“Every person has three basic needs in order to be happy: they must feel autonomous, competent and connected to other people.”
-Self-Determination Theory
(The following excerpt taken from Hover No More: Helicopter Parents May Breed Incompetence And Depression In Their Children was originally posted on healthland.time.comon February 22, 2013. To view it in its entirety please click on the link below.
You may think you’re helping out by phoning your kids’ college professors to haggle over the difference between a B+ and an A–, but that interference may be undermining young adults’ ability to problem-solve and fend for themselves. Constantly texting adult children and friending them on Facebook— letting them fly the coop but still demanding daily check-ins — is not exactly building a generation of confident and resilient grownups. And the problem only snowballs. “Parents are sending an unintentional message to their children that they are not competent,” says Holly Schiffrin, lead author of the study and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Mary Washington. “When adult children don’t get to practice problem-solving skills, they can’t solve these problems in the future.”
“Success means being heard and don’t stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.”
So said American author Flannery O’Connor.
Girls are often encouraged to retreat. They are permitted to demur and back away from their goals. So they bite their nails, they diet themselves into near invisibility, they cry behind closed doors.
What a waste.
(This excerpt was taken from Reasons Girls Are Encouraged To Fail – And How To Change This by Gina Barreca, Ph.D., and was originally posted on February 13, 2013, on psychologytoday.com. To view this post in its entirety please click on the following link.)
The Global Poverty Project is inviting engaged idealists the world over to spend only $1.50 a day for food and drink for five days to raise awareness for the 1.4 billion people who live below the extreme poverty line.
Why?
Because 1.4 billion people in the world live on less than $1.50 per day.
Because 10 percent of the world’s income goes to women, despite the fact that women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours.
Because 950 children die every hour from hunger or preventable diseases.
Because 884 million people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water.
In 2012, roughly 15,000 Live Below the Line participants raised over $3 million dollars for organizations working to fight poverty globally. The Global Poverty Project wants to double the number of participants in 2013.
Are you in? Register here to participate in the official global Live Below the Line week from April 29 – May 3, 2013.
Nicholas Winton is surprised when he realizes he is in an audience filled with children whose lives he saved. This emotional video clip is from the BBC television program “That’s Life”.
“I was told that my sister and I were going to be sent to England. I was only 9 and not aware of the situation. A lot of us thought it was an adventure. We didn’t know what was happening.”
Here’s what happened. Milena Grenfell-Baines and 668 other mostly Jewish children were transported from Czechoslovakia to England in order to save their lives before the outbreak of WWII.
The man who made this possible was Sir Nicholas Winton. In 1939, Winton and a friend, Martin Blake, were supposed to take a skiing vacation. Instead, Blake, who worked with refugees, told Winton, at the time a 29-year-old stockbroker, that he should visit him in Prague and help with the refugees fleeing Hitler’s advancing armies.
Nicholas Winton did go to Prague, and he was deeply affected by what he saw: thousands of refugees driven out of Sudetenland, a Czechoslovakian area recently under Nazi control (Britain and France agreed to allow Hitler to annex a large part of Czechoslovakia in an attempt to avoid a World War and the Nazis had started to take control of the country.) There was no plan to save the refugees from the looming danger of the Nazis.
So Winton decided to act. He told the BBC, “The task was enormous but I had to do something. The so-called Kindertransports—initiatives to bring children west—had been organized elsewhere, but not in Prague.”
“Everybody in Prague said, ‘Look, there is no organization in Prague to deal with refugee children, nobody will let the children go on their own, but if you want to have a go, have a go.’”
Winton contacted multiple governments for help, but only England and Sweden agreed. The British government approved his bringing children to the UK if he could find them homes and make a deposit of 50 pounds for each child.
From March to August 1939, Winton worked as a stockbroker by day and a rescue worker at night to get the kids to the UK. Winton advertised in British newspapers and in churches and temples to find families. He raised money for transportation and managed logistics—even forging entry permits when the government was moving too slowly.
Winton saved 669 children, working until war broke out and kids could no longer leave Czechoslovakia.
Winton stresses that he receives too much attention and that his collaborator in Prague—Trevor Chadwick—and everyone who participated deserves credit.
In fact, Winton kept his heroic deeds to himself for almost 50 years. His wife, Grete, didn’t even know about his rescue efforts until 1988, when she found his scrapbook in the attic, with records, photos, names and documents from his efforts. With his wife’s encouragement, Winton shared his story, which led to his appearance on the BBC television program That’s Life. The emotional video clip in this article is from that show—you’ll see the moment when he realizes that the studio audience is composed mostly of people he rescued.
The rescued children, many of them now grandparents, still refer to themselves as “Winton’s children.” And Winton said that hardly a week goes by when he isn’t in touch with one of the children or their relatives.
Vera Gissing, one of the rescued children, said, “If he hadn’t gone to Prague on that day [instead of on his skiing vacation], we wouldn’t be alive. There are thousands of us in this world all thanks to him.”
When asked by a class doing a history project for advice, Nicholas Winton said “Don’t be content in your life just to do no wrong. Be prepared every day to try to do some good.”
“Technology reshapes the landscape of our emotional lives, but is it offering the lives we want to lead?”
- Sherry Turkle
The following is an excerpt from Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Each Otherby Sherry Turkle and originally appeared on http://www.alternet.orgon February 19, 2013.
Online connections were first conceived as a substitute for face-to-face contact, when the latter was for some reason impractical: Don’t have time to make a phone call? Shoot off a text message. But very quickly, the text message became the connection of choice. We discovered the network—the world of connectivity—to be uniquely suited to the overworked and overscheduled life it makes possible. And now we look to the network to defend us against loneliness even as we use it to control the intensity of our connections.
(To read the rest of this excerpt please click on this link.)
Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathyis Slate senior editor Emily Bazelon’s in-depth look at bullying and a blueprint for how to reduce it. She tells compelling stories from the perspective of both the bullied and the bullies, explores the new world of online bullying, looks deep into the academic literature, and provides answers to the problem. She discussed it all with Slate‘s “Dear Prudence”columnist, Emily Yoffe.
