A Disneyland explosion was caused by dry ice in a water bottle but did not injure anyone. Here, cast members of the show 'Mickey and the Magical Map' perform at the park. (Paul Hiffmeyer/Disneyland Resort/AP)

Disneyland arrest: Explosion at a family vacation spot is hard to hear about

By Molly Driscoll, Staff Writer / 05.29.13

The parks are probably the most legendary family vacation spot in the world (remember those “I’m going to Disney World” commercials?).

And that makes headlines this morning with the phrase “Disneyland explosion” just a little more sad to see.

The good news is that no one was hurt in the incident, which prompted Disney staffers to evacuate part of the park. According to authorities, dry ice was left inside a plastic bottle, which was then put in a trash can in the Toontown area of the park. Toontown is an area containing the “houses” of popular cartoon characters like Mickey and Minnie Mouse as well as some rides. Authorities have since arrested a park employee who worked as a vendor and Disneyland stated they are working with investigators.

The small explosion caused by the water bottle resulted in the area being evacuated for about two hours, according to the Anaheim Police Department. Sgt. Bob Dunn told the Los Angeles Times that the plastic bottle seemed similar to other explosives that had been put in other areas of Anaheim.

“Unfortunately," Dunn told The Times, "it's an all-too-common occurrence.” 

Of course, the incident could have been an accident, he said in a separate interview with NBC Los Angeles.

“At this point, we don't know it was on purpose or by accident or accidentally thrown away," Dunn said. "We are looking at all aspects.”

Dry ice bombs are usually composed of water and some pieces of dry ice. The pressure created by the combination leads the container to explode and could obviously cause injuries by doing so. Others who have placed the devices in public areas, such as a Colorado teen in 2011, have been arrested for use of an explosive device.

Whether it was malicious or a mistake, an explosion, even one that thankfully didn’t injure anyone, at Disneyland is still plenty sad to anyone, especially someone like me who loves the Disney parks. 

I’ve only been to Disneyland once but have been to its Florida equivalent, Disney World, a lot more, going first as a toddler and then many other times as I was growing up. My family are Disney experts by now with favorite rides that we return to time and time again. And no matter how old I get, I still feel my breath catch when I see the “Fantasmic” park show where Mickey battles a massive dragon and smile when I see a character waving at me.

And if I’m sad to hear about an explosion at a Disney park, a place that is sacrosanct to me, I can only imagine how parents who have traveled there with their children or were planning future trips feel about it. When you’re a parent taking your kids to see the characters they’ve watched over and over on the TV screen, you want to be leaving the depressing real-world headlines behind you. If I’m standing in the line at Splash Mountain, I want to just be anticipating the steep drop on the flume ride, not wondering what’s in the trash can a few feet away from me.

The good news is that the Disney park responded quickly – the Disneyland Twitter account stated that staffers evacuated the area “in an abundance of caution,” which you would certainly prefer they do. The quick response showed that the park is ready if any emergency occurs and has steps in place for keeping park-goers safe.

That makes it a little easier to simply enjoy the Haunted Mansion ride.

'Bad Teacher' stars Cameron Diaz (r.) and Jason Segel (l.). (Gemma LaMana/Columbia Pictures - Sony/AP)

'Bad Teacher' CBS TV series won't do educators any favors

By Lisa Suhay, Correspondent / 05.29.13

CBS has decided to give educators a vote of no confidence by bringing "Bad Teacher" to TV as a series adaptation of the film that starred Cameron Diaz. The premise, which plays to every possible negative stereotype of educators and women, may make the grade with network executives, but it will set up middle- and high-school teachers for failure in the eyes of students who watch the show.

I spent a year as a teacher a while back, and I can say I was blessed to have left the job before "Bad Teacher" was released in 2011. Teaching middle- and high-school kids is like being an antelope trying to teach ravenous lion cubs – it’s a whole lot easier when someone outside the classroom isn’t roasting antelope and venting the exhaust into the lion’s den.

That last thought is the rough equivalent to what I believe middle- and high-school educators will have to cope with once "Bad Teacher" is on the small screens in homes and on laptops and smart phones in the hands of students.

CBS announced May 15 it had ordered the comedy, based on the film which starred Diaz. She played Elizabeth Halsey, an ignorant, sexed-up, scheming middle-school teacher who gets dumped by her wealthy boyfriend and rebounds by sinking her claws into a handsome substitute teacher (Justin Timberlake).

In the CBS version (no air date set yet), Ari Graynor will star as "an always inappropriate, fearless and unapologetic former trophy wife who masquerades as a teacher in order to find a new man after her wealthy husband leaves her penniless," according to Yahoo News.

How did CBS get from "I love Lucy" to "let’s hate teacher"? Of course, the world is changing and so are tastes in comedy and other programming, but CBS has a legacy that it’s putting down for the count with decisions like "Bad Teacher." Maybe they just need to remember who they are?

Dear CBS: You taught us so many good lessons. You gave us:

·         Captain Kangaroo (1955–1984)

·         The Honeymooners (1955–56, 1971)

·         The Carol Burnett Show (1967–1978)

·         Gunsmoke (1955–1975)

·   The Cosby Show (1996–2000)

·         My Three Sons (1965–72)

·         The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77)

·          M*A*S*H (1972–83)

·         The Nanny (1993–99)

·         Blue's Clues (2002–2006)

Now the "Twilight Zone" you intend to put us in is a place where bad is good and the bad guys always win.

"Bad Teacher" is on the low end of the comedic evolutionary timeline. The lessons learned are that being a narcissistic, sadistic, incompetent teacher is cool; bullying is funny and being all those negative stereotypes will pay off with true love from a good man who can look past all your character flaws because he’s too focused on lust and your pretty face.

In the movie, Diaz’s character makes bullying “funny” as she smashes the “chubby” kid in the face with a dodge ball because he failed to answer her question. In another scene, a male teacher is seduced and blackmailed with nude photos of himself taken as he lay face down on a school copier.

I’m taking a moment to inventory my notes and see what, if anything, I missed. Oh, wait, and the film also teaches us that competent teachers are socially inept, overweight, clueless, and timid.

“America’s teachers earn our respect every day, doing some of this country’s toughest and most important work,” according to the US Department of Education’s website. I agree, which is why I don’t think we need a major network making that respect hard to come by, thus derailing efforts to get that important work done with our kids.

While middle schoolers may have missed "Bad Teacher" when it was in theaters because of its R rating and parental intervention, as a television show on a network it will be unavoidable. I can already see all the unending cheap shots at teachers in the teasers that will run during all the other shows we do approve of teens watching.

It’s really not a stretch at all to the conclusion that kids will lose the respect they have for teachers and at that point our children are going to get left behind because they will be too busy mocking teachers to learn anything from them.

CBS executives should stop believing that making their bottom line means choosing comedies that are bottom dwellers.

They should take a commercial break and watch the hilarious new Audi commercial, a refreshingly witty Old Spock Battles New Spock romp. See it here.

Audi’s spot stars Leonard Nimoy (the original Mr. Spock of Star Trek TV fame) and Zachary Quinto (new Mr. Spock of the next next next generation films). The two Spocks play chess via iPad and smack-talk each other, with Leonard Nimoy singing the "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" and later taking Quinto out with a Vulcan neck pinch in order to win a bet.

As a mom, I don’t recommend it for my nine-year old because there’s a bleeped-out swear word and it’s not nice to Vulcan neck-pinch people, plus betting is wrong. However, my 14-, 18-, and 19-year-olds thought it was really funny, know not to use the word they lip read from Nimoy, and have been feigning the neck-pinch-win as a spoof for a week.  

Maybe CBS needs a visit from Mary Tyler Moore, who once said, “The kinds of shows that seem to work now, the comedy shows, are those which require very little attention. They're superficial and I like articulate comedy.” 

Actually, perhaps the CBS executives are just unable to say “no” to this kind of show for fear of losing viewers. In that case, again, I would go to Ms. Moore’s character, Mary Richards, and a dialogue exchange that occurred on her show:

Mary Richards: "Well, it's hard for me to say no."

Ted Baxter: "Say, Mary..."

Mary Richards: "NO!"

See how easy that was? The best thing about it is that it’s still funny and no teachers or kids were harmed in the making of those lines.

10-year-old in dog cage on turnpike: “bad mom” or pop lynching?

By Clara Germani, Staff writer / 05.29.13

A couple put their 10-year-old in a dog cage in the back of a pickup truck and drove home on the Pennsylvania Turnpike from Grandma’s house over the Memorial Day weekend. Photos of the crime captured by alarmed drivers went viral early this week and ... we have the latest case of mom bashing.

“Bad moms” are a staple of the pop-lynching-by-social-media phenomenon – and it’s sometimes heartbreaking to see the victims that are created on all sides of a “crime” publicized without context or detail. The Pennsylvania couple is being ripped across the web as “horrible” parents, and will probably find themselves pictured alongside Huffington Post’s “Questionable Parenting” mug shots of parents who did things like glue a toddler’s hands to a wall, fit kids with shock collars, and injected babies with heroin.

It's easy to ask: What the heck were they thinking? Were they thinking? Watching 29-year-old Abbey Carlson, the mom, drift in and out of tearfulness during a TV interview while nervously holding a cigarette as she and her boyfriend dug themselves deeper into socially incorrect ground trying to explain themselves is painful if you believe  – as I do, on first glance – that they made a bad judgment, meant no harm, and are not criminals. And there’s absolutely no evidence the kid was locked in the cage unwillingly. The family has said, plausibly, she wanted to leave the cab of the truck and ride with the family dog because she felt bad that it was whimpering. (I'm surprised that animal lovers haven't weighed in, too, with the abuse it is to keep a dog in a cage in the open bed of a truck.)

Yes, Ms. Carlson and her boyfriend, Thomas Fishinger, admit that they let the child ride in the back of a moving pickup. Yes, it’s against the law in Pennsylvania for a child under 18 to ride in the open bed of a truck. But they were charged with child endangerment, not the traffic offense, according to a state police spokesman. (Millvale, Pa. police, who made the arrest, did not return phone calls, but the state police explained the charges.) The sensationalizing factor in the whole incident is not illegal, in itself: A child in a dog cage. It looked outrageous in photos online – and in combination with the traffic offense, was obviously part of the cause for endangerment concerns. (I admit, it makes me wonder if I should purge our photo albums that include evidence of our daughter happily locking herself in our dog’s kennel through the years – and that's just one bad judgment among probably many others our photo albums reveal.)

Context does help mitigate – though not absolve –  a bad decision. 

Citations for driving with passengers of any age in the open bed of a truck are not exactly unusual in Pennsylvania: 152 citations were issued across the state since May 2010, an average of slightly more than one a week, says State Trooper Adam Reed, who adds that the state law allows adults to ride in the back of pickups going under 35 M.P.H. and kids to ride there anytime while on farms. Kids in dog cages aren’t part of the data stream, but – again – that’s not illegal.

It’s especially interesting if you’re old enough to remember just a generation back when the same kind of “criminal” behavior was considered typical, unremarkable parenting. I remember my wind-whipped hair making my cheeks sore as I rode in the back of my Dad’s pickup as a kid of 8, 9, 10 in the 1960s – there was the usual warning to stay seated, but no second thoughts about kids riding back there. 

And other parenting choices, too, would be more than frowned on today: standing up in the front seat of the car beside my Mom or Dad when we went places;  piling half a dozen kids in the back seat for group outings. We did have seat belts, we just didn’t use them. Also, on long trips we’d be sealed in the air-conditioned car with Mom smoking Kent cigarettes and Dad smoking stinky Italian stogies – just like most of our friends. And, no one ever pointed a finger when Mom left us in the car when she’d run in for groceries. 

The Pennsylvania couple admit they made a bad parenting choice, and there will be legal judgment. But the sharp public judgment will echo punishingly – without context or explanation – in cyberspace forever. Barring new discoveries that the family has done something else illegal, why not cut them some slack for a mistake they will always rue? The pop lynching by viral video may do more damage than the parents did.

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Are mermaids real? As real as you want to make one: Here is a mermaid coloring page from Lisa Suhay's book. Enlarge this image, save it to your computer, and print. Kids can color them, add sequins, glitter, and even feathers. Then cut it out and glue to a popsicle stick to make a mermaid puppet for summer fun. (Sam Hundley)

Mermaids: Are they real? NOAA says 'no,' but Mom and Animal Planet say ...

By Lisa Suhay, Correspondent / 05.28.13

Ever since the first little mermaid sat on a rock to sing a scale, children have asked parents, “are mermaids real?”

Depending on our personal commitment to the maintenance of childhood innocence and the magic of TV, especially Animal Planet’s Mermaids docu-tales (documentary fairytales) we can make childhood stretch just a bit longer. However, be careful what you wish for, lest you end up with adults who find themselves, like Peter Pan, unable to grow up and face the music of real science on sirens.

Given the ocean of Titanic news events we must all slog through daily, it’s little wonder I – who literally wrote the book on Mermaids – meet so many adults as well as children who ask me, “Are mermaids really real?” Over the past 10 years of living in Norfolk, Virg. where I have written two children’s books about merfolk and created a read and walk story trail from one larger-than-life-size mermaid sculpture to the next.

While I love science, I also have a household of men, four sons and a husband, who are all serious, logical, literal business 24-7. In response to that, I try to generate a little mommy magic and occasionally take a poke at science just to lighten things up for my sons and my sanity. Given the fact that science tends to flip-flop on everything from the value of fish oil in our diets to the shroud of Turin, I think it’s OK to have a little fun at its expense every now and then with a mermaid tale or two.

Last night, Animal Planet  followed-up its science fictional, but photorealistic, “Mermaids: the body found,” with “Mermaids: The New Evidence.” The new mer-mentary asks us to keep on believing that mermaids are among us, if only through the some very fishy video.

Last year when the first “documentary” came out in May, I was filling in as an editor at a local daily newspaper and had to call someone in a city office here for comment on a story about the how the broadcast was impacting tourism.

Norfolk is known as The Mermaid City because our city symbol is the mermaid and more than 300, 8-foot-long, 4-foot high, mermaid sculptures dot the landscape. More mermaid sculptures, mostly by local Artist Georgia Mason, are added to our streets by private collectors and businesses every year.

To my eternal shock, the city official asked to “go off the record” asking me, “Are mermaids really real? I swear never to tell another living soul, but I need to know because I’ve always believed and I know your books explain everything about them. I know you lived on a sailboat. You must know the truth.”

I suppose now is as good a time as any to admit to being the one behind Merwiki which I began with my youngest son immediately after the first Animal Planet mockumentary and the NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) response debunking our girls came to light. The site regularly generates e-mail questions from around the globe on the legitimacy, history, and physicality of mermaids. I try to answer as many as I can each week.

Any time I am asked if mermaids are real, I tell the same story; and when that fails, I quote Shel Silverstein.

The first thing I tell people is that when we moved from New Jersey to Norfolk 10 years ago our sons, then ages nine, eight, and three, would point to each and every mermaid sculpture they saw, competing to be the first to shout, “There goes a mermaid!” The first to shout it claimed that mermaid as his own personal property.

My husband told them, “They’re not real. They’re just statues.”

Son Ian, then eight, would have none of that kind of talk and beset his father with questions in an effort to prove that these so-called sculptures must have some actual connection, some secret entrée to the magical world of merfolk. Every car ride was peppered with questions about these fiberglass sculptures. See the Norfolk City website Mermaids on Parade to view some of our “mermaids."

Because each sculpture is mounted on a pipe, Ian insisted, “Why pipes? Pipes are useful things, carrying water. Maybe there’s a reason they chose pipes for the sculptures!”

One day, as we drove around downtown, a place where one can’t swing a dead catfish without hitting a mermaid sculpture, Ian had my husband at the end of his rope due to his relentless inquiries.  

To save us all from impending doom I turned to Ian, who was in the back seat, and delivered the impromptu speech that would change our lives and make me “the mermaid author” for all-time sake. 

“The pipes are there because they go down through the street, under the city and out to the river which leads to the sea. Mermaids are shape-shifters. They can turn into water and swim into the pipes, under the city and flow up into the pipes, up through the city and into the hollow sculptures which are their city apartments. When we stop the car you can get out and put your ear to one of the mermaids and if you hear the ocean you know a mermaid is at home inside.”

Ian looked at me and weighed this answer carefully before responding, “Excellent! How do they get out and turn into women?” Ummm…

When Hurricane Isabelle hit the next day, we had nine days with no electricity and a note pad to figure out the answer to that and all the mermaid questions the other boys asked during that time. The answers became the book “There Goes a mermaid! A NorFolktale," which benefits two children’s charities here in Norfolk.

Unfortunately, telling that simple and slightly ambiguous truth with no explanation of how I “knew” that about the sculptures often fails to satisfy. In those cases I simple recite "Magic," a favorite childhood poem from Shel Silverstein's "Where the Sidewalk Ends":

“Sandra’s seen a leprechaun,

Eddie touched a troll,
Laurie danced with witches once,
Charlie found some goblins gold.
Donald heard a mermaid sing,
Susy spied an elf,
But all the magic I have known
I've had to make myself.” 

Of course being a parent means making magic all by yourself. To do so requires imagination and isn’t the necessity for that daily magic the mother of invention?

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Teaching "colorblindess" to our children does not impart racial understanding, researchers say. Similar research, which studied black children ashamed of their skin color, were instrumental in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education. Here, Linda Brown Smith stands in front of Sumner School in Topeka, Kan., in 1964. (Associated Press)

Discussing Race: The pitfalls of racial 'colorblindness' and the importance of talk

By Noelle Swan, Guest Blogger / 05.24.13

“Now, I don’t see race. People tell me I’m white and I believe them,” late night satirist Stephen Colbert frequently tells his guests. He isn’t the only one claiming to be racially “colorblind.” Since the days of the civil rights movement, many parents and teachers have adopted this approach with the hope that by simply refusing to point out differences to their children, racism, stereotyping, and bigotry would just fall away.

Instead, “in this supposed racial vacuum created by parents, the kids have been left to come up with their own conclusions based on who knows what. Their own observations? Heresay? Who knows?” said Janie Ward, Simmons College Professor and Department Chair of Africana Studies and author of The Skin We’re In: Teaching Our Teens to be Emotionally Strong, Socially Smart, and Spiritually Connected.

According to recent research, many of those conclusions have not been good.

Ward shared the results of a recent University of Texas study on racial attitudes with a group of parents and teachers gathered for a lunch, lecture, and book signing as part of The Boston Children’s Museum’s Lunch and Learn Lecture Series this week.

UT researchers initially set out to assess the impact of multicultural characters in television programs on white children’s attitudes about race. They solicited hundreds of families to participate in the study and gave the children an initial racial attitude test. They asked the children questions like, “Are white people nice,” and “Are black people nice?” They followed up with additional questions and substituted the adjective “nice” with other adjectives, including “pretty,” “mean,” and “smart.” This was intended to be a base line measurement of children’s racial attitudes.

Then the researchers divided the families into three groups. They sent one group home with a video that included an episode of Sesame Street where the cast members visited a black family at home. They gave the second group the same video,  as well as a list of talking points for parents to use in discussing the video with their kids. The third group took home just the talking points.

However, the researchers soon realized that something was wrong.

Many parents balked at the idea of raising the discussion of race with their kids. Five parents refused to participate entirely. Several indicated that the idea of having such a discussion with their kids was scary. Others said they preferred to raise their children to be “colorblind.” So the researchers shifted the direction of the study to examine the effect of “colorblind” child rearing on children’s actual racial attitudes.

When the researchers returned to the results of the original study that they had already given the kids, they discovered that the children were forming their own ideas about race. When asked how many white people are mean, almost all of the kids responded “almost none.” When asked how many black people are mean, many answered “a lot.” When asked about their parents' attitudes toward black people, 14 percent of kids said that their parents did not like black people and 38 percent of kids said they did not know how their parents felt. While the parents have been trying to impart “colorblindness,” the kids have still developed white biases, Ward said.

Similar studies where researchers have asked black children to point out which of two dolls — one white and one black — is nicer, smarter, prettier have shown that black children also harbor white biases. The first of these studies proved instrumental during the landmark Brown v. Board of Education court case that resulted in the desegregation of public schools. Many things have changed since then. However, many black kids still identify the black doll as “bad” and “mean” and label the while doll as “nice” and “pretty.”

That lack of ethnic pride is particularly troubling, Ward said. “Ethnic pride is about a whole lot more than just feeling good,” she said. In her research, Ward has found that children’s sense of ethnic pride can affect both their grades and their mental health. Further, she found that teenagers with a strong sense of ethnic pride were able to navigate social inequities more effectively than kids that harbor feelings of shame about their ethnicity.

Parents can start to foster ethnic pride at a very young age. Ward offered the example of one mother who used the opportunity of brushing her child’s hair to plant the seeds of ethnic pride. “Your hair is so beautiful. Other kids have different kinds of hair, but your hair is just like Mummy’s hair and grandma’s hair,” she would tell her daughter. Ward asked the mother why she felt this was so important. “As a black woman in this society I know what my daughter is going to be up against. I’m giving my daughter the tools now that she will need to do battle when she gets older,” the mother responded.

Ward urged parents to talk to their children about race throughout their childhood. “I know that this kind of conversation can be a scary conversation, but the more you talk, the better you get at it. It’s not just about one conversation, it’s about talking about these kinds of things over time and being on the lookout for teachable moments,” she said.

Doodle 4 Google shows us that to support our troops we must support their kids

By Lisa Suhay, Guest Blogger / 05.23.13

Today’s Doodle 4 Google image by Wisconsin teenager Sabrina Brady illustrates the powerful emotion of a military parent-child reunion. Looking at it, I suddenly realized the images I usually associate with soldiers coming home from a tour of duty are images of adults in the throes of emotion — Norman Rockwell’s famous Saturday Evening Post cover of a GI returning home, the sailor dipping a nurse and stealing a kiss on VJ Day. 

Sabrina's image shows it’s actually more powerful to see images of children in a moment of commingled relief and joy. It reminds us that supporting our troops also means supporting their kids.

The theme for this year’s Doodle 4 Google competition, which invites K-12 students to submit an illustration incorporating the search giant's logo, was “My Best Day Ever...” Sabrina won with her piece, “Coming Home,” an illustration of her running toward her father upon his return from an 18-month deployment in Iraq.

The image shows the stages of military childhood: from steadfast support, through expectation, and into embrace.

While my family members are not in the military, nearly all our friends and neighbors here in Norfolk, Va., are Navy families. Deployments are hard on anyone who has a loved one in harm’s way. However, I believe the greatest price paid for our freedom comes from the emotional piggy banks of the children of military families.

Nearby to Naval Station Norfolk — a Navy base supporting US naval forces in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans — this is sure to be the most popular Google Doodle of the year.

The image resonates even more strongly as President Barack Obama draws overseas troop levels down and military personnel return from deployments.

One such moving reunion moment came a week ago when Alayna Adams, 9, threw out the first pitch at a Tampa Bay Rays baseball game in honor of her father, a lieutenant colonel in the Army stationed in Afghanistan. However, when Alayna threw the pitch, the catcher took off his mask and revealed himself to be her father.

I watched that moment on television at the gym while I ran on the treadmill and had to stop to cry my eyes out along with four others in the room. Women and grown men who were there pumping iron alongside me paused, too. The emotion of the images on the big flatscreen flattened us all.

Seeing today’s Google Doodle brought it right back, and here I sit, at my computer, with tears running down my face in unison with the downpour outside my window.

In another TV reunion moment, Army Spc. Larry Shaffer arrived home last week from his stint in Afghanistan to his wife Misty who had lost over 100 lbs in his absence.

But for me, the more gut-wrenching moment came when Mr. Shaffer tried to hold his daughter Nevaeh (Heaven spelled backward) at the Wilmington, N.C., airport, but had to hold back as the little one shrieked and cried in panic at the sight of this “stranger” trying to hug her. She clung to her grandmother, hysterical, as her father helplessly looked on, powerless to reconnect for the moment.

Parents in the military make the ultimate sacrifice in the name of our nation’s security and freedom. There are men and women, fathers and mothers, in every branch of service who would rather face death a thousand-fold rather than their own child who has been separated from them for so long they recoil from their parent’s “strange” embrace. Maybe it was just the excitement that had Nevaeh unglued, but here in Norfolk it’s not uncommon to see children becoming tense and either overly emotional or shut-down as they wait in anticipation for a military mom or dad to come home after being away for many months.

For her ability to capture that in a “doodle” and bring it all home for use, I believe Sabrina deserves all the accolades and prizes heaped on her today. Besides the home-page display, Google announced in a press release that Sabrina has won “a $30,000 college scholarship, a Chromebook computer and a $50,000 technology grant for her school.” She beat out a field of 130,000 submissions that collectively drew millions of online votes. Google reports that she’ll attend the Minneapolis College of Art and Design this fall.

I want to thank Sabrina for letting us into her moment. We should all take a moment to do something kind for the child of a military family to show them that we support all our troops, great and small.

Bed Bugs, seen here in all their pesty glory. 2011, file. (PR Newswire)

Bed bugs on the eve of summer vacation: A mom’s guide [+video]

By Lisa Suhay, Guest Blogger / 05.22.13

As the kids watched their beds, blankets, and dressers make their way to the curb, our son Avery, 14, said, “Man, I never realized grandmothers meant it literally when they say ‘Goodnight. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.’ ”

Bed bugs are real, easily transferred to our homes, and expensive to cope with. However, everything we need to know comes from my granny, her sayings, and some moms who went buggy over these critters.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, bed bugs — blood-sucking insects that feed on humans while they sleep — are literally everywhere. “Everyone is at risk for getting bed bugs when visiting an infected area," the CDC reports. "However, anyone who travels frequently and shares living and sleeping quarters where other people have previously slept has a higher risk of being bitten and or spreading a bed bug infestation.”

Contrary to urban legend, bed bugs are not microscopic; those are mites. Bed bugs are reddish-brown, wingless, about the size of an apple seed, and can live several months without a blood meal.

I can tell you that while bites are painless, welts left behind are itchy, but they don’t transmit diseases. Some people are mildly allergic to them. The welts from bed bugs sometimes get written off as mosquito bites.

That was all the bad stuff. Now let’s talk about getting them to bug-off. I was perfectly serious about taking our cues from nursery rhymes and old wives' expressions because those old girls have forgotten more than we even know.

The bed bug, Cimex lectularius, was my childhood nickname given to me by my maternal grandmother, Anne. She called me “My little vance (vants)” which is Yiddish for bed bug. This makes little sense because she was a blonde, blue-eyed, Roman Catholic to the bone. According to her, it was also a Polish expression of endearment. I looked it up and in Polish the word for bed bug is pluskwa.

While she might have been a little off-base on nicknames, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that Grandma Anneisms had some practical sense when it came to bed bug riddance.

“Some Like it Hot,” was one of my Grandma Anne’s favorite films and it works as an extermination plan for bed bugs because bed bugs hate warmth, according to Scientific American.

However professional heat treatments are costly, between $2,000 and $4,000 per single-family home, according to Scientific American, which also tells us that today’s bed bug has become “pesticide resistant,” while heat remains effective.

The best and thriftiest solution comes from friend Theresa who had them through two moves until she learned to put things in the dryer for 25 minutes and then put the still hot items into a plastic bag in a warm place for a few hours. She actually had bags in her car in the sun for the day and that did the job better than chemical treatments that had repeatedly failed to get the job done.

That means if it can go in the dryer on high for 25 minutes you’re probably going to be able to keep it. If the bed doesn’t fit in there it’s time to call the trash guys for a bulk pickup or rent a dumpster.

“Snug as a bug in a rug.” Well that says it all for how we got bed bugs at our house after accepting a beautiful, but infested rug from a neighbor. Beware the magic carpet that will take you on a hellish ride through bed bug land.

We put it in the room shared by Avery and Ian, 18,  over the tatty old tan wall-to-wall carpeting to hide the stains and make the room bearably warm in winter.

At first we thought the plush oriental carpet was itchy because of its age and not being aired. Later we thought it might have mites so we sprinkled it with powdered insecticide. This had the effect of sending the bugs deeper into the carpet where they lay dormant through the cold winter as our furnace repeatedly broke down – thus keeping the house quite cold.

The moment the heat bloomed here in Virginia the boys began getting bites at night. We thought it was fleas and dipped, sprayed, and generally made miserable our two cats and the dog. We washed sheets and vacuumed. Nothing worked until Avery at last spotted a little flat, oval, brown bug in the seam of his mattress. “Mom! Do we have bug spray?” he called from his room.

Don’t spray the mattress inside the house. 

I don’t care what any “expert” tells you, unless you are ready to cope with something that looks like Hitchcock meets SciFi Channel as critters swarm out of the seams, don’t do it.

If you find one and you’re sure it’s a bed bug it’s time to bag it and tag it — the mattress and everything on it except pets and the kids.

I know this because I got the spray and used it, to my eternal regret.

How to bed bugs get around?
“This room may be bugged.” Granted, granny may not have said that one unless she was a spy, but it’s still a good one to pay attention to because hotels, conference rooms, workplaces, and even classrooms can be Grand Central Station for bug transport to our homes.

“Never leave your handbag, backpack or bags on a carpeted floor in a room that you aren’t completely certain is bug free,” says my friend Theresa, whose last name I’ll withhold because she doesn’t want to be judged for having had bed bugs in her house. “They get into everything, right through the seams of your handbag, shoes, or the kids’ backpacks.”

Theresa now keeps a clear Rubbermaid container by the door for depositing bags and backpacks.

“I do the same for clothing instead of wooden dressers now because I can see them immediately and nip it right in the bud,” she explains.

Myth: Bedbugs prefer unsanitary, urban conditions

"Bedbugs are terribly nondiscriminatory," Coby Schal, an entomologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh told Scientific American. The publication also concluded, “Bedbugs can be found anywhere from ritzy high-rises to homeless shelters. The prevalence of the bugs in low-income housing is therefore not a result of the insect's preference, but of dense populations and the lack of money to pay for proper elimination strategies.

Bed bugs only live in beds.  

We learned bed bugs not only travel in anything but they live anywhere they can slip into: wall sockets, vents, dressers, seams of cloth laundry baskets, every crack in the floor, and creases of any kind of bag, belt, or garment.

My friend Laura, in New Jersey, told me about how her daughter, who attends college in Richmond, Va., had to move apartments six times before she was able to sleep through the night without being bitten.

“She finally found out the bugs were moving with her each time because they were inside a wooden, acoustic guitar her roommate had gotten at a yard sale,” Laura explained.

Also, get a spray specifically formulated for bed bugs and use it liberally on vents, in every crack and cranny and take off electrical outlet covers for spraying as well.

Being thrifty, not so nifty

Curb your enthusiasm for thrifting, yard sales, flea markets (perhaps more aptly named bed bug bargains), trash day treasures and the like to avoid making someone else’s problems your own. I know, I love them too and times are tough but after this I would rather do without than do this all over again.

Global warming may be our ultimate weapon in the bug battle because Spring is here and I intend to save a pile of cash by not running air conditioning this summer. I will crank the stereo instead and listen to my new favorite tune, “Burn Baby Burn!” It’s gonna be a disco bed bug inferno here in the south.

For more tips, check out this Yahoo! Shine article.

Christine Gross-Loh's book about how parents raise their children around the world is a helpful reminder that there's no one way to correctly care for your child. (Screenshot of book cover)

Diaper-free babies and co-sleeping: Global parents use techniques we shun

By Judy Bolton-Fasman, Guest blogger / 05.22.13

I knew it!

Even Dr. Ferber, the sleep guru of “just let the baby cry it out” fame (or notoriety, depending in your point of view), concedes that there are many viable ways for a baby to sleep. This is just one of the many wonderful nuggets of information that Cambridge writer Christine Gross-Loh brings to the table in her new book Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us.

It’s tempting to call Gross-Loh’s book a reference guide, but that would be giving short shrift to this wise and entertaining compendium on child-rearing. Her goal is simple: as borders blur and the world gets smaller, effective parenting can be more easily shared around the world. Gross-Loh delves into many traditions for advice on everything from co-sleeping, eating habits and guerilla marketing to our kids.

But back to Dr. Ferber for a moment. Ken and I had our own borders when it came to parenting Anna as a baby. Aside from the fact that we had no idea what we were doing, in a word the thing we craved most was sleep. But we had very different ideas of how exactly we would get Anna to sleep and tackle our own sleep deprivation. I was brought up by a Latina mother, and by extension much of my mother’s family. Though we didn’t call it that, co-sleeping was not out of the norm. If I had a bad dream I crawled into bed with my mother. My American father was not so thrilled about my visits and usually ended up switching beds with me.

And so these cultural differences continued in my marriage. Gross-Loh happens to be a proponent of co-sleeping. She and her husband and their four children have ended up in various groupings throughout the night. She also investigated co-sleeping in countries like Japan and Sweden where the family bed is a way of life. When Anna was born we lived in Baltimore where co-sleeping was not exactly in vogue. I swear I gave “Ferberizing” a decent try, but I just couldn’t do it. My very patient husband had to finally accept that Anna would be hanging out with us occasionally.

Throughout the book Gross-Loh draws upon her experiences from living abroad in Japan as well as her Korean heritage and her husband’s Jewish upbringing. I thought her section on children and eating was of particular interest. Like many parents, Gross-Loh is concerned with the growing rates of childhood obesity in the United States. She investigates American eating habits in search of a solution to curb our children’s growing waistlines. She finds despite a diet rich in fats and meats, French children are generally healthy and slim. One of the reasons is that snacking is highly discouraged in France. The French go so far as to air public service announcements warning against eating in between meals. Additionally, French kids eat their meals with their families. These meals are generally long and leisurely, and to compensate for a high fat diet, the French eat smaller portions. “In France,” writes Gross-Loh, “teaching kids to eat is as important as teaching them to read.”

Gross-Loh believes that the idea that children are picky eaters is, in part, an artificial construct; this rings true to me. She correctly notes that rejecting vegetables for potato chips is “a marketing strategy that doesn’t have to bind us.” Teaching children to eat well can be habit forming. To prove her point she takes her readers to France, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and Sweden where the culture dictates a diet of fresh whole foods, cooking from scratch with seasonal ingredients and taking the time to enjoy eating together. As for the babies—the parents in most of these countries give their little ones the same food as the rest of the family.

I know that cooking from scratch strikes terror in many a parent’s heart. I’m no chef myself, but honestly it’s a lot easier than it seems. I’ve just discovered quinoa, a healthy grain that’s easy to make. Most supermarkets have pre-cut veggies that you can throw in a wok. And for meat eaters like my family, turkey burgers are easy to make and roasting a chicken is simple. As for snacking, I work at home so you can imagine the temptation. The easiest solution is not to buy the chips or the Chex mix in the first place. I’m holding my own for the moment. But I still I keep an emergency stash of chocolate.

As big as food is in a family’s life, Gross-Loh also devotes an entire section of her book to conspicuous consumption or in her descriptive phrase, “The Tyranny of Choice.” She writes:

"Few families in the world are as vulnerable to the desire to buy as American families. Though commercialism is a modern, global phenomenon, it affects American children disproportionately because corporations have benefited from deregulation against marketing directly to children, which began in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan."

At last, an explanation for the genesis of what Gross-Loh calls “the pester-power”—in and of itself a well-honed marketing strategy and the source of much family stress.

As I said in the beginning of this column, there are so many nuggets to mine in this wonderful book. Add it to your collection of parenting books. I promise you that reading Parenting Without Borders will be like spending time with a very understanding and resourceful friend.

New data released by the Pew Research Center throws the curtains open on teenage social media habits: What do they share? Who do they friend? How often do they login? (Screenshot Pew Research Center)

Facebook waning, social media may have plateaued among teens, Pew study says

By Anne Collier, Guest Blogger / 05.21.13

Contrary to how they’re typically represented in the news media, “few teens embrace a fully public approach to social media,” Pew Internet reports in a major new study, “Teens, Social Media and Privacy.” Yes, they share more about themselves than we did as teens, but “they take an array of steps to restrict and prune their profiles.”

Pew turned up a lot of intelligence on teens’ part, where safety, privacy and reputation management are concerned, bearing out findings in Canada last fall. Here are some key findings of this important research, Pew’s first in-depth look at teens’ online privacy since 2007:

• “The frequency of teen social media usage may have reached a plateau” – the number of teens social media users who check their pages “‘several times a day’ hasn’t changed in any significant way since 2011,” Pew says.
• Teens’ Twitter use is up significantly, from 16% of US 12-to-17-year-olds in 2011 to nearly a quarter (24%) now, and African American teens use Twitter significantly more than white teens – 39% vs. 23%, respectively.
• “The typical (median) teen Facebook user has 300 friends, while the typical teen Twitter user has 79 followers” (and Pew found that teens “don’t always think of Twitter as a social networking site,” though the authors didn’t say what they do think Twitter is).
• Online mirrors offline: “Teens’ Facebook friendship networks largely mirror their offline networks” (which should further reduce the speculative “stranger danger” fears of the previous decade and its national task forces [see this]). “Unwanted contact from strangers is relatively uncommon, but 17% of online teens report some kind of contact that made them feel scared or uncomfortable,” Pew said, adding in a footnote, thought that its question did not reference sexual solicitations, so respondents could’ve been referring to a wide array of concerning behaviors or interactions.
• A whopping 70% of teen Facebook users say they’re friends with their parents on FB, and 91% of teen Facebook users are friends with members of their extended family.
• Their use of Facebook is “waning.”
• We knew this, but it’s important confirmation: “60% of teen Facebook users keep their profiles private [note that Pew's not just saying that 60% use privacy settings], and most report high levels of confidence in their ability to manage their settings.” On Twitter, thought, nearly two-thirds (64%) of teens tweet publicly, which is typical for adult Twitter users too.
• “Teens take other steps to shape their reputation, manage their networks, and mask information 
they don’t want others to know: 74% of teen social media users have deleted people from their 
network or friends list”; 58% “share inside jokes or cloak their messages in some way” (see this about “social steganography” from researcher danah boyd); 26% post false information like a fake name, age, or location to help protect their privacy (see this about “fictionalizing profiles” as a safety measure).
• Teens with larger friend networks on Facebook also use more social apps and services other than Facebook. They also share more information and media while at the same time show more care with “profile pruning” and reputation management.
• Teens’ concern about advertisers’ access to their information is low: “just 9% say they are ‘very’ concerned”; 40% are somewhat *or* very concerned, while 81% of parents are somewhat or very concerned about this for their children. Pew adds that “teens who are concerned about third-party access to their personal information are also more likely to engage in online reputation management.”

So let’s zoom in on the reasons teens interviewed in focus groups gave Pew for why they’re using Facebook less and consider some takeaways:

1. “The increase in adult presence”: The takeaway we might consider is that trying to monitor teens’ activities by setting up an account in every online service and app they use in a kind of whack-a-mole approach to tech parenting won’t ultimately keep parents abreast of their kids’ digital activities for the simple reason that the more we monitor, the more likely they are to move on. It’ll get harder and harder, too, because they aren’t moving on to a single new service (the way in the last decade Facebook replace MySpace as the No. 1 social network site). Today, digital socializing is expanding and diversifying because it’s now on the mobile platform at least as much as the Web. It looks like digital monitoring and “parental controls” are being replaced by good old-fashioned communication between parent and child about how they use digital devices and spaces (we ConnectSafely folk offer discussion points in two of those spaces with our new parents’ guides to Snapchat and Instagram).
2. “People sharing excessively”: Note how smart Pew’s respondents are to find that annoying! What this indicates is that protective social norms are developing – teens are viewing it less and less socially acceptable to overshare. Adults might find it comforting to see this; it’s online safety in action at the grassroots level. And I hope parents will increasingly understand and acknowledge the protective power of social norms among young people every bit as much as among adults.
3. “Stressful ‘drama’”: This is one reason why, in other reports, young people are saying they’re moving to Snapchat and other perishable media services: drama avoidance (see this). If the photos and videos vanish in 10 seconds or less, there’s no chance posturing (or “posing”), no self-presentation, “claiming,” or grandstanding. Drama can’t build. Sharing becomes just fun, spontaneous and, well, gone in a few seconds. What a relief, huh? Drama can’t build (or at least drama queens and kings have to work a lot harder), people can let down their guard a little (a little), and reputation management becomes a little less of an issue.

“One of the most striking themes that surfaced through the Berkman focus groups this spring,” the authors write (referring to their co-authors at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society), “was the sense of a social burden teens associated with Facebook. While Facebook is still deeply integrated in teens’ everyday lives, it is sometimes seen as a utility and an obligation rather than an exciting new platform that teens can claim as their own.” Thus their growing interest in the mobile platform. Facebook and its Instagram app are mobile, too, but so are hundreds of thousands of other apps offering at least thousands of different uses. Teens’ digital social activities, from the friendship-driven to the interest-driven kinds*, are diversifying and segmenting. That makes for fascinating conversations with our children and their peers. Seriously, there is so much to learn about them now in kinder, more respectful, less intrusive ways than through impersonal monitoring software and “parental controls.”

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.

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