Alicia Silverstone is starting a breast milk sharing program and the idea is rooted in a sense of social concern. Here, Silverstone addresses an audience in Los Angeles in August. (Invision)

Alicia Silverstone: Breast milk sharing program rooted in love, don't laugh

By James Norton, Guest Blogger / 07.02.13

The jokes write themselves: A celebrity (Alicia Silverstone) has tackled a problem (insufficient vegan breast milk) that is so rarefied and disconnected from the everyday American experience as to be the storytelling equivalent of self-marinating meat ... if that metaphor isn't inappropriate to the circumstances.

Silverstone's proposed solution to support breastfeeding mothers is an Internet-driven sharing system, the physical, sanitary, and legal logistics of which will no doubt boggle the mind of even an imaginative observer.

Breastfeeding is challenging – in terms of logistics and (most crucially) time, it's a grind. My wife breastfeeds while maintaining a career as a professional photographer, and there are some days when the struggle can be profound.

And eating a vegan diet is challenging – again, the logistics are daunting, and getting a healthy diet while spurning meat, milk, eggs, and sometimes even honey requires careful planning and a lot of home cooking. Trying to do them both at once – well, that's a situation where having a staff of personal assistants would really come in handy. And if both of these major lifestyle choices are important to you, it makes sense that you'd work to enable other people to follow in your footsteps.

Naturally, people are skeptical; skip down to the comments section of the Yahoo! article on this and you'll watch the Internet equivalent of a festival day mob chucking clods of dirt at the village outcast. "Yes, because the unregulated sharing of bodily fluids between random strangers on the internet is always a totally good idea..." "This is one of the dumbest things I have heard from any Hollywood mom..." "That is disgusting..." and so forth.

But how about this: Yes, there are a lot of problems inherent in the sharing of body fluids between strangers and infants. Yes, breast milk itself is a dairy product, potentially making the "vegan" aspect of all this a bit of a thought experiment. ("Well, the mothers are choosing to give their milk, so it's not the same as compelling a cow or goat to do so ...") And yes, this is a celebrity problem – for most of us, breastfeeding our own children most of the time for even the first six months of life is plenty of work and struggle, thank you very much.

But what Silverstone is striving for – a technology-based solution that will enable more people to live what she perceives as a healthy, loving, lifestyle – is motivated by a sense of love and social concern. Idealistic? Maybe. Misguided? Perhaps. But love's at the heart of this mess, and instead of scorn and mockery, it would be nice to see some gentler deconstructions of the logistics and helpful suggestions of alternative ways to allow mothers to feed their babies and themselves in ways that are healthful and nurturing.

And leave the jokes to the pros. Conan and Letterman are going to go to town on this like Derek Jeter playing a game of elementary school softball.

Teenager Ann Makosinski shows off her body heat-powered flashlight in a video. (Screenshot LiveLeak)

Teen invents body heat-powered flashlight: What's your teen done?

By James Norton, Guest Blogger / 07.02.13

A 15-year-old student inventor of a new kind of flashlight is the latest in a long line of young people to catch the public imagination with the sheer ambition of her creation. Ann Makosinski, a high school junior from Canada, harnessed Peltier tiles (which generate electricity when one side is cooled and the other is heated) to make a flashlight that can run for about 20 minutes by using nothing more than human body heat. This puts her in the running for the Google Science Fair's $50,000 top prize, to be announced in September.

Inventions have captivated commentators and the general public since the era of the ancient Greeks (remember that cool ship-burning lens thing?) and Chinese (paper, anybody?), and they're doubly inspiring when young people create them - evidence that within every child there is a Leonardo da Vinci waiting to hatch.

The fine print (as there almost always is with any invention) is that Ann's flashlight doesn't work in temperatures above 50 degrees F. Think back to every time you've lost power and/or needed a flashlight, and then recall how many times it has been under 50 degrees. And then remember the similarly battery-free friction powered flashlight, already useful and brought to market. In short: it's a science-fair triumph, but probably not a cash cow.

That is, of course, at least partially beside the point. The excitement over the flashlight (which could, of course, be refined by a company or academic institution with greater resources) is that it's part of a long, ongoing story of young people creating something new and useful - in recent years alone, we've had under-18 inventors create human hair-derived solar panels,  fast-acting phone chargers, and even cancer tests, among dozens of others.

The Google Science Fair initiative is meant to encourage and tap into this spirit of young creativity, and there are dozens of other contests and forums for young people who plunge into the worlds of science and industrial design - everything from local and state gatherings to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair or the London International Youth Science Forum. The key is trapping the lightning of young imagination in the bottle of demonstrable scientific principles.

What you make of this precocious innovation as a parent, of course, depends on the hopes - and/or baggage - that you bring to the story. Is it fun and encouraging? You've probably got a young kid with a world of potential or a slightly older one who has already shown a precocious flair for science and independently guided projects.

Does it induce nervousness? Perhaps you've got an early teen (or teens) and you're wondering what paths they'll take as they search for academic success, careers, and personal fulfillment.

Is it oddly depressing? Well, it may well be that your son or daughter has already cruised through high school without exhibiting so much as a flash of interest in the scientific and mathematical, and has instead decided to spend a year following a jam band from Vermont to San Francisco.

But if you're like me, and raising a three-month-old, you're just happy to stay on top of the diaper situation - angst can wait.

Single mom Lena Bushrod raises her daughter, Alaina Inman, full time. Alaina's father is still in the picture - and her parents are still a couple, but they both still live with their own parents. This allows Lena to be a full-time mom because she doesn't have to work. They were photographed last year. (Melanie Stetson Freeman/Christian Science Monitor)

In praise of single mothers, fathers

By Judy Bolton-Fasman, Guest blogger / 07.01.13

The first thing that went wrong was the lock on the door. It didn’t work.

Our friends S and R generously lent us their Cape Cod condo the weekend of Father’s Day. They were away and Ken was on an extended business trip. I thought that a quick outing to the Cape would nicely break up the time while he was away. We unlocked the door of the condo just fine, but locking it was another story. I leaned heavily on my technologically savvy teenagers to figure out the lock’s mechanism. No dice. None of us had a clue about how to work our friends’ door.

My first inclination was to call Ken who was a continent away. After all, the man can walk me through complicated computer problems over the telephone. But I quickly realized that, as talented as he is, even he could not figure out how to work a lock he had never seen. The kids and I did the next best thing. We called a locksmith who, five minutes and $65.00 later, showed us that all we had to do to lock the door was lift up the handle.

And then it hit me like a megaton of bricks – this is what single parents go through every day. They don’t have the luxury of calling on a partner to get them through a rough patch. I can remember the extensive debates Ken and I have had over the years about little things like low-grade fevers, sleepless babies and fussy toddlers. Tylenol or Advil? We had no idea what we were doing, but it was less scary to be in the dark together.

Here’s another thing about our weekend away – driving. I had to do all of it. Ken always does the driving while I snooze in the front seat. This time it was completely up to me to get my kids from Point A to Point B since neither of them has a driver’s license. That’s a lot of pressure on someone with a lousy sense of direction that doesn’t like to drive.

But one of the biggest things that I learned on that fateful weekend was that Anna and Adam weren’t thrilled to be so far from their friends. That’s right, I’m not their whole world anymore. Not even remotely. So I expended a lot of energy on trying to make them happy. Unfortunately, the two of them have very different ideas of happiness. One likes the beach; the other hates it. One likes the movies; the other is not so keen on sitting in a theater for two hours.

I finally ditched the kids and called Ken from a coffee shop. “They’re driving me nuts,” I said breathlessly into the phone.

“I think what they’re doing is developmentally normal,” he said. “At this stage, they don’t want to hang out with us that much.”

I knew that Ken had spoken the unvarnished truth. I even accepted that truth; it was just hard to see it in action.

By the end of the weekend we had had enough of one another. My children demanded that we leave the Cape a day early. No Monday morning departure to beat the Sunday traffic for this solo driver. They couldn’t stand to be away from home for another minute. That’s when I did something I swore that I would never do as a parent: I gave them the “You do not appreciate me” speech. I hate to admit this, but it was not the first time I’ve done that.

“I am, “ I said in my best martyr-like voice, “only as good as my last favor or the last thing that I bought for you.” Then my kids got into a row with me about how that wasn’t true as we waited to be seated for brunch. People were staring.

At the table their bottled-up resentments came tumbling out. Adam was still furious that we didn’t go to his favorite beach, missing out on eating the best onion rings on the face of the earth. Anna had passed up several invitations of a lifetime that had been sent in rapid-fire text messages throughout the time we were away together. And I took out a small loan to take them to the finest restaurants and buy them the loveliest souvenirs.

“Neither of us asked you to bring us here,” Anna said. “This was all your idea,” Adam said. That’s when I really blew a gasket. “You have no idea how much I do for you.” As soon as I said it, I heard how flat and clichéd the comment sounded. Of course, my children had no inkling of everything Ken and I do for them. How could they? They’re not parents yet.

As for me, I am humbled and awed by those parents who bring up children on their own with grace, wisdom, and the hard-won experience of figuring out how to lock a door.

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Screenshot of kid-created builds on the Massively @ Jokaydia server in Australia (the young players and parents are all over the world, though).Screenshot taken by “Kerry J” at Flickr.com (Creative Commons licensed). (Screenshot by “Kerry J” at Flickr.com (Creative Commons licensed).)

Minecraft: The video game kids should waste time on this summer

By Anne Collier, Guest Blogger / 07.01.13

Reporters and reviewers write about Minecraft as if it’s just like any other video game. Even this highly readable piece about its creator (Markus Persson, aka “Notch”) and its parent company (Mojang) by Harry McCracken in Time magazine doesn’t cover what makes it different from other games specifically for its kid (and parent) players. But he does bring out this extraordinary differentiating factor:

“No less lofty an authority than the United Nations sees Minecraft as a tool to improve human life. Last September, its U.N.-Habitat agency teamed up with Mojang to launch a program called Block by Block. It will use Minecraft to digitally reimagine 300 run-down public spaces in the next three years, giving people who live near them the chance to chime in on how they might be improved. First up: a dilapidated park in Nairobi’s business district and parts of its Kibera slum” (Kibera is home to some 1 million people – see this).

Distributed and shared safety

As for what might interest Minecraft players’ families is not only how it’s different from other video games but what it shares with all social media: distributed, collective, and/or shared safety (pick one adjective, but they all work). This game that looks like a virtual-LEGO land is literally all over the Internet and world. It’s not hosted by its so-called parent Mojang in Stockholm. It’s hosted and played on public and private servers all over the world, and it’s the ultimate example of what online safety is now and from now on in our very social media environment and connected world.

Kids under 10 host Minecraft games on their own servers, as do parents for their own kids, on laptops and family computers. So do schools I know of. Some people play the year-old Xbox 360 edition for console players. Others run adult-only Minecraft servers because they don’t want to “babysit” young players who sometimes like to be annoying and mess around with “griefing” or just ask too many questions in chat.

This is not exactly the kind of safety that can really be regulated for all by any single parent, jurisdiction, or law such as the US’s COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act). Each Minecraft server has its own rules of engagement (or creation or play), its own atmosphere and mode (“survival,” “creative,” “adventure,” or “player vs. player” [PVP]). Some have more than one “world,” allowing players to choose their mode of play. Clearly, child safety in Minecraft is a shared proposition, just as it is in social media in general (because multiplayer console, online, and phone-based games are indeed social media) – shared by players themselves, server admins, families, classes, teachers, school policy, and shared with the designers of the games, apps and worlds and the conditions they create and change. More and more, online safety takes a village too.

What creating together safety can teach

Safety can also be a creative effort in game worlds. It can take some strategy, risk assessment and collaborative problem-solving, and maintaining it can develop resilience and social literacy.

And parents, I think you’ll love this: To Minecraft players themselves, “safe” means many things and suggests a lot about the creativity I’m talking about. Here are just a few examples:

• How to monster-proof one’s house
• How to safely light one’s building made of ice or snow
• How to build a fireplace in a wooden house so it doesn’t burn down
• How not to step in lava and how to build with it so that it doesn’t burn down your building overnight
• How to move or pick up TNT
• How to keep one’s wolf safe at night.

Minecraft at its most kid-friendly

There are definitely kid-safe public and semi-public Minecraft servers (called “whitelisted” servers because would-be players have to apply to join). One I know well is the Australia-based Massively @ Jokaydia. With 500 registered users worldwide, it’s run by educators who call it a Minecraft Guild for parents as well as kids (aged 4-16). Parents are welcome to participate, and everybody learns. See the citizenship and social- and media-literacy skills represented in this list of 10 kinds of learning that this server aims to help players develop in Minecraft). But this is informal learning for parents and young people (“no teaching or lessons allowed in the game”). It’s also free (donations “gratefully accepted”), but there’s an application that people fill out to join.

There are certainly other kid-safe Minecraft servers out there. [Mojang doesn't endorse any single "safe" Minecraft server.] The servers come and go (it can be time-consuming to run a successful server for more than a few players), so do google “safe minecraft servers” to see what strikes you. When I did, I got about 1.7 million search results, but it looked like there were some good options right on the first results page.

Make a donation, get particle effects

If you google and click on some of them, you’ll probably learn a lot about Minecraft safety just from their descriptions of how they’re set up for play. Many are supported by donations. One example is SandlotMinecraft.com, which offers “perks” for donations (smart!), so don’t be surprised if Minecraft players at your house tell you, for example, that you really need to make a donation because they REALLY need “particle effects” such as “smoke, fire, hearts, ender dust, and TNT.” I mean, really, you’ll need them too when you’re in the game yourself!

So to sum up, the only two safety issues I can think of which parents may want to think about are 1) the age-old need for balance in our lives (because there are so many absorbing ways to have fun in the Minecraft sandbox and/or player vs. player game) and 2) the multiplayer experience (as with any multiplayer online game or online community like Xbox Live). Multiplayer – whether online, on phones, or on Xbox Live – means you don’t always know the people you’re playing with. Most kids are smart about that, but some need reminders not to share personal information with people they don’t know. But it can also be helpful to keep in mind that kids learn a lot from figuring out among themselves how to resolve arguments and get themselves out of fixes, and digital spaces like a Minecraft game are pretty safe environments in which to do that all-important learning and inner-guidance-system development that keep them safe the rest of their lives.

Minecraft advice for parents

My research turned up some great tips from seasoned Minecraft players, some of them from parents for fellow parents. Here’s a sampler:

• About “griefing”, defined as “the act of irritating and angering people in video games through the use of destruction, construction, or social engineering” at MinecraftWiki.net, which adds that it has become a real problem for server administrators and is probably why people screen potential players or “whitelist” their servers. Another problem is trolling, annoying other players by killing their avatars. These can be forms of online harassment or bullying and can either be tough for emotionally vulnerable kids or a tool for developing resilience, in-world “street smarts,” or strategy, risk-assessment, and social skills. So much depends on the child. There can be a lot of creativity in griefing too, whether offensive or defensive, and – as in life in general – there’s a spectrum between fun pranks and cruel pranks. See these 9 tips for dealing with a griefer in Minecraft at WikiHow and this great advice (whether a player wants to partake in griefing or not) here.
• From a gamer and a gamer-parent: A comment from player “ZobmieRules” at SafeVideoGames.blogspot.com (do a page search for “ZobmieRules,” and this date and time: March 6, 2012 at 5:33. His/her first three words are “To any parent…”, so you could do a page search for that phrase too). Good Minecraft advice for parents by a parent (her kids are 5 and 7) can also be found at GameSpot – do a page search of her screenname VixenWolf11 here. She rates Minecraft “9.5.”
• From another mom: The user reviews at Common Sense Media are much more useful than that of the site’s own reviewer – check out that of 18-year-old “CsomeSence” here (his/her headline is “Clearly no ‘Common Sense’” or search for his/her screen name) and self-professed parent and educator “BayAreaMediaMaven,” who focuses on the potential risks to emotionally vulnerable children here.
• Hardcore safety: For players of this variant of “survival” mode Minecraft, see this at MinecraftWiki.net for 9 meaty survival tips like “build an in-door tree farm” as soon as possible; maintain situational awareness at all times; if a horde of skeletons approaches at the same time as a creeper, the skeletons are probably the bigger problem; and “wear at least Iron armour at all times, replacing it as it gets worn.”

Related links

• Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition – the biggest upside is that it’s so plug-’n'-play for console gamers. According to a great review in VentureBeat.com, they can just start it up and start building. But serious Minecrafters will instantly see the downsides of no creative mode, no mods, and the fact that its features lag behind the computer version by about a year. BUT there are “great multiplayer options” for play among friends and fellow gamers via Xbox Live. (A reader can’t tell if the combat in the Xbox edition is “no fun” because the writer really just likes creating and building or because it’s no fun for people who love PvP mode on computers.) This edition had a “record-breaking launch” on May 9, 2012, and sold millions of copies within a few months of launch, Gamespot reported last October.
• Mining Minecraft for learning – a 3-part series of guest posts right here in NFN by Marianne Malmstrom, who teaches 3rd-through-8th-graders in Minecraft – “Part 1: Little gamers’ digital play through a teacher’s eyes,” “Part 2: Brilliance when students drive the learning,” and “Part 3: Safety & citizenship in games (do try this at home)“
• “Minecraft in education: How video games are teaching kids”
• Server admin challenges: Here’s a page that can give you a solid sense of the challenges of running a public Minecraft server, like those listed at Mojang’s Minecraft.net here (there are also “whitelist” servers where players have to be approved, or apply, before they can join).
• “What does ‘safe’ really look like in a digital age?”
• Time’s McCracken’s story about the making of his Minecraft story

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.org.

Ben Heinrich smiles as he looks at his younger sister, Hannah, at their home in Grand Haven, Mich., this winter. Siblings love each other, but sometimes they can lash out and, if it's too aggressive, cause lasting emotional trauma, a study says. (AP Photo/Grand Haven Tribune, Krystle Wagner)

Sibling bullying: How to be sure normal tangles are not actually damaging

By Noelle Swan, Guest Blogger / 06.28.13

There’s a common parental refrain, “If you’re not bleeding, I don’t want to hear it! Figure out how to work it out!”
Siblings fight. It’s part of how kids learn to resolve conflict. Parents expect it, shrug it off, and tell their kids that, one day, they will be best friends.

However, aggressive behavior between siblings can have an impact on kids’ mental health, says a new study from the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center, published in the July issue of the medical journal “Pediatrics.”
Study authors indicated that victimization among siblings could be just as harmful as peer bullying.
This is startling news for parents, who see the sibling dynamic as the ideal relationship for practicing independent conflict resolution.
How can parents set the stage for this kind of learning without opening the door for one sibling to victimize the other?
Parents should start while the kids are young, suggests Lauren Bondy, a licensed social worker and founder of Parenting Perspectives, an Illinois consulting agency offering workshops, courses, and counseling services to families.
“Parents can do a lot of things when kids are younger than 4 to teach them the skills to work conflict out on their own,” Ms. Bondy says.
Young children need to be taught about the effects of their behavior in firm but kind ways, she says. She cautions parents to avoid making young children feel bad about their actions because they are still learning how to deal with their own emotions and how to interpret others’ feelings.
Bondy encourages parents to “respond in a loving, teaching way” and to remember that “harshness breeds harshness.”
As children grow older, parents can talk with kids during calm, neutral moments about ways to resolve conflicts, including walking away, ignoring unwanted behavior, and establishing a compromise.
Once kids have these tools, parents should allow them to freely explore them, because jumping into conflicts and resolving them for kids can actually promote a bully-victim dynamic, Bondy says.
“Frequently parents jump in with their own perception of who is right or wrong and lecture and punish them. They often expect more from the older child and feel they need to rescue the other one. In actuality, this is setting up a victim mentality; the older child feels bad about who he is and the younger child ends up feeling incapable,” Bondy says.
Parents do need to intervene if a child loses control and begins to hysterically kick, scream, and throw things, she says. In that state, she says kids are not capable of hearing anything. The only thing to do is remove the child somewhere she cannot harm herself or anyone else and let her calm down. Teaching kids self-calming strategies can facilitate this process.
Parents also need to be on the lookout for intentional, repeated victimization between siblings, Bondy says. While conflict is developmentally appropriate, an imbalance of power in the relationship can be harmful.
While many siblings have aggressive relationships and feel that it is a fair fight, the difference in ages can set the stage for an imbalance of power, says Timothy Davis, a Massachusetts child and family psychotherapist and author of “Challenging Boys.”
“Aggression between siblings, especially younger ones, is normal, but some measure of it, particularly if there is an element of fear and intimidation or harassment, becomes really worrisome,” Dr. Davis says.

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William, Knott, 7, son of Kelly Bryson and her wife Erika Knott, right, participates in a celebration rally in Jackson Square in New Orleans after the Supreme Court's decision on the Defense of Marriage Act was published. (AP)

Supreme Court DOMA and Proposition 8 rulings good for kids, by accident?

By James Norton, Guest Blogger / 06.28.13

If you’ve followed the news over the past week, you've probably noticed a shift in the very definition of the American family. As public opinion and state laws have evolved increasingly to tolerate and embrace gay marriage, so has the legal system – the Supreme Court this week invalidated the Defense of Marriage Act and effectively ended California's gay marriage ban, Proposition 8.

Gays and lesbians who want to marry and receive recognition under the law are the obvious winners. But that the Court has been expanding marriage recognition, rights, and protection to same-sex couples is a part of a bigger trend – an expansion of marriage that has positive effects for children specifically, says Adam Pertman, executive director of the Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York.
 
 "The fact is, there's lots of research indicating that the biggest beneficiaries of marriage are children," Mr. Pertman says. "They get social benefits, economic benefits – they get a big range of benefits from marriage. The list goes on and on."
 
 Pertman, whose organization researches policies that affect adoption and works to improve adoption laws, doesn't think that the court has been swept up in a pro-gay marriage, pro-children crusade. He points to the different ways that justices arrived at their two important decisions this week.
 
 "If you look at it ruling by ruling, the California [Prop 8] ruling, for instance, it has a very different rationale than the DOMA ruling," Pertman says. "Both seem to be saying: 'All families are created equal, and all children should be protected' — but [the] California [decision] didn't really say that, [it] said the litigants didn't have standing." (The court ruled that proponents of a ban on gay marriage passed by California voters did not have the right to defend that law in federal courts).

The court also ruled that the backers of California's Proposition 8 didn't have standing to challenge lower-court rulings about the 2008 ballot initiative that banned gay marriage in the state.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/How_this_weeks_Supreme_Court_decisions_affect_Pa_NJ.html#Ktv31eVBwAR5XHEP.99 Pertman's stance is that the positive impact on children's lives is a good thing, but one that has come about haphazardly and not through any beneficent design on the part of the country's top court.

 "The powers that be — the courts, and the legislatures — I rarely think they put their money where their mouth is," Pertman says. "What they say is, 'The children are the future, children are our more valuable resource, children are this, children are that,' but the truth is when push comes to shove, it's the adults and adult concerns that take priority."
 
 The story, Pertman suggests, leads back to the ancient currency of Washington: clout.
 
 "I wrote an op-ed saying children don't lobby and children don't vote, and they pay the price for that," he says.

Veronica and her biological father Dusten Brown pose for a photo on Brown's parents' farm in Nowata, Oklahoma, in this handout photo taken in early 2013. The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that federal law did not compel her to be sent to Brown. (Reuters / Handout)

Baby Veronica Supreme Court ruling raises the question: What is a parent?

By James Norton, Guest Blogger / 06.26.13

What makes a parent?

The answer to this seemingly simple question is, in practice, torturously complex, if the recent adoption case of 3-year-old Veronica Brown is any guide. 

Veronica, a Native American, spent the first 27 months of her life with her (non-Native American) adoptive parents. The US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 yesterday that a federal law doesn't compel her to be sent to live with her biological father, who is petitioning for custody under the Indian Child Welfare Act. This leaves her ultimate placement up to a South Carolina court.

The actors in the case include:

• Veronica's adoptive parents (Matt and Melanie Capobianco), who can make a compelling case simply through the time and care they've already given to this young child.
• Her biological father Dusten Brown, who abandoned Veronica before birth but now wants to step up and take custody.
• Her biological mother, who saw a brighter future for Veronica in a loving adoptive home.
• The US court system, which must balance upholding the letter of the law as interpreted by judges and justices with the actual human outcomes of its decisions.
• And the Cherokee Nation, which views the case in the greater context of the cultural assimilation (and destruction) wrought by white settlers on Native American culture in general, and via a historically flawed adoption process in particular.

What unites all of these actors is, nominally, an interest in Veronica's "best interests," a phrase that's no easier to disentangle than "parent." What makes Veronica's case so compelling for an outside observer is the overwhelming power of the forces that tug at her. 

If you watch a divorce proceeding and custody battle from an outside perspective, your heart goes out to the children involved, who are being torn between two parents who presumably love them and will care for them to varying degrees to be determined imperfectly by a stranger in a robe. Lives hang in the balance, and two whole families are swept up in the conflict.

Veronica's case has all that tension, plus hundreds of years of historical conflict, the painful question of "what is biological parenthood worth?", and sufficient legal intrigue to escalate the fight to the highest court in the land. All actors involved claim to be acting in Veronica's best interest, but by the sheer weight of their numbers, they can't be - the fight itself has the potential to (adversely) affect the rest of her life.

The proceeding also raises the question of heritage — what is it worth to be aware of your own heritage and connected, on a daily basis, to your own history? Tribal governments have struggled for years with out-of-tribe adoptions shrinking their extended families, and the sense of loss is dramatic and palpable.

Louis La Rose (of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska) testified during a hearing on the Indian Child Welfare Act:

"I think the cruelest trick that the white man has ever done to Indian children is to take them into adoption court, erase all of their records and send them off to some nebulous family ... residing in a white community and he goes back to the reservation and he has absolutely no idea who his relatives are, and they effectively make him a non-person and I think ... they destroy him."

Is the Cherokee tribe, in effect, a parent with a compelling interest that might make the Veronica Brown case more than a question of a former non-involved father versus a stable, committed adoptive family? Is there legal ground to consider and value that relationship? And would Veronica be better off if there was?

However these questions are ultimately decided, it's troubling to know that there will, inevitably, be more Veronicas caught up the in courts in years to come — but also comforting to understand that these cases have been increasingly decided by mediation in recent years, as we collectively come to grips with the impact a custody fight can have on the person for whom all the fighting is supposedly for: the child.

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Talking to your teen about weight loss and obesity means not discussing either, but reinforcing healthy eating habits. A man carries freshly picked strawberries at Hollin Farms in Delaplane, Va., June 15. (AP)

How to talk about obesity and weight loss with your teen

By Noelle Swan, Guest Blogger / 06.25.13

Wondering how to talk to your teen about weight? Tread carefully, suggests a new study from the University of Minnesota published this week in the medical journal “Pediatrics."

Talking about weight loss and obesity might do more harm than good, the researchers found.

A survey of more than 2,000 adolescents and their parents revealed that while discussions of healthy eating and lifestyle can promote healthy choices, talking about it in terms of weight loss and obesity can drive kids to try dangerous methods of weight control, including diet pills, laxatives, fasting, and purging.

Adolescence is marked by intense peer pressure, and can involve anxiety over self-image and emotional extremes. As tough and independent as teens may insist they are, their self-esteem can be fragile. Many endure bullying from peers about their weight. All are bombarded by an onslaught of images depicting the “perfect body” in magazines, billboards, advertisements, and on television. If parents jump into the fray with even gentle cajoling about their waistline, or nagging about their weight, they run the risk of pushing teens to explore extreme methods of weight control.

That does not mean that parents should avoid the subject entirely. With teen obesity rates at 18 percent, nearly three times the rates seen 30 years ago, promoting healthy eating may be more important now than ever.

The good news is that opening up the dialogue with teens about healthy eating practices can have a positive impact “regardless of the size of your adolescent,” says study author Jerica Berge, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

So how can parents spark conversations about healthy eating without pushing kids to a dangerous extreme?

“The more positive the message the better,” Ms. Berge says.

As every parent knows, very few things are more enticing to teenagers than the things they have been told to avoid. Instead of focusing on what they should not be eating, parents can talk about how fruits and vegetables will make their teens strong and healthy.

There are many advertising campaigns out there promoting foods that can lead to weight gain. The more messages teens receive from adults in their life promoting healthier foods, the better, Berge says. The study found that for teens living in two-parent families, hearing about healthy eating from both parents had a more positive impact than in families where one parent remained silent on the issue.

Parents can turn to pediatricians for additional support in having these conversations. While health care providers probably already are tuned into this issue and most often include discussion of weight and body mass index (BMI) as a routine part of office visits, Berge says that calling pediatricians before the appointment and mentioning that they would like some help discussing healthy eating could be helpful.

Regardless of when parents bring up the topic, Berge emphasizes that parents frame the discussion in as positive a way as possible.

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Snapchat's new feature, SnapKidz, does not allow users under the age of 13 to send photos to friends or family. While the feature's a good idea in theory, there are a few ways to get around the child lock. (Snapchat.com)

Snapchat's new feature, SnapKidz, good in theory, not in practice

By Anne Collier, Guest Blogger / 06.25.13

It’s an interesting experiment: The creators of Snapchat, the social app for sharing photos that disappear in seconds, have just introduced SnapKidz, a non-social photo app for kids under 13 with Apple mobile devices (it’s not yet available for Android). So, true to its name, it’s basically the snap without the chat. It’s also the ephemeral photo-sharing app without the ephemeral part. Kids’ photos don’t necessarily disappear in SnapKidz; they can be saved to their iPhone’s camera roll. The way it works is, kids can “take photos and videos, add captions and drawings,” according toSnapchat’s guide for parents, but they can’t create a Snapchat account (so they can’t provide the company with any personal information, which would be a violation of the kids’ privacy law called “COPPA”), add friends or send or receive snaps.

So the main reason why it’s an interesting experiment is that Snapchat’s defining, game-changing characteristics – which created a new category of digital socializing and “safety” (from what some found to be the exhausting self-presentation and daunting permanent and uncontrollable nature of social media before it) – aren’t part of SnapKidz. Which makes it much safer.

App safer, but what about kids?

The thing is, while this may make Snapchat much safer, it doesn’t make kids much safer. Kids can just move on to other apps that provide both photo effects and sharing – on Apple or Android devices (search for “photo editing,” “photo effects” or “drawing” in Google Play). Or they can just use SnapKidz to play with photos, save them, and – and then share them with friends with a myriad other photo-sharing tools, such as via texting, emailing, Instagram, Twitter, etc. And if not tipped off in advance (that they’ll be redirected if s/he says s/he’s under 13), it won’t take a determined kid long to figure out that he or she can just delete SnapKidz and start over – “delete the app, re-install it and sign up for a new account with a false birth year,” as my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid writes at Forbes.com.

Kids vote with their feet

This well-intended product development is fine – maybe it’ll catch on with kids and they won’t lie about their age to get Snapchat so they can play with their friends+spontaneity+photography rather than just photography. But it shouldn’t give anybody a false sense of security. Products and laws designed to keep kids safe never quite seem to get the fluidity of both kids and social media. If they find a product too safe (i.e. restrictive), they can simply move on. They vote with their feet (and their workarounds). Which is why it’s silly to depend on safe products and laws rather than on the power of informed, loving parent-child communication about kids’ social experiences wherever they play out – on devices and in digital spaces just as much as in all the other parts of life.

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.org.