefits and consequences of child internet use is lagging behind. A new study, analyzing a number of social media websites for kids online, is stepping up. Here, two sisters under the age of 10 play games on their computer. 2010. (Christian Science Monitor)

Kids online: Social media sites can help develop identity, study says

By Anne Collier / 01.31.13

Imagine a game in which a child not only discovers, collects, creates, and/or customizes 2- and 3-dimensional art objects that s/he then shares with fellow player-creators, but also creates his/her own levels of play. Imagine the literacies players could be developing in the process of playing such a game, including social literacy, through sharing, “liking,” and reviewing each other’s creations.

Wonderfully, there’s nothing imagined about any of that. Millions of children 5- to 12-years-old are playing this game (rated “E” for “Everyone”), LittleBigPlanet, in 13 languages on PlayStation 3 consoles, and this is just one social-media venue profiled by a study from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop in New York. There is still so little we know about preteens’ use of social media, but thanks to this report – which both pulls together the research we do have and catalogs what we still need to know – we have some rich new insights.

The authors write that “many important new literacies are necessary for participating deeply in some of the best practices available in SNF,” as the description of what happens in and around LittleBigPlanet shows (the authors prefer the broader term “forums” to “sites,” thus using “social networking forums” or SNF). “Research also suggests that SNF can also promote some forms of social and identity development. Emerging SNF that sponsor sharing creative designs may provide unique opportunities for children to develop these kinds of new literacies and social practices, sometimes also called “citizenship.”

One of the arguments the study’s authors make, thankfully, is that “social networking,” “gaming,” and other terms used to describe children’s experiences in and with these services, are way too narrow, and the research literature tends to silo them – if it even allows that learning and literacy development happen in them, I would add (considering recent studies relegating children’s screen time to “entertainment media”). In LittleBigPlanet, for example, there’s gaming, media production, media-sharing, and socializing, to name just a few types of online activity – it’s far more than a game or social network site.

Child-centric research called for

Research needs to be less prejudiced by the public discourse about teens’ social media use and adult experiences with media (largely of the very different, mass-media era), I have argued, and this report calls for a more child-focused approach because children are very different developmentally from teens and have very different interests: “Children’s own practices and preferences need to be better accounted for in future discussions and research,” they write. “A more child-centric approach to these issues would assist enormously in avoiding the types of assumptions and omissions identified above.” Then maybe, too, as a society, we’ll consider children’s rights as well as safety – seek young people’s, not just adults’ “perspectives on questions of privacy, consent and freedom of speech, authorship and transfer of ownership, as well,” they write.

Some data we do have

Here’s some of the data we do have on preteens’ use of social media, according to the report: “Children don’t begin to ‘extend their media habits deeper into the digital realm’ until sometime between the ages of 7 and 9,” the Cooney Center reported in an earlier study, so “an important shift in usage takes place at around age 8″; “about 30% of 3-to-5-year-old children use the Internet on a typical day, compared with about 50% of 6-to-9-year olds” and 47% of 6-year-olds use the Internet on a typical day, compared with 67% of 8-year-olds. But there is so much more to learn as we move past the assumptions and fears that characterized the first phase of Web 2.0. “The lack of substantive empirical research of their practices, concerns, and motivations precludes us from understanding what they are doing, thinking, and feeling as they engage there.”

Learning-rich SNFs

The report both identifies the key gaps in our knowledge and puts forth a research agenda. Parents and educators will also appreciate the report’s case studies of social media services for youth. Besides LittleBigPlanet, the authors profiled…

• Disney’s Club Penguin, with some 150 million largely 6-to-14-year-old worldwide registered users, who play in 5 languages
• Cisco’s Networking Academy on Facebook, hosting knowledge-sharing by teens and young adults in 20 countries about designing, building, troubleshooting and securing computer networks (15,575 weekly active users, with approximate 546,416 weekly total reach, and 52% of users aged 18-24 years and 5% aged 13-17 years)
• The very design-oriented educational virtual world Whyville.net with 6.9 million members (median ages 8-15; 24% male, 76% female)
• The very social computer-programming and media project-sharing site Scratch.mit.edu (median age 12; 64% male, 36% female), with 1.1+ million members working in 44 languages around the world

The last case study looks at a group rather than a venue: “hackers and nonconformists,” representing 22% of all students surveyed by the National School Boards Association and 31% of all teens – a significant minority who especially need guidance not restriction (because they do have workarounds!). The authors report that they’re a group of heavy social media users, active content producers, and frequent SNS rule-breakers, and they also exhibit an “extraordinary set of traditional and 21st century skills, including communication, creativity, collaboration and leadership skills and technology proficiency” – see the 2009 study “Cookie monsters: Seeing young people’s hacking as creative practice,” by Gregory Donovan and Cindi Katz for more. These are the students who may be less engaged in traditional academics, but more engaged in solving real problems (a higher proportion participate in content creation than the general student population: 50% vs. 21%).

Children’s properties less rich than teens’

Not all children’s properties are as learning-rich, the Cooney report’s authors write as well. “Evidence is growing that many of the virtual worlds for children that are currently available are impoverished compared to those for teens and adults.” The reason could well be societal fears generated by the Internet-safety discourse: “Literacy scholars highlight that the greatest opportunities for literacy development occur where kids are given the most freedom for expression, but such expression is often limited (because of societal fears, etc.) on sites developed for children.

Balancing safety with children’s rights, opportunities

This report marks another much-needed turning point in the public discourse about children in the digital age. Just by gathering what we know about the youngest media users and setting an agenda for filling in the gaps, it makes a major contribution. But this modestly titled report goes further. It puts online safety in the context of children’s development, education, participation, and rights, calling for a new, balanced and evidence-based approach to the discussion of children and media. It’s time for parents and educators to take note:

“Misrepresentation is common in media coverage of kids and SNF, especially various examples of moral panic-style reports of young people’s so-called ‘deviant’ online practices,” the report’s authors write. “In addition to perpetuating harmful myths about kids and online social networking, such media classification also obscures important findings and compelling arguments about the roles that these activities can play in kids’ lives.”

The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best family and parenting bloggers out there. Our contributing and guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor, and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. Anne Collier blogs at NetFamilyNews.

Carbon Monoxide can build up in a house, especially after the furnace has been turned on for winter. Make sure to have a CO detector, seen here, installed and tested regularly. (Associated Press)

Deep freeze and family safety: Watch the carbon monoxide levels

By Lisa Suhay, Guest Blogger / 01.30.13

A little animal, the sharp drop in temperatures – below freezing here in Norfolk last week – and the recent flu epidemic formed a dangerous conspiracy of miscommunication in our household this week: the nearly missed signs of carbon monoxide – CO -- poisoning in a house buttoned tight for the winter.

We have a battery operated CO detector. But being penny-wise and not buying batteries as often as we should, it wasn’t working while a toxic CO level built in our home after some wildlife chose our chimney (which vents the gas furnace and hot water heater) as a potential nest.

For two weeks my husband, three sons, and I suffered from the blahs and flu-like symptoms which we chalked-up to seasonal illness. When we felt better after being away from the house it was assumed that the illness had subsided or home remedies had worked.

Our son Ian, 17, came home early from high school exam day and said the house “smelled like gas” – like propane, he added. Virginia Natural Gas puts in an additive “mercaptan” that makes the normally odorless gas smell like rotten eggs; which is different from the “propane smell,” and we never use propane indoors. So I told him not to worry. When he insisted, I gave the “Don’t sass your mother” warning.

It was fairly rare for Ian to come back to me a few minutes later looking mulish and actually demand I call the gas company – so unusual and alarming that I relented and called.

I was told not to put my cordless phone handset back on the receiver or use the computer to prevent them from causing a spark. I was told to check on the flame in the furnace because, according to the emergency operator at VA Natural Gas, “A gas flame should burn bright blue. A yellow or orange flame could indicate improper combustion or venting.”

Virginia Natural Gas (VNG) offers a checklist for detecting potential signs of carbon monoxide buildup and poisoning symptoms and we had them all. The buildup clues are: stuffy or stale air, very high humidity, fallen soot from the chimney or draft hood, and a hot draft coming from the draft hood. The poisoning symptoms were very similar to those being pounded into us by all the stories about the flu epidemic.

According to the VGN technician who assessed our home, the CO level should have been no higher than 9 parts-per-million by the handheld meter that he brought. Our home was at 240 PPM and climbing fast. “At levels over 9 PPM, CO begins to adversely affect your health if you persist in breathing it for over eight hours," according to eHow’s David Scott.

Today everyone is fine. We opened all the windows, shut down appliances, got the people, cats, and dog outdoors and had a neighbor who has a heating business make an emergency visit. He found the chimney blocked, saying it was birds or squirrels trying to keep warm by filling the chimney with twigs and leaves in hopes of building a nest.

I talked to VGN spokesman Duane Bourne, who said our situation is not uncommon. “These [carbon monoxide] leaks occur most often during the winter months, when an improperly vented furnace is turned on for the first time and when a furnace runs more frequently during colder temperatures like what you have been experiencing."

The debris filled a 5-gallon bucket, and then all was right with the world again. I bought a slightly more expensive detector that has both batteries as well as a plug for sockets. Sure, times are tough, but our family is priceless.

I wish a little bird had told me what to look for a month ago, instead of creating distress in our nest. I am putting up netting around the chimney cap and two new birdhouses down in the yard.

The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best family and parenting bloggers out there. Our contributing and guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor, and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs.

Immigration reform, like the plan outlined by this group of bipartisan senators Jan. 28, tends to start a divisive debate about who is a real American and who is an outsider. But really, everyone in America was once an outsider, an educator tells his kids. (Reuters)

Immigration reform: Teaching kids about the “pathway to citizenship”

By Todd R. Nelson, Correspondent / 01.29.13

Why is "foreign" such a problematic word? In the recent presidential campaign, it was a negative label used by Mitt Romney to tar and feather Barack Obama. President Obama has foreign ideas, he said. It was already a worn out trope that Mr. Obama's not American. “He’s different!” True – just like the rest of us. Which means, we shouldn't be so schizophrenic about what's foreign and what's American. Obama seems to be getting it right now, stressing the talents and skills that immigrants offer the American talent pool – talents we should enfranchise, not deport. 

It’s a commonplace to say, “We are a nation of immigrants.” We can all tell a family story whose arc originates somewhere else on the planet. Many of us are several generations away from the actual immigrant experience; some of us are new arrivals. We forget the strength of our history and how to embrace it. After all, what is an American?

It’s an engaging complication that even school children can investigate with greater vigor and clarity than the pundits and fulminators and bloviators of the news cycle. At one of my past schools we called this Project Acceptance, in which 5th- to 8th-graders focused on the experience of immigrants, or new Americans. For several weeks, our students even used an online forum to share their opinions about a common set of readings. I recommend author Margy Burns Knight who wrote, "Who Belongs Here?" the story of a young Cambodian boy refugee living in the US. International students from GSA joined us. I recommend Katherine Applegate’s book, "Home of the Brave," the story of a Sudanese refugee boy in Minnesota. I recommend Allen Say’s "Grandfather’s Journey," to name but a few.

Which is to say we shouldn’t stray too far from story telling, a format that each one of us could use to tell our family history – showing how we belong here. “Who Am I?” I asked my students to get started and then presented the following facts about two mystery people.

I’m an American. I belong here.

I was born in Tokyo. My father was born in Tonawanda, my mother in Pittsburgh. My great-great grandparents came from Germany and from Glasgow, Scotland. My German great-great-grandfather sold flour from a wheelbarrow in Pittsburgh. They all arrived in America in the late 19th century. My other great-great-grandparents lived in Moose River, Maine and, after the Civil War, went to Michigan and then Nebraska in a covered wagon. Their ancestors had arrived here almost 400 years ago from England.

My wife was born in London. Her ancestors came from Russia and from Holland. The Dutch family was named Van Valkenburgh and arrived almost 400 years ago; the Russian family name was lost at Ellis Island, so they became “Brody,” the name of their town. They arrived in 1888 and lived on the lower east side of Manhattan … not far from where the Dutch ancestors had grazed cows. My sister-in-law is English; my brother-in-law is French. No one in our families speaks the languages of our ancestors any longer … except for English. My children have lived in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, and my daughter returned to one of the “old countries” for her college degree. I wonder if she felt like she belonged in Glasgow? Who am I? Todd R. Nelson.

Here’s another American story:

My father came from Kenya. He herded goats when he was young, then won a scholarship to school. My mother came from Kansas. My parents met in Hawaii. I grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii and went to college in California, New York, and Massachusetts. My mother’s family includes abolitionists and Revolutionary War veterans. My Kenyan grandmother just got electricity in her house. I have a half-sister who is Indonesian, a brother-in-law who is Chinese-Canadian. My relatives are Christian, Muslim, and Jewish. In my extended family, we speak “English, Indonesian, French, Cantonese, German, Hebrew, African languages including Swahili, Luo and Igbo, and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina Low country.”                                                            

My wife’s ancestors also came to this country from Africa – as slaves. They lived in South Carolina, Alabama, and eventually moved to Chicago. Her grandfather was a World War II veteran. One of my children has a Swahili name. We live in Washington, D.C. in the same house as my office. Who am I? President Obama.

In "The Middle of Everywhere," Mary Pipher talks about the difficulty of being an immigrant to the United States, like Kek in Katherine Applegate’s "Home of the Brave." The smallest details of the daily life we take for granted can be formidable obstacles to finding your way, to belonging, making a home. Her experience has been with Sudanese newcomers to Lincoln, Neb. Consider a few: using escalators, crossing streets with traffic lights, understanding signs and signals, how to bake a frozen pizza, deal with telephone solicitors, overdue library books, job interviews, asparagus and rhubarb, dry cleaning … the meaning of “homesick.” What are those stairs for? How do you drink from a water fountain? From the sublime to the ridiculous – but sometimes our ridiculous can be someone else’s sublime. Kek has never seen snow, which is “like claws on [his] skin.” He misses his cattle back home. Will he ever feel like he belongs here?

A new immigrant needs “cultural brokers,” and the most important cultural brokers are schoolteachers,” Ms. Pipher writes. “Schools are the frontline institution for acculturation, where children receive solid information about their new world … I have met many heroic teachers who, among their other responsibilities, become the antidotes to media and ads. One ELL teacher told me, “We’re all there is between them and Howard Stern and Eminem.” Kek says, “Things are very different here.”

A few teachers could do a good job as cultural brokers for the shrill political culture we’re exposing kids to. Insofar as all children are emigrating to adulthood and citizenship, they need to have the stories of their own ancestors in mind, which informs a willingness to help others write new stories. In any child’s journey, they must learn to navigate perplexing institutions and social conventions, language barriers, and literal and figurative road signs that locate them, slow them down, and warn of upcoming hazards.

What are those stares for? What’s wrong with “foreign?” What is an American? With Project Acceptance, we invited students to join some significant conversations leading to the land of maturity and fulfillment and diversity – where, we hope, they will feel they belong.

The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best family and parenting bloggers out there. Our contributing and guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor, and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs.Todd R. Nelson is Head of School at The School in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania.

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Rescue dog Albie is pleasantly well-behaved. A welcomed relief to the uneasiness owner Peter Zheutlin felt about adopting an unfamiliar dog. (Peter Zheutlin)

Rescue dog Albie: if only children could be so accommodating

By Peter Zheutlin / 01.28.13

If patience is a virtue, Albie, our part golden retriever, part yellow Lab, is virtuous in spades. I’ve never seen a dog so willing to wait calmly for the things he wants – a treat, a belly rub, a pat on the head – though there is one exception. When he senses we’re getting ready to take him for a walk, and he has an uncanny way of knowing, he can hardly contain his excitement. He rears up on his hind legs like -- and I’m going to date myself here -- Fury, the black stallion who starred with Peter Graves in the eponymous 1950s television show. Then he barks, which is completely out of character. But he otherwise displays an almost preternatural calm.

For example, he never wakes us up to go out in the morning no matter how late we sleep and, one presumes, how urgent his need might be to relieve himself. He watches us eat dinner from a respectful distance, never begging for food, something virtually unheard of in Labs. When we come in from a walk on a wet day and his paws and legs are covered with dirt, he sits patiently offering up one paw at a time to be wiped off. Though he doesn’t voluntarily get into the tub when it’s bath time, he stands stock still even as I pour water over his head to rinse the doggie shampoo from his fur. He offers no resistance when I clean the wax from his ears or brush his teeth. If only my children had been so accommodating!

Adopting a dog was a huge leap for me: I fretted about how much work it would entail, the limits it would place on our ability to be spontaneous, and whether the dog would even be lovable enough to make it all worthwhile. In essence, the same anxieties I had about having kids. To be fair, I did have a little more information about Albie than I had about either of my boys. For them I had a blurry ultrasound image and a mild faith in the genetic dice. With Albie there were a couple of photos, a twenty second video (quite fetching) and the raves of the volunteer from Labs 4 Rescue attesting to his high moral character and lovability. But still, as with kids, you never really know what you’re going to get.

Now, more than six months into this new phase in our lives, I can’t imagine a dog more perfectly suited to our family and, more to the point, to me. He’s made every day better – not necessarily easier, but better. He’s the calm when it’s hectic, and the balm when it’s been a bad day. He’s the reminder, as he lopes with pure joy across a snow-covered fairway, that we need to sometimes set aside our human concerns and worries and just be in the moment. He’s the one we can count on not to judge us even as we judge ourselves. And he’s the one who waits patiently at the window, sometimes for hours, for me to come home. Patience is a virtue.

Gretchen Belsie's adopted daughter, Madeline, is seen in this photograph. (Gretchen Belsie)

China adoption diary: Newtown shooting and a holiday concert, interrupted

By Gretchen Belsie / 01.25.13

On a bright and cold Friday afternoon in December, my husband and I attended the annual Holiday Concert held at our daughters’ elementary school. The event – a combination of old-school enthusiasm for the music of the season with a super-sized PTO bake sale off to the side – was something we had both looked forward to this year, especially since it would be Madeleine’s first encounter with this aspect of the American Christmas experience. We had heard endless details from fifth grader Grace and had watched her practice her “Lotsa Latkes” Jewish dance number in the living room for at least a month. But since Madeleine still doesn’t speak much English, we weren’t sure what her grade would be offering up on the program.

Solid attendance at the concert is a given. Parents get off work for two hours, grandparents throng the gymnasium, younger siblings are dragged along to chortle and weep throughout the presentations. Given a past experience when we had arrived just before the doors “officially opened” and thus had to stand leaning up against the junior rock climbing wall for two hours, I urged Laurent to drop me off ahead of time so I could dash in and save some seats while he went to park the car down the street. I was fortunate to get two seats together in the last row, and this time, we had only a pair of sobbing toddlers in our immediate area.

The cultural and ethnic diversity of the audience stood out in marked contrast to the relative homogeneity of the population in the Midwest region where we used to live. Spanish conversations swirled around us. I noticed several Muslim women in the crowd with brightly colored head scarves. A Mongolian mother stood by with an infant cradled in her arms. A young Japanese mother searched for her daughter when the kindergarteners marched in in a wobbly line.

There was so much joy and anticipation in the air. And then Laurent showed up, took his seat beside me, and with a strange expression on his face stated simply, “I just heard this on the car radio. A gunman got into an elementary school in Connecticut and shot some teachers and their kindergarten students. Many are dead.” In that one moment, the color and joy seemed to drain away from the gymnasium. It was as though everything was now sepia-toned. I felt numb.

On some level, the concert was still enjoyable, but the deep concern for the events of that morning kept coming to thought. As a parent, how could I ever survive such a thing? What, if anything, could I do to alleviate some of the pain and fear that would no doubt be on my children’s minds as the details of the story unfolded? Were my children really safe at school? Was there still a way to protect and preserve a sense of innocence for their childhood experience?

I decided to focus, as best I could, on the innocence and purity I saw expressed in the various performances. As the kindergarteners rattled unto the raisers and shrilled “Hello, how are you?” in different languages, holding up cards that read “Bonjour” and “Ni hao” for audience approval, I felt that palpable sense of innocence, that ability to represent a world that knows peace and tolerance and joy.

When Madeleine and the other second graders trooped in wearing homemade construction paper Kwanzaa crowns, I could feel the tears welling up. There she stood, proudly joining in with the song’s hand gestures and doing a yeoman’s job at lip-synching the unfamiliar words, happy as a lark and the picture of innocence. Soon after, the fifth graders took to the aisles, dancing in circles to the melancholy strains of “Lotsa Latkes.” Grace would never have been mistaken for a Jewish lass, even with the long dark skirt and shawl, but she did manage to hold hands briefly with several of the fifth grade boys and demonstrate a certain seriousness of purpose.

As the concert wrapped up, the audience was invited to join in singing that old folk ballad, “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony,” that Coca-Cola appropriated for its advertising campaign in the late 1960’s. By that point I was emotionally spent and could only let my tears flow. I wanted to believe that that world could still exist for my children.

The following Monday, school administrators and teachers took time out of the daily schedule to review with the children the appropriate safety procedures they would need to know by heart should a similar emergency ever happen at their school. That night at the supper table, Grace confidently recounted what she had learned that day, listing all the hiding places she now knew about at school. “If we are in the gym, we’re all supposed to run and cram ourselves into the ball storage closet and KEEP QUIET.”

As a parent, you hope and pray that this discussion was only academic. But given recent tragic events in Newtown, Conn., perhaps the watchword of this generation of elementary school children is “innocence forearmed.”                        

The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best family and parenting bloggers out there. Our contributing and guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor, and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs.

Parental control and website blocking are not constructive ways to keep kids safe online, a new study says. Here, Bruna Quaresma and her son, Joao Pedro, use a computer to play games and surf the internet in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 2011. (Christian Science Monitor)

Internet security for kids: less parental control, more communication

By Anne Collier / 01.23.13

As a society, we’ve been talking about youth online risk for years, but we’ve only just begun to talk about young people’s resilience, which is what helps them keep risk from turning into harm. It’s important to know, as the authors of an important new report note, that resilience – the ability to deal with negative experiences without being upset by them – doesn’t come from avoiding risk, online or offline.

“Risk and resilience go hand in hand, as resilience can only develop through exposure to risks or stressful events. Consequently, as children learn how to adequately cope with (online) adversities, they develop (online) resilience,” write Leen d’Haenens, Sofie Vandoninck and Verónica Donoso of EU Kids Online in the UK.

Here are some things parents and educators need to know about resilience:

• What it enables: “Resilient children are able to tackle adverse situations in a problem-focused way, and to transfer negative emotions into positive (or neutral) feelings,” the authors write.
• Gender differences: Boys were less resilient at a younger age, girls were less resilient as teenagers.
• Online and offline inseparable: “Children with more psychological problems suffer more from online as well as offline risks” (resonant with findings of a just-released study in the US, published in the journal Pediatrics, about maltreatment's amplifying effect on a child's online vulnerability). 
• Most popular coping strategy (but resilient kids usually use more than one): “Talking to somebody is the most popular employed strategy, regardless of the type of risk, especially among girls and younger children who tend to employ this communicative strategy more often.” The authors recommend encouraging “open communication, both at home and at school.”
• Other education needed: Teach children effective coping strategies, including blocking and abuse-reporting tools, but especially social-emotional literacy (I added the latter, based on other research and the authors’ advice that “special attention to children with low self-efficacy and psychological difficulties … is crucial.”
• It’s not either/or, but a spectrum: “Being resilient is not a simple ‘yes or no’ question, and … would rather be understood as a continuum from very low to very high resilience.” Over all, “girls, younger children, children with more psychological problems, those receiving more support from their friends, children whose parents mediated their internet use and children whose parents were low internet users were less resilient.”
• Parents’ own tech use a significant factor: Promoting Net use by parents “is crucial, as parents who are frequent internet users themselves feel more confident with the medium, and also feel more confident in guiding their children … promoting a positive attitude toward online safety and proactive coping strategies.”
• Mediation better than restriction: In terms of parenting style, the authors write that “monitoring or mediating approaches seem to be more beneficial for children’s online resilience than restrictive ones.” They add that more research is needed for different types of risks and on social practices of young people.
• Taking away the Net doesn’t help: It’s related to a passive or fatalistic approach that doesn’t build self-confidence or -efficacy online, the researchers found. “Going offline was related to missing out on online opportunities, and the problem could easily re-occur because the cause had not been tackled.”
• Educators key too: Teachers are needed to “stimulate their pupils to resort to proactive problem-solving strategies,” so “sufficient digital skills among the teachers themselves are therefore essential.”

Zooming in on young people’s top coping strategy: “Talking with somebody” was the most popular one regardless of the problem encountered,” according to the report. In the case of bullying, 77% of the victims talked to someone after an incident; 53% “did so after seeing disturbing sexual content.” But they often use several strategies at once – for example, “deleting unwelcome messages [41%] and blocking the sender [46%]” in cases of bullying and 38% and 40%, respectively, in cases of sexting. Did that help? Yes, the authors found, 92% of young people who reported deleting unwelcome sexual content and 78% of those who blocked the sender in bullying cases said those strategies helped.

It’s great to see research turning up substantive evidence of young people’s resourcefulness as well as resilience online. Remember that this research is based on surveys of more than 25,000 youth in 25 countries.

The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best family and parenting bloggers out there. Our contributing and guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor, and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. Anne Collier blogs at NetFamilyNews.