Pendragons Princess

This appeared in Details:

http://www.details.com/sex-relationships/marriage-and-kids/200610/did-your-girlfriend

-trick-you-into-fatherhood

That Was No “Accident”

You two were careful, but somehow she got pregnant. It happens. Or not… Getting tricked into fatherhood by a woman hell-bent on getting pregnant is much more common than you think.

By Ian Daly,
Photograph by Jenny Van Sommers

Imagine for a moment this perfectly plausible scenario: You’ve had a steady girlfriend for a year or so and everything’s going great. You still hold hands at the movies. Friends tell you you’re good together. You’re both around 30 years old and making plenty of money, maybe living together, but you’re nowhere near considering fatherhood. And though you occasionally get the feeling that her biological clock is set far ahead of yours, she tells you she’s “safe,” so you don’t worry. Why would you? It’s not as if you’d just picked her up on Dollar Margarita Night at Senor Frog’s. But one morning she tells you something has gone wrong. Unlikely as it sounds, she’s pregnant-and she wants to keep it. What she doesn’t tell you, though, is this: She wasn’t being safe all along. She wanted to have that baby— and the way she saw it, this was the only way to make it happen.

Here’s how a scenario like that played out in real life. Jody (not her real name), a 32-year-old account manager for a major New York ad firm, decided to speed things along with her boyfriend two years ago by getting pregnant without telling him. “It’s not about trapping the guy,” Jody says. “That’s kind of old-fashioned. Yeah, you want him to be into it, but there are other ways to get a guy to commit. If you’re smart and in a good relationship, it’s just about the fact that you want a kid.” Even in her circle of young, urban, and gainfully employed friends, Jody says, this particular brand of subterfuge isn’t exactly condemned the way one might expect. In fact, it’s sort of, well, normal. “I see and hear people talk about it, and I understand. I get it,” she says, “and I don’t even think it’s that manipulative. It’s more like, ‘Hey, the timing is right for me. I got pregnant—oops! Well, it’s here, let’s have it.’ I think that’s more the way it is now than it was back in the day when you had to marry someone before you got pregnant. Marriage doesn’t matter now.”

Railroading a guy into parenthood isn’t just some “baby daddy” soap-opera scenario. You’ll never hear the ladies’-room chatter that leads people like Jody to feel justified, but to get some idea of it, consider this: A woman’s fertility peaks when she’s between the ages of 20 and 24, according to Mayo Clinic statistics. By the time she’s 35 to 39, it’s already wilted by 25 to 50 percent. And from there the options aren’t always so attractive: The average cost of in vitro fertilization in the United States is $100,000 per baby—and insurance generally won’t pay a cent. Combine that with the shifting social mores about single motherhood and having kids outside of marriage, and you’ve got a pretty good explanation for why some women, particularly ones in stable relationships, don’t see this as trickery at all—it’s more like a nudge.

“A lot of us feel like it’s not even really fair that men should get to vote, considering they could be 72 and, with a little Viagra, have another baby,” says Vicki Iovine, author of The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy. “For us women, it’s really a limited window. We know that boys who grow up to become men don’t necessarily want to be men. They like to be boys. And so women say, ‘You know what? He’s gonna just have to snap out of it—and my pregnancy will be the thing to do it.’” The end, says Iovine, sometimes justifies the means. “Any guy with a heart and soul, and preferably with a job, once he sees the baby on the sonogram or hears the heartbeat, will melt,” she says.

Just how many women act on that presumption is hard to say. According to FDA figures, one in a thousand of them should get pregnant over the course of a year if they’re using the Pill exactly as prescribed. But it is estimated that in reality 50 times that many get pregnant. There’s no way of knowing how much of that disparity can be explained away by “intentional” oversight, but that’s a big gap to chalk up to carelessness. And though there was a time when flushing the Pill down the toilet was fodder for Jerry Springer, the rules have changed. “I’ve been hearing a lot about this lately, and it’s coming into the educated and wealthy classes, too,” says Pepper Schwartz, a relationships expert for Perfectmatch.com and professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle (she does not support the practice). “These women can afford to take care of the child.”

Many of them will probably have to. We don’t hear about the cases in which a guy suspects he’s been duped into fatherhood- but ultimately turns to mush in the soft glow of the sonogram monitor. But as cavalier as certain women are about the “nudge,” not all men react so favorably when the “good news” is delivered—especially if they find out they’ve been snowed. Jody’s boyfriend more or less freaked out. She terminated the pregnancy, then their relationship slowly dissolved. “It felt a little like the fun was taken out of everything,” she says. “He was shocked and scared.”

Last year, Matt Dubay, a 25-year-old computer programmer in Saginaw, Michigan, says he had the same reaction when his girlfriend, Lauren Wells, allegedly pulled something similar. Dubay claims she told him she was infertile and was using a contraceptive “as an extra layer of assurance and protection.” But when she got pregnant anyway and told Dubay she was keeping the baby, he said he wanted no part of it. Earlier this year, he argued in court that her alleged deception should exempt him from having to pay child support. His lawyer, Jeffrey Cojocar, reasoned that Michigan’s paternity law violated the Constitution’s equal-protection clause: If the situation were reversed and Dubay had gotten Wells pregnant after claiming he was sterile, he’d have no way of forcing her either to keep or to abort the child. The judge didn’t buy his argument, but it’s helped open a broadening national dialogue: Where do you draw the line between deadbeat dad and victim of deceit?

“This case has actually been more of a movement,” Cojocar says. “I probably got four or five hundred e-mails—many of them from females.” The women Cojocar says he was hearing from were angry because their significant others were supporting exes who they suspected had pulled a sneak pregnancy. Cojocar is appealing the case to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. In the meantime, Dubay is paying $500 a month in child support.

The case has become a cause celebre for the National Center for Men (NCM), a men’s-rights advocacy group that counsels people like Dubay through its website, www.nationalcenterformen.org—so much so that the organization’s picking up the tab for his court costs. It’s even trademarked the case: “Roe vs. Wade . . . for Men.”

“Matt is asking for the reproductive choice he would have had if he were ‘Mattilda,’” the website says. The NCM doesn’t have much contact with men who acquiesce to their role as new fathers. The guys who come to the organization see their situations as deception in its purest form.

“A lot of these men feel like they have no control,” says Mel Feit, the NCM’s executive director. “The courts are ruthless in enforcing getting money and not asking questions. Judges aren’t allowing the fraud argument, either.”

The NCM actually offers the “Reproductive Rights Affidavit” (think of it as the sexual equivalent of a living will), which challenges “any court order that seeks to impose a parental obligation upon me against my will.” Unfortunately for Jeremy, a 35-year-old technical consultant and musician in New York, the affidavit doesn’t provide a legal cover for now. He thought he’d found himself a nice girl. He had just split with his longtime fiancee but explains that this new woman was saying all the right things—even when it came to practical matters. She was on the Pill. She was pro-choice. So she and Jeremy (who’s using a fake name) enjoyed a couple of months of unprotected intimacy.

Then things got weird. She mysteriously quit drinking. She disappeared for days at a time. She told him she was considering going off birth control, though she assured him she hadn’t yet. By July, Jeremy had had enough and broke things off. Then in August, he says, she told him she was pregnant and was keeping it. “She was pregnant all of May, all of June, and all of July,” Jeremy says. “I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?’ She’s like, ‘I didn’t want you to influence my decision.’ Something that has potential impact on me for the rest of my life, she doesn’t want me influencing her decision!?”

More than a year and $6,500 in legal fees later, Jeremy has a 7-month-old boy he’s never met, a child-support case pending, and a judge who’s less than sympathetic toward his allegations of contraceptive deceit. Even his own attorney told him he’d better ditch that dream of becoming a full-time musician and focus on the computer gig that he’d hoped would only supplement his income: “She was like, ‘You know what? You gotta be a man. You’re gonna have to have a job 40 hours a week, and you need to support this child—this is your responsibility and your obligation.’ And I’m thinking to myself, like, ‘How is all of this my responsibility and my obligation when none of this was my choice?’”

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There you have it, in a nutshell: women who are so desperate to have a child will do anything to a guy to get him to “give her” a child. It sounds icky, it sounds gross, it sounds abusive (but look at how American women treat men with disdain and little better than “Do this for me, do that for me” servitude. I would have to think that any woman who truly loved and respected her boyfriend or husband would never oops him. Those are very few and far between, women who meet other baby rabid women who never cease to bother them about having children (Huh? Now why on earth would I want a child? A child does not have any practical use to me.) Oopsing is a major social disease and one that should be made undesirable at all costs. Wait a minute: the consequences of oopsing are already undesirable: sleepless nights, a fire engine going off every two seconds in your ear, dirty diapers to change every half hour. Well, that would explain the miserable expressions on these young women’s faces as they take their infant to the mall in a stroller. Children do not buy happiness after all.

This is a great article:

http://lifestyle.msn.com/your-life/bigger-picture/articlemc.aspx?cp-documentid=22037279

&gt1=32001

To Breed or Not to Breed?

By Abigail Pesta

Yes, we live in a baby-obsessed nation. When do the tabloids not run craptastic cover stories on Octomom, Kate Gosselin, or Brangelina’s brood? Then there’s the tsunami of celeb-mom photos — Kate Hudson, Halle Berry, Gwen Stefani, toting their stylish tots like the latest It bag. It’s enough to make a childless woman feel like an alien. “There’s a stigma, especially if women are childless by choice instead of by circumstance,” says Laura S. Scott, the 47-year-old married and kid-free author of the new book Two Is Enough. “Childlessness is perceived as being selfish, with a tragic outcome — you’ll die alone with 10 cats.” But sometimes having babies isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. We asked Scott — who talked to experts, parents, and 171 childless folk for her book — to bust myths about parenthood.

ALL WOMEN HAVE THE MATERNAL INSTINCT. “We think we’ll get this burning urge,” Scott says. “But many women never feel a desire to have kids, ever.”

PARENTHOOD MAKES YOU A BETTER PERSON. “Better than who? Oprah? Gandhi?”

PARENTING IS, BY DEFINITION, REWARDING. For many, yes. For all? No. Says Scott, “Dr. Phil surveyed 20,000 parents, and a third of them said that if they knew then what they know now, they probably wouldn’t have started a family.”

IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN THEY’RE YOURS. “If you don’t like being around kids, you’re unlikely to be more tolerant if they’re yours — especially when they throw a fit at Walmart.”

PARENTING IS THE PATH TO MATURITY. “Our parents were raised to think this, and society clings to the notion,” says Scott. “But let’s face it: Having kids doesn’t guarantee mature behavior.” Ever see a dad go berserk on a Little League ref?

A BABY WILL STRENGTHEN THE MARRIAGE. “Research shows that marital satisfaction goes way down — particularly for women — after the birth of the first child,” she says. “It doesn’t return to honeymoon levels till the kids leave home.”

YOU’LL REGRET NOT HAVING KIDS. “Studies don’t show any widespread regret among the childless by choice. A lot of thought goes into the decision,” says Scott. And if you need a kid fix, you can always be a mentor.

KIDS OFFER SECURITY WHEN YOU’RE OLD. “Grown children are often hundreds of miles away,” Scott notes. “To really guarantee your well-being, long-term health insurance is a better bet.”

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We really do live in a baby-and pregnancy- centered society. For proof, I went to the the mall a few days ago and right by the entrance, I see a young Asian woman and as soon as she sees me, she starts to rub her very pregnant belly. Uh huh, like I was at all interested in that. Oh, she got the attention from me, but not the good type of attention. But back to the article: our society is in love with babies and small children (so are pedophiles, but that’s for another post) and once the reality of having a child hits the woman square in the face when she has to get up at 2:00 AM for a feeding, she is not going to singing and dancing while feeding a hungry baby. She will be yelling at the kid, “Why did you wake me up at this hour?!” I love the response to “parenting is a path to maturity”, to which can also be added, the parents fight like two five year olds over how to raise the child. Maturity, my ass. All a child proves is that their privates are in working order - and that most certainly is not love.

But so much for unconditional love. Speaking of unconditional love, my hubby and I are celebrating our childfreeness tonight with chicken stir fry and a peaceful, quiet evening loving each other - one thing childed people never have time for when a child is involved.

http://www.clickorlando.com/education/20568523/detail.html?

dsq=15457428#comment-15457428

Dad Takes Son To School In Helicopter
Landing At Clermont High School Under Investigation

POSTED: Wednesday, August 26, 2009

CLERMONT, Fla. — An investigation has been launched after a man took his son to his first day of high school in a helicopter and landed the chopper on the Clermont campus without permission.

Bart Southern, who rented the blue and white Hughes 300 helicopter from Air Orlando, said he flew his son to East Ridge High School “to make a positive impression on the other students,” according to a Lake County sheriff’s report.

Two deputies spotted the helicopter at about 7 a.m. Monday and soon thereafter received calls from school officials about the helicopter, which landed behind some portables on the east side of campus, the report said.

It’s not known how many students witnessed the landing.

The school principal, David Cunningham, requested that an investigation be launched to find out if there was an emergency. Deputies contacted the FAA, which said the chopper had been rented by Southern.

According to the Lake County sheriff’s report, Southern admitted that he landed the helicopter on the campus.

Cunningham said he would “forward the information though his chain of command,” the report stated.

Watch Local 6 News for more on this story.

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What exactly was the purpose of Southern dropping off his son in a helicopter for? He clearly did not have permission to land the helicopter on school grounds, even if he owned the helicopter. Perhaps Southern was busy trying to be a big buddy to his little buddy (Yo, Gilligan!) in getting him to school on he first day. One can only wonder how his son’s peers will treat him now - like the snob he and his father is? No, it would be wrong to blame a teenaged boy for the stupid actions of his father. Chances are Southern would say something like: “But my son insisted I bring him to school this way!” while the father is busy projecting his fantasies onto his unassuming teenaged son. It just goes to show you how desperate some parents are in wanting to live their childhood all over again through their offspring.

I think they just hate the potential danger some parents put their child in:

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1917878,00.html

Why Does Facebook Hate Babies?
by Joel Stein, August 21, 2009

Facebook hates babies. I found this out last night when I logged on as Laszlo Stein, my three-month old son who has been faithfully posting adorable photos and angry commentary since his second-trimester sonogram, back when his listed interests were just kicking and drinking his own urine. In his time on Facebook, he threatened to pee on some, cut others and once posted — next to a photo of him gummily smiling and wearing a kimono — this response to my wife’s friend Nancy’s comment that she met another baby named Laszlo: “OMG! That’s so awesome! We should form a Facebook group! Just kidding. I don’t give a crap, you loser. Get a life.” More than once, he commented on the photo of another baby with “I’d hit that.”
But last night when I logged in, all I got was a page that said, “Account disabled.” Now, I know Facebook has a rule that you have to be over 13, and I guess some loser at Facebook is paid to look around for accounts with photos of people under 13. I’m sure Facebook does this to protect kids from pedophiles, and yet the surest way for a pedophile to find a kid would be to get a job at Facebook looking for kids’ accounts. (Read “Does Facebook Replace Face Time or Enhance It?”)

All I wanted was to avoid being one of those annoying parents who post photos of their kids on their own page. I wanted a place for the few family and friends who want to see his baby pictures. And now all the photos other people posted of Laszlo are gone, and I have to e-mail every damn photo to our parents and siblings. I wish Facebook had given me some kind of warning so I could have archived all this stuff or transferred it to the Facebook application Baby Book, which I found out about too late and is oddly O.K. with Facebook even though it’s exactly the same as Laszlo having his own page.

You can still do right, Facebook, by giving me back his page for a day so I can transfer it, and no longer be known as a baby hater. You know how to contact me. On Facebook.
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“Ohhh wheeee! Look at my baby! Isn’t he so kayouuuutee!” Well, what other possible reason would someone have for plastering their child’s photo on Facebook? Do they really think the rest of the world will be obsessed with their child? I didn’t think so. Well, the pedophiles might, but they are an exception. But you know how big some people are about fambly. Facebook should be for, and remain for, adults, not crotchdumps. Forget about fambly, too - if you want a site for that, make your own website. Even I don’t plaster photos of myself and husband all over the Internet. That’s an invasion of privacy. But I guess the whining parents have to whine about something.

I used to see parents at the mall have their toddlers run around barefoot with no socks or shoes on. Not too bright, admittedly, since the child could accidentally step on something sharp. So I can perfectly understand Burger King’s move here:

http://www.fox2now.com/ktvi-baby-no-shoes-kickedout-restaurant-080409,0,5070606.story

Restaurant Threatens To Kick Out Baby Not Wearing Shoes

By Andy Banker

August 4, 2009

SUNSET HILLS, MO (KTVI - FOX2now.com) - No shoes, no shirt, no service: there is word that the manager of a St. Louis County restaurant threatened to kick out a six-month old baby and her mother because the baby wasn’t wearing shoes. The infant’s mom says the restaurant is taking the policy too far. Jennifer Frederich said the manager of the Sunset Hills Burger King at 10734 Sunset Hills Plaza cited ‘health concerns’.

Frederich said her daughter, Kaylin, was too young to even get her feet dirty; she couldn’t walk, couldn’t crawl, her feet still pretty much too small for shoes.

“Everybody loves baby feet,” she said.

Yet she said those feet nearly got the baby, her mom and her grandmother, booted from the restaurant, as grandma was holding Kaylin at the counter and the cashier took their order.

“The manager was standing next to him said, ‘you can order “to go” but you’re going to have to leave if she doesn’t have shoes on’. He said, ‘it’s against health code’,” Frederich said.

Frederich said she was taking her church youth group to the Rock the River concerts under the Gateway Arch, Sunday; she, her mother, daughter, and about 25 others, stopped at the Burger King on the way; Frederich’s mother went in with the baby first; then Frederich came in with the rest of the group.

“The guy was still saying, ‘that lady is still here with that baby without shoes’,” Frederich said. “I just looked at him and I said, ‘that’s my daughter. She doesn’t own shoes. She’s only 6 months old’… she doesn’t walk. She’s not touching the ground. So there’s no reason for her to have shoes on.”

Still, a sign on the door did say, “shoes and shirt required”. So, Frederich said she put socks on the baby in an effort to comply; but the manager threatened to call police, so the group ate hurriedly and left.

“It’s been an absolute hysteria on Facebook,” she said. “People just think it’s so funny.”

She posted her story on the social networking website and had gotten dozen of responses by Tuesday; ranging from “are you kidding me?” — to — “that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard”.

She said she felt obligated to spread the word about the policy.

“People had to know about this…if you’re going to go to Burger King get some shoes on your baby or go somewhere else,” she said. “I think they [Burger King manageers] just need to understand, it’s a baby. They’re not going to be walking around in their dirty, nasty, feet. I feel like the policy was probably for grown adults who might walk in without shoes on. That’s understandable. But, baby’s don’t wear shoes.”

The restaurant’s management referred FOX 2 to Burger King’s corporate office for comment on the incident. After repeated calls, FOX 2 had yet to get a response Tuesday night.

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So, will the child be in the habit of not wearing shoes until it reaches the age of 5 or 6? It’s not as if baby shoes are not made anymore. Heck, even I still have my baby shoes, although they have been bronzed. The laziness of some parents. But I guess it is much more important for that attachment parenting to take place rather than common sense. I mean, it’s just a bayybeee.

I am sure no one will dispute the following article. The real parents who actually raise their kids with some sense of values and ethics are an exception, not the rule. Read on:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30585984/

Today’s tykes: Secure kids or rudest in history?
Parents’ focus on building self-esteem may neglect compassion for others

By Susan Gregory Thomas
May 6, 2009

The little wagon seemed abandoned.

So when Ada Calhoon’s 1-year-old son spotted it during an outing to a neighborhood park, he began playing with it. But almost immediately, they heard a little boy on a far-away swing set shriek “Noooooooooooo!” sending his mom storming toward them.

“Rather than saying, ‘We’re swinging now. You can let that baby look at your wagon,’ [the mother] took the wagon out of my son’s hands and brought it to her son in the swing,” says Calhoun, the editor-in-chief of the popular parenting Web site Babble.com.

It wasn’t the child’s fit that left Calhoun speechless: It was the mother’s.

Parenting blogs — and grandparents — echo that shock. A commenter on a recent New York Times’ blog recounted seeing a preschooler purposely trip a woman in a crowded restaurant, and chortle, “‘Mommy, did you see me trip that woman? I tripped her!’” — with no corrective measure from the mother. On Grandparents.com, a mortified grandmother recently asked for advice on how to handle her grandson’s relentless public insulting of his own mother, who apparently seemed unable or unwilling to stand up to the mistreatment.

Many experts say today’s kids are ruder than ever. And it may have something to do with popular parenting movements focusing on self-esteem and the generation that’s embracing them: Generation X, or those born between 1965 and 1977.

On paper, it doesn’t add up. After all, by many accounts Generation X may be the most devoted parents in American history. They are champions of “attachment parenting,” the school of child-rearing that calls for a high level of closeness between parents and children, Many Gen-X parents co-sleep with their children, hold them back from entering kindergarten if they feel their children’s emotional maturity is at stake and volunteer at their kids’ schools at record rates. Gen-X moms have been famously criticized by early feminists for dropping out of the workforce to care for their young children.

Yet, their kids are, well, rude. It may be that today’s parents are so fixated on their children’s emotional well-being that they’re teaching them that the well-being of others is comparatively unimportant, says Dr. Philippa Gordon, a long-time pediatrician in Park Slope, Brooklyn, an urban New York neighborhood famous for its dense Gen-X parent population.

Parents ‘ferociously advocating’

“I see parents ferociously advocating for their children, responding with hostility to anyone they perceive as getting in the child’s way — from a person whose dog snuffles inquiringly at a baby in a carriage, to a teacher or coach whom they perceive is slighting their child, to a poor, hapless doctor who cannot cure the common cold,” says Gordon. “There is a feeling that anything interfering with their kid’s homeostasis, as they see it, is an inappropriate behavior to be fended off sharply.”

Such defensiveness represents a radical departure from Gen X’s parental forebears, who, experts say, were more concerned about their children’s behavior toward others, rather than the other way around. But it also may highlight what makes many of today’s parents tick, as a group — specifically, how they themselves grew up.

Many researchers consider members of Generation X to have been among the least nurtured children in American history with half coming from split families, 40 percent raised as latchkey kids — literally, home alone.

“They are trying to heal the wounds from their own childhoods through their children,” says Dr. Michael Brody, a child psychiatrist and chair of the Television and Media Committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

In indulging their children’s moods, Brody argues, some parents may be trying to protect their children from experiencing the kind of anxiety and neglect that they themselves suffered as youngsters.

Attachment parenting or enmeshment?
But not being able to separate their own feelings from their children’s has its costs. “Generation X parents seem to have mistaken emotional ‘enmeshment’ for ‘attachment parenting,’” he says.

To be fair, such a response comes from an understandable place.

“Our parents, the Boomers, didn’t pay so much attention to us — they were getting divorced and working and respecting independence, so they left us a lot of times to Scooby Doo,” says Calhoun. “But we’re going a bit far in the other direction and paying so much attention that we’re picking up on every blip in our kids’ whims.”

But not all this can be laid at Generation X’s door. Dr. Susan Linn , who teaches psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and is director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, points out that children learn societal values not just through parental modeling, but also from the stories and toys passed on to them.

“Commercial culture tends to glorify negative behaviors on the continuum from rudeness to violence,” says Linn. “Anti-social behaviors capture the attention of viewers and add to audience share, and in a world where physical violence reigns, rudeness seems ordinary — it becomes a behavioral norm.”

Just take a quick survey the most popular commercial offerings for kids, Linn says. On “American Idol,” which, according to Nielsen ratings, is a top program among 2- to 11-year-old viewers, the judges aren’t just rude but truly scathing to contestants.

And, of course, a best-selling line of dolls is, literally, named Bratz. That message pales in comparison to the video game franchise “Grand Theft Auto,” a perennial best-seller among teens and pre-teens who spend hours engaging in virtual behaviors ranging from bullying to having sex with a prostitute and then killing her. Younger siblings who emulate their older brothers and sisters are peripherally, but routinely, exposed to such violence in large numbers, says Linn.

Preschool delinquents?
It is also worth underlining that rudeness can have more serious behavioral consequences. As a 2005 Yale study demonstrated, preschool students are expelled at a rate more than three times that of children in grades K-12 because of behavioral problems.

What does this mean for their future as adults? We may be starting to see some of the effects in Generation Y, those born between 1980 and 1996, whose self-centered — if not downright arrogant — workplace behavior has been well-documented in the popular press since the mid-2000s.

“They’ve grown up questioning their parents, and now they’re questioning their employers. They don’t know how to shut up, which is great, but that’s aggravating to the 50-year-old manager who says, ‘Do it and do it now,’ ” says Jordan Kaplan, an associate managerial science professor at Long Island University-Brooklyn in New York, in a USA Today article.

As for today’s little kids? “No one will want to hire them,” says Brody. That’s not an encouraging thought, especially in these economic times.
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This next generation of kids will have a very hard time adjusting to adulthood. Why? Simply because they will think the world revolves aroun them and that others should drop whatever they are doing to serve them. Now that we have seen what our entitlements minded society has done to destroy the younger generation, everyone will wind up paying for these spoiled kids. But, some parents think their precious snowflake from seventh heaven should be worshipped by the rest of the planet. Talk about failing to live in reality. Child worship does not benefit the child being worshipped and the evidence is clear.

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/courts/entries/2009/04/07/dead_mans_sperm_to_be_taken_by.html

Dead man’s sperm to be taken by court order

by Tony Plohetski

Tuesday, April 7, 2009, 02:38 PM

A Travis County judge has signed an order today requiring the medical examiner’s office to preserve the body of an assault victim until his sperm can be taken and make the body available to an expert trained in collecting such specimens.

Probate Judge Guy Herman signed the temporary restraining order and mandatory injunction at 3 p.m. at the request of Marissa Evans, whose son died Sunday. Nikolas Colton Evans, 20, shown at right, was assaulted on East Sixth Street on March 27 and remained at the University Medical Center at Brackenridge until his death.

Marissa Evans, 42, said in a court affidavit and an interview today that she wants to use the sperm to have a grandchild through a surrogate mother.

“I want him to live on,” Evans said. “I want to keep a piece of him.”

Evans said in the affidavit that her son had told her that he wanted to have three children and had already chosen their names: Hunter, Tod and Van.

According to court documents and Marissa Evans, she repeatedly asked hospital officials and representatives from an organ donation agency to extract her son’s sperm leading up to and immediately after his death. They declined, she said.

The documents said that the sperm must be collected within 24 hours of Evans’ death for it to remain viable or that his body must be cooled to no more than 4 degrees centigrade. Evans agreed to donate her son’s organs, which required him to be on life support until 9 p.m. Monday, documents said.

Police have said Evans was leaving a bar on Sixth Street with a friend about 2 a.m. on March 27 when they got into an argument with several men.

After that argument, police say another group approached Evans and his friend and that one of the men in that group hit both of them. Evans hit his head on the ground after he was punched, police said.

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Just when you thought that breeders could not get any worse - but this plainly perverse. The mother wants a grandchild (GREEDY) and she loves her son so much she wants to preserve his sperm for just this purpose. These people do not “need” grandchildren, they need professional psychiatric help. It isn’t bad enough her son died in an assault attack. Legal motions like that make me question just how much these parents really love their children (most of them do not since they just lust for a child). Apparently they don’t. And what’s with the so-called “obligation” of Evans to her son’s lustful wishes? Three kids? Three non-existent kids with their names already picked out? What sort of an accomplishment is that?The organ donation is a better accomplishment, because creating more starving mouths isn’t.

http://i.gizmodo.com/5191510/peekaru-is-a-baby-snuggie

Just when you thought the front harnesses were not creepy enough. Along comes the Peekaru which makes the baby looks like it is still attatched to its mommy:

Personally, I prefer this guy below:

No, he is not wearing a Renaissance style Peekaru, that is actually a parasite attatched to its middle. But it runs on the same principle, you see. The creators of Peekaru saw a photo of this guy in an old medical curiosity book and figured it would be cool to make something similar for infants. Yes, the baby inside will have its stinky diaper full while Mommy has to carry the thing around. Repulsive, certainly, Disgusting, no question about it. Well, it’s just another dark sign of our baby infatuated society. Personally, I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a Peekaru and since I will never have any children, there is nothing to worry about. By the way, for those wondering who that guy is in the illustration, that is Harry. His parasite is named George. Well, those with parasites sure do tend to stick together.

http://www.slate.com/id/2212816/

Too Many Kiddie Cooks Spoil the Broth: Why the child foodie movement has got to go.

By Regina Schrambling

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

For the last few years, the most burning question in the food world has been: Is there any phenomenon more annoying than Rachael Ray? And, finally, we have the answer: Absolutely.

Call it “a little child shall lead you.” First there was the 12-year-old “restaurant critic,” David Fishman in New York City, whose “review” of a neighborhood salumeria somehow snared him huge coverage in his hometown paper and then a long appearance on the CBS morning show, replete with warnings that his power had local chefs quaking in their clogs. Next a 5-year-old, Julian Kreusser, was touted for his cooking show on public access television in Portland, OR., with the Times of London warning that he might get a cookbook deal at an age when most kids need In the Night Kitchen read to them. Now the New York Times Magazine has pledged one-quarter of its monthly food real estate to the kitchen exploits of a 4-year-old, Dexter Wells, who just happens to be the firstborn of the newspaper’s food editor, Pete Wells.

Presenting children as inspiration is troublesome not least because kitchens are not nurseries. Check out the Wrestler-worthy scars on real chefs’ bodies, and you can see why. Reading Pete Wells’ most recent piece, on overseeing his son at the stove, had me conjuring the horrific tale of late Republican strategist Lee Atwater’s toddler brother, burned to death when a pot full of boiling oil spilled over on him. Watching the Oregon whiz kid cram clementines into a food processor reminded me of how Philadelphia chef Georges Perrier famously lost several digit-tips with the same tool, and he had decades more experience with its blades.

And then there is the problem of what children produce. The “Yummy Yummy Citrus Boys” Julian Kreusser allegedly invented, demonstrated over 18 very long minutes, look to be perfectly ordinary cookies (the ratio of butter to flour seems stingy to this old baker), though I couldn’t bear to sit through the cooking lesson again to get the recipe. So I opted instead to try his widely distributed recipe for zucchini chcolate-chip bread, which yielded everything I dread. It was gooey, due to a cup of molasses, a cup of sugar, and chocolate chips, and it was as subtly flavored as an all-day sucker. (I had to guess the pan size, and I knew enough to let the thing bake 60 minutes, not the 30 “he” prescribed.) Fortunately, the New York Times spares us from the recipe for the perfectly dreadful-sounding vegetable pies Dexter Wells decides to make, but we do hear about his insistence on grinding coffee beans just so for a morning brew he won’t even be able to drink. While the tangerine sherbet he inspired his dad to develop wasn’t bad, the gelatin and the excessive labor of zesting and juicing the tangerines guarantee I will never bother with it again.

No matter how precocious the kid, it’s difficult for him to truly educate and enlighten adults. Nature might trump nurture here. While children do have taste buds that adults do not—inside their cheeks and on their palates rather than only on the tongue—studies at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia have found that children are always worse than adults at flavor identification simply because they are less experienced eaters. According to food psychologist and scientist Dr. Marcia Pelchat, even if children like something, they cannot qualify how good it is because they lack the necessary math skills to do so. Studies at the center have also determined that children favor sweet to savory more than adults (this may be an evolutionary issue–children need more energy because they are active and growing, and sweet foods generally have more calories), and they tend to reject vegetables (possibly because they’re unfamiliar, partly because of their individual genetic makeup) and, often, meat.

I can hear all the parents insisting, “My child is different. He eats what I do.” Sure, there are ways to help influence a child’s tolerance or penchant for sophisticated flavors—dining out, helping in the kitchen, being exposed to strong flavors (spicy food, for example) via amniotic fluid or breast milk. But Pelchat says, “Even those kids eat like children.”

This is partially because children rank texture above taste. Sliminess, according to Pelchat, is a total turnoff (at least in our culture; it’s all in what kids are used to). They also do not develop a taste for salt until they are about 5 months old, but from then on they like higher levels of salt than adults do.

Finally, consider what impact memory has on your food. People lose their sense of smell as they age, so our bodies compensate for that loss by allowing memory to help us know what we’re eating. What’s one thing 5-year-olds are lacking? Remembrances of madeleines past. Or even of cheeseburgers or tacos past.

I’m not saying children cannot be skewed by food snobs who hang out on Chowhound. Dr. Perri Klass, a professor of pediatrics and journalism at New York University, recalls the 4-year-old friend her daughter once brought home for a sleepover who rejected what she was serving for dinner and demanded noodles with pesto. Taken aback, Klass offered to run to the corner store, and the friend informed her contemptuously: “You don’t buy pesto. You make pesto.”

Even those of us who make pesto can’t please children, though. I will never forget the first time I brought some carefully crafted tidbits involving goat cheese and roasted peppers to a party where a toddler was indulgently allowed to grab one with a grubby hand only to spit it out on the carpet.

But this is not just me yelling at kids to get off my lawn—I’m willing to set aside the annoying narcissism of parents who believe they have spawned a cross between Ferran Adria and Brillat-Savarin. On a larger scale, the trend emphasizes the worst of the food frenzy today: the celebration of celebrity and novelty over authenticity and seriousness. Julia Child was 50 years old before she flipped her first omelet on television. She got that gig only after studying at the Cordon Bleu and then devoting 10 years to perfecting “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” with two collaborators. Today chefs barely out of high school are competing on reality cooking shows, and the bar keeps being lowered, with Internet exposure for every little Thomas Keller. The movement devalues the very subject it pretends to celebrate. As Pelchat put it: “Kids would be excellent culinary guides. For food for other kids.”

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That’s fine and well that kids can prepare simple, sweet snacks in the kitchen but when it comes to real cooking, kids just don’t get it. Most of them don’t even have a vocabulary that includes the words fricasse and braise. So, why the hoopla over children who have a cooking show. Yes, it is all because of the “parents” - those who think their angel is just so special, smart and brilliant with a whisk and the kid is smart enough not to get burned or cut open with a Ginsu knife while performing all of those cooking stunts like the chefs at Benihana do.

It is questionable for many people, not just the childfree community, about children being presented as “inspiration.” It is not just food, as the above article states, but just about anywhere else in our society. Children as “inspiration” for the adult world, is, well, not real inspiration at all. No matter how smart or clever a child might be, there is just no way any child can ever inspire an adult to create a work of art, make a great finding in science, or anything along that line. Years ago such inspiration for things of that nature was credited to what was above - not that which comes from “below.” Adults cannot learn from children, period, no matter what it is that a child does. Adults can learn from other adults, particularly the elderly (just think about it: in many other cultures, the elderly and not children are looked to for guidance and advice, simply because they have lived that long to experience it. Children, well, they are on the undeveloped side in so many ways. But I digress.). McDonald-like french fries may appeal to the kiddie chef and his or her little friends but most adults prefer real food.

So nice of MSNBC to have this story. Proceed at your own risk:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29163803/

Some women driven to ‘baby addiction’

When moms always want a newborn, even at expense of other children

By Jacqueline Stenson
Friday Feb. 13, 2009

While it was once common for American families to have six, seven or even more children, today the sight of such a large brood makes many people stop and ask a seemingly simple question: Why?

Plenty have been asking that ever since the news broke that California mom Nadya Suleman gave birth to octuplets after already having six other young children. And celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and Mia Farrow who have large families have long been an endless source of public curiosity and speculation.

There’s not always a simple reason why people create uncommonly large families. Some parents cite religious or cultural reasons for having many children. Some say they just love kids and feel they can provide a big family with a stable, loving home. Some want to help a child in need so they add to their biological families through adoption.

But sometimes the desire to keep having children can be rooted in complex psychological issues dating as far back as one’s childhood. In certain cases, experts say, it can become a compulsion, an obsession or even a “baby addiction.”

While the current book of psychiatric diagnoses, the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” has no entry on baby addiction, mental-health professionals say they see patients, mostly women, who desperately want to keep having newborns, even when they already have several children and aren’t managing their family situation well. That, they say, is a big red flag, no matter what term is used to describe it.

“It can be an addiction,” says Gayle Peterson, a family therapist in the San Francisco area and author of “Making Healthy Families.”

Overwhelmed, but wanting more

Peterson has seen several women in her practice who’ve been overwhelmed with four or five children, including those with special needs. Some of the women were suffering with depression or panic attacks and yet when their youngest child became a toddler, they wanted another baby. These women can be driven to have more children in an effort to make up for some sort of void or loss, usually from their own unhappy childhood, explains Peterson.

“If you’re just having babies to complete something in yourself that never got completed, you really are talking about an addiction,” she says.

Without personally treating Suleman, mental-health experts acknowledge they can’t say for sure what her motivations are but that there are similarities to these other women, as well as additional troubling signs. Suleman, who has a history of depression, told TODAY’s Ann Curry that she wanted a ‘huge family’ because she had a “dysfunctional” childhood as an only child and longed for personal connections.

Suleman, who is single and has no job, has one autistic child and two others who she says have some disability, raising concerns about how she’ll manage emotionally and financially with the additional octuplets who are likely to face some disabilities as well. She has already set up a Web site that accepts donations.

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People need a license to sell liquor, drive a car, own a business - it is time we have a license to breed. Psychiatric evaluation should be a prerequisite for that license, too. Continue:

And while some have speculated that Suleman is an attention-seeker who is modeling her looks and her family after Angelina Jolie, she has denied a Jolie fixation or plastic surgery to look like her.

Babies — all new and cherubic and completely enthralled with their mothers — can bring profound joy. But when they enter toddlerhood and start developing independence and a mind of their own, some mothers miss the intenseness of the newborn period and want another baby even though that’s not in the best interests of the family, Peterson says.

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The phrase, “A woman’s lust for a child” has been around far too long to not mention it here. Read on:

“Therapy helps women come to grips with the fact that this only complicates their lives, does not heal them,” she says.
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Proof that some women’s brains are in the lower parts. Continue:

“There are many rewards of having children,” says Dr. Sudeepta Varma, a psychiatrist at New York Medical Center and a spokesperson for the American Psychiatric Association. But “as health professionals, we become concerned with respect to behavior that provides initial pleasure but eventually is spinning out of control.”
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Hahahaha hey Dr. Varma, don’t you even bother suggesting that if the behavior (sexual intercourse) is pleasurable, that people should at least use some form of contraceptive? No, of course not. Continue:

No ‘ideal’ family size

To protect the health and well-being of mothers and babies, fertility doctors have set guidelines for how many embryos should be implanted during one round of in vitro fertilization — guidelines that were ignored in Suleman’s case.

But while the average American family has about two children, there’s no single “ideal” family size for everyone, says Varma. Each couple should think through how many children they want and can manage, afford and provide for emotionally.
Rob Shearer, a father of 11 children ranging in age from 10 to 28, says he and his wife didn’t plan on having a large family. But he says things were going well, so they kept expanding.

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Um, what was going so well? The sex, obviously. Don’t people know any better? Not knowing how to use birth control makes you look ignorant with a capital I. Continue:

“We never sat down and said, ‘Let’s have 11 children!’ We had two and enjoyed them, so we had a third,” says Shearer, of Lebanon, Tenn. “We enjoyed three, so we had a fourth.” Two girls were adopted from China.

He says that, like any parent, he feels inadequate and overwhelmed at times, but adds that it’s all worth it.

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Not sexually inadequate, obviously. But whatever. Read on:

Experts are quick to point out that there are plenty of big, happy families that are not the result of baby addiction. They also emphasize that children in small families can suffer emotional scars, too, from absentee or otherwise poor parents.

Kids need more than money

But having large numbers of children certainly can strain a family’s finances and emotional reserves, Varma says, and that can negatively impact the children. “Are neglect, abuse, emotional disturbances in children more likely in a situation like this? It’s definitely possible.”

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And there is the reason childfree people call children, “resource gobblers.” Read on:

Kids in large families — particularly those involving a lot of youngsters close in age — who don’t get enough attention because their mother is depressed or overwhelmed, for instance, may become anxious or depressed themselves, says family psychologist Nadine Kaslow, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University in Atlanta. On the other hand, they may act out to get attention.

“It’s really important when you have children to have resources,” Kaslow says. “Not just financial resources but emotional resources.”

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No sh*t, Sherlock. Of course there’s such a thing as emotional resources. Hey, so one child gets loved but not the 5 plus others. Yes, someone does need psychiatric evaluation - the parents of these kids. Continue:

Peterson says some of the most “damaged” children are those in very poor homes and those in very rich ones. Young children, especially, don’t thrive when they are raised by an army of nannies — even fabulous nannies — at the expense of bonding time with their parents, she says. Nannies come and go, which can be devastating to children who spend the majority of their time with these caregivers.

“You can’t have a baby and be a ‘weekend parent’ and expect that your baby won’t have anxiety as they grow,” Peterson says. “It’s not enough.”

As a guiding rule, families need to create “connection over disconnection,” she says.
For couples who endlessly feel that their family isn’t complete, even when it’s getting awfully crowded at home, Kaslow notes that there are other ways to get a “baby fix” — such as baby-sitting or working in a daycare center or volunteering in a church nursery.

“I do think there are people who always want to have a baby around,” she says. “But it’s one thing to love babies and another to keep having babies.”

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I’ll close with the following:

‘These people should be forced to wear a tattoo across their foreheads saying:’

“Proving to the world that it works: One child at a time.”

People really don’t know what they are doing when they breed - their brain goes dead.

Use birth control if you want to run through the sheets.