Looking for love? Pin it to your chest
Reuters
From: Montreal Gazette
Single? Shy? An Australian dating website is offering wallflowers looking for love a subtle way to declare their intentions: identification badges.
The badges are the invention of IT professional and Yes I Am Single website (www.yis.com.au) founder Evan Diacopolous, who says it's a way to revive old-fashioned dating.
"It's a conversation starter, a prompt. It helps people who lack the confidence," he told Reuters of the small silver discs that bear the website's address.
"Many people now are into online dating, but once upon a time people looking for a partner actually talked to each other in person, rather than going online. This is going back to meeting people the old-fashioned way."
To get the badge, as well as gain access to the website's forums, members pay A$23 Australian ($16.5).
Diacopolous, who is single himself, started the website nearly a month ago after he and many of his friends became disillusioned by online dating.
"People spend a lot of money and send a lot of emails, there's a lot of expectations that aren't met and I thought there's got to be an easier way to meet people," he said.
So far, the site has 50 members and Diacopolous advised those looking of love to do so in "everyday settings."
"You can wear your badge at the supermarket, on the train to work or anywhere you go. You never know who you might meet," the 35-year-old said.
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
Showing posts with label Social Work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Work. Show all posts
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Even a good marriage cannot survive bad manners
By SUSAN SCHWARTZ, The Gazette
From: Montreal Gazette
Sorry, but I don't buy this business that manners have disappeared and rudeness is rampant. Yes, it's true that the young probably stood more readily 40 years ago to offer the elderly a seat on the bus - but then, it was also acceptable for people to spit as they rode those buses 40 years ago. Everything is relative.
I believe the foundation of manners lies, as it always has, in being courteous and in considering the impact of our actions on others. That's the crux of Barbara Cartland's Etiquette Handbook: A Guide to Good Behaviour From the Boudoir to the Boardroom (Random House Books, 2008, $23.95).
The book by the prolific British writer was first published in 1962, in an era when women graced no luncheon without a hat and a 6-year-old boy learned to address an older man as Sir. Nigel Wilcockson, publishing director at Random House, called it a fascinating part of social history; he predicted it will appeal to those who recall the time with nostalgia or people charmed by the unintentional humour of chapters like those dealing with how to wash up on the servants' night off.
It's true that some sections of the handbook are hopelessly dated - comically so. But others are timeless and of great value - and none, to my mind, more than a chapter called Home Life Is What You Make It. Cartland, who died in 2000 at 98, believed that manners begin at home. And they do.
"It is a sad reflection that we can be provoked into callous and inconsiderate behaviour more easily by those we love than by anyone else," she wrote. "The self-discipline of good behaviour should never be dropped within the home, least of all by the husband and wife."
Showing good manners in marriage means everything from not hogging the bedclothes or reading if your partner wants to sleep, Cartland believed, to not nagging or criticizing your partner to looking smart even if it's just the two of you.
Good manners mean not reserving one's best self for company. "Wives resent husbands who fall asleep every evening when they are alone with their families, but can be lively, interesting, conversationalists when guests are present," she wrote.
Similarly, "a husband is repelled by a wife who nags or treats him alternately as a child, an idiot, a brute and a tyrant."
To be fair, I believe some marriages are not meant to last; it happens that two partners are fundamentally incompatible or that one is nothing more than a lout.
Sadder is when a marriage ends because one partner or the other stops caring enough to give the relationship his - or her - best. In the absence of the nurturing the marriage needs, it shrivels.
It is during courtship, though, that at least a pretense of good manners is shown - even by the most uncouth people, Cartland opined. Partners take care with everything from their appearance to their words, as they "try to show the height and depth of their characters when expressing their hopes and ambitions."
A cardinal rule for partners, then, "is to treasure the beauty and spiritual yearning of that awakening love, and to turn it into the strong, enduring and equally beautiful love of married life," she wrote.
"I am sure that the spiritual side of love is destroyed in many marriages entirely by rudeness and contempt."
Just as familiarity breeds contempt, so, too, can living together under the same roof lead to lack of consideration, Cartland says. She berates women who don't try to look attractive in the house and admonishes men: "Washing, shaving and hair brushing are tasks to complete as early as possible, not delayed or omitted because only your wife will see you."
Gestures of affection and terms of endearment, too, remain important - and not just in the privacy of the boudoir.
"Husbands should remember to be lovers, in thought as well as in deed," Cartland wrote. "No man can be excused for later omitting the small courtesies of gratitude, tenderness and consideration. On these, more than on anything else, rests a happy marriage."
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
By SUSAN SCHWARTZ, The Gazette
From: Montreal Gazette
Sorry, but I don't buy this business that manners have disappeared and rudeness is rampant. Yes, it's true that the young probably stood more readily 40 years ago to offer the elderly a seat on the bus - but then, it was also acceptable for people to spit as they rode those buses 40 years ago. Everything is relative.
I believe the foundation of manners lies, as it always has, in being courteous and in considering the impact of our actions on others. That's the crux of Barbara Cartland's Etiquette Handbook: A Guide to Good Behaviour From the Boudoir to the Boardroom (Random House Books, 2008, $23.95).
The book by the prolific British writer was first published in 1962, in an era when women graced no luncheon without a hat and a 6-year-old boy learned to address an older man as Sir. Nigel Wilcockson, publishing director at Random House, called it a fascinating part of social history; he predicted it will appeal to those who recall the time with nostalgia or people charmed by the unintentional humour of chapters like those dealing with how to wash up on the servants' night off.
It's true that some sections of the handbook are hopelessly dated - comically so. But others are timeless and of great value - and none, to my mind, more than a chapter called Home Life Is What You Make It. Cartland, who died in 2000 at 98, believed that manners begin at home. And they do.
"It is a sad reflection that we can be provoked into callous and inconsiderate behaviour more easily by those we love than by anyone else," she wrote. "The self-discipline of good behaviour should never be dropped within the home, least of all by the husband and wife."
Showing good manners in marriage means everything from not hogging the bedclothes or reading if your partner wants to sleep, Cartland believed, to not nagging or criticizing your partner to looking smart even if it's just the two of you.
Good manners mean not reserving one's best self for company. "Wives resent husbands who fall asleep every evening when they are alone with their families, but can be lively, interesting, conversationalists when guests are present," she wrote.
Similarly, "a husband is repelled by a wife who nags or treats him alternately as a child, an idiot, a brute and a tyrant."
To be fair, I believe some marriages are not meant to last; it happens that two partners are fundamentally incompatible or that one is nothing more than a lout.
Sadder is when a marriage ends because one partner or the other stops caring enough to give the relationship his - or her - best. In the absence of the nurturing the marriage needs, it shrivels.
It is during courtship, though, that at least a pretense of good manners is shown - even by the most uncouth people, Cartland opined. Partners take care with everything from their appearance to their words, as they "try to show the height and depth of their characters when expressing their hopes and ambitions."
A cardinal rule for partners, then, "is to treasure the beauty and spiritual yearning of that awakening love, and to turn it into the strong, enduring and equally beautiful love of married life," she wrote.
"I am sure that the spiritual side of love is destroyed in many marriages entirely by rudeness and contempt."
Just as familiarity breeds contempt, so, too, can living together under the same roof lead to lack of consideration, Cartland says. She berates women who don't try to look attractive in the house and admonishes men: "Washing, shaving and hair brushing are tasks to complete as early as possible, not delayed or omitted because only your wife will see you."
Gestures of affection and terms of endearment, too, remain important - and not just in the privacy of the boudoir.
"Husbands should remember to be lovers, in thought as well as in deed," Cartland wrote. "No man can be excused for later omitting the small courtesies of gratitude, tenderness and consideration. On these, more than on anything else, rests a happy marriage."
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Thai 'Spider-Man' to the rescue
An unusual disguise has helped a Bangkok fireman rescue an eight-year-old boy who had climbed on to a third-floor window ledge, Thai police say.
The firefighter dressed up as the comic book superhero Spider-Man in order to coax the boy, who is autistic, from his dangerous perch.
Police said teachers had alerted the fire station after the boy began crying and climbed out of a classroom window.
It was reportedly his first day at the special needs school.
Efforts by the teachers to persuade the pupil to come back inside had failed.
But a remark by his mother about his passion for comic superheroes prompted fireman Somchai Yoosabai to rush back to the station, where he kept a Spider-Man costume in his locker.
The sight of Mr Somchai dressed as Spider-Man and holding a glass of juice for him, brought a big smile to the boy's face, and he promptly threw himself into the arms of his "superhero", police said.
Mr Somchai normally uses the costume to liven up fire drills in schools.
An unusual disguise has helped a Bangkok fireman rescue an eight-year-old boy who had climbed on to a third-floor window ledge, Thai police say.
The firefighter dressed up as the comic book superhero Spider-Man in order to coax the boy, who is autistic, from his dangerous perch.
Police said teachers had alerted the fire station after the boy began crying and climbed out of a classroom window.
It was reportedly his first day at the special needs school.
Efforts by the teachers to persuade the pupil to come back inside had failed.
But a remark by his mother about his passion for comic superheroes prompted fireman Somchai Yoosabai to rush back to the station, where he kept a Spider-Man costume in his locker.
The sight of Mr Somchai dressed as Spider-Man and holding a glass of juice for him, brought a big smile to the boy's face, and he promptly threw himself into the arms of his "superhero", police said.
Mr Somchai normally uses the costume to liven up fire drills in schools.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Girls talk about rape
Two girls in a Youtheatre production engage in a verbal duel on issues of culture, sexuality, betrayal, class and race
By Kathryn Greenaway, The GazetteMarch 19, 2009
From: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/theatre/Girls+talk+about+rape/1406152/story.html
Playwright Hannah Moscovitch realized she had to get back into the loop when it came to sex and the teenage girl after Youtheatre artistic director Michel Lefebvre commissioned her to write a play about rape, from a girl’s perspective. Moscovitch had just turned 30 and felt out of touch with teen girls and their attitudes toward sexuality.
As part of Youtheatre’s 40th anniversary season, there is one public performance of Moscovitch’s play In This World, directed by Lefebvre, at Théâtre Calixa-Lavallée tomorrow at 7 p.m.
Youtheatre is dedicated to the production of issue-oriented works by Canadian playwrights and has been touring Ed Roy’s Bang Boy, Bang! – a play about rape from a guy’s perspective – for years. Lefebvre wanted to give the girls a say.
Moscovitch hated her first draft of the play, so Lefebvre suggested she go to the source. She set up interviews with girls from a high school in Dorval and a high school in LaSalle.
“I was worried they would react to me like a teacher and I didn’t want my questions to sound judgmental,” Moscovitch said following a student performance on Monday.
“Luckily, because of the way I look (like a teenager), they opened up to me completely and said the most incredible things.
“The genesis for the (two) characters in the play is based on interviews I did with an alpha female from each of the two schools.”
In This World is relevant and unflinching.
Sharon James plays Neyssa, a curvy black girl with roots in Jamaica and a working-class address in LaSalle. She thinks girls who have sex are sluts.
Hannah Cheesman plays Bijou, a slender blond WASP from Westmount who has had sex with Neyssa’s cousin and is proud of it.
The girls attend the same swank private school (Neyssa’s on scholarship) and play on the same volleyball team.
Their tenuous friendship is threatened when Neyssa goes to a party at Bijou’s mansion and is raped. She tells no one. At school, Neyssa picks a fight with Bijou and punches her.
Cheesman and James vibrated with anger and frustration during Monday afternoon’s performance.
Lefebvre coaxed emotionally acute performances out of both actors, leaving little time for the audience to exhale, but then this is a play for teenagers who are pretty much on hormonal high alert 24/7, so the ferocity fit.
In the detention hall, the girls faced off while sitting on raised metal chairs. Their verbal sparring touched on issues of culture, sexuality, betrayal, class and race. At one point, Bijou stopped just short of using the “N” word.
Teenagers attending Monday’s performance listened carefully – the ultimate compliment – and responded thoughtfully during a question period following the show.
“It’s a risky thing having an ending where a rape is hidden instead of reported,” Moscovitch said.
“But when I interviewed the (girl students), they said it was what they would do. I’m hoping the teachers will talk about what went on and what should be done.”
Moscovitch is Ottawa-raised, Toronto-based and a National Theatre School graduate. Her mainstage play East of Berlin – about the son of a Nazi war criminal coming to terms with his father’s past – is a hit with theatre critics this season.
Youtheatre presents In This World at Théâtre Calixa-Lavallée, 3829 Calixa-Lavallée Ave., tomorrow at 7 p.m. For info, call 514-844-8781.
kgreenaway@thegazette.canwest.com
Two girls in a Youtheatre production engage in a verbal duel on issues of culture, sexuality, betrayal, class and race
By Kathryn Greenaway, The GazetteMarch 19, 2009
From: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/theatre/Girls+talk+about+rape/1406152/story.html
Playwright Hannah Moscovitch realized she had to get back into the loop when it came to sex and the teenage girl after Youtheatre artistic director Michel Lefebvre commissioned her to write a play about rape, from a girl’s perspective. Moscovitch had just turned 30 and felt out of touch with teen girls and their attitudes toward sexuality.
As part of Youtheatre’s 40th anniversary season, there is one public performance of Moscovitch’s play In This World, directed by Lefebvre, at Théâtre Calixa-Lavallée tomorrow at 7 p.m.
Youtheatre is dedicated to the production of issue-oriented works by Canadian playwrights and has been touring Ed Roy’s Bang Boy, Bang! – a play about rape from a guy’s perspective – for years. Lefebvre wanted to give the girls a say.
Moscovitch hated her first draft of the play, so Lefebvre suggested she go to the source. She set up interviews with girls from a high school in Dorval and a high school in LaSalle.
“I was worried they would react to me like a teacher and I didn’t want my questions to sound judgmental,” Moscovitch said following a student performance on Monday.
“Luckily, because of the way I look (like a teenager), they opened up to me completely and said the most incredible things.
“The genesis for the (two) characters in the play is based on interviews I did with an alpha female from each of the two schools.”
In This World is relevant and unflinching.
Sharon James plays Neyssa, a curvy black girl with roots in Jamaica and a working-class address in LaSalle. She thinks girls who have sex are sluts.
Hannah Cheesman plays Bijou, a slender blond WASP from Westmount who has had sex with Neyssa’s cousin and is proud of it.
The girls attend the same swank private school (Neyssa’s on scholarship) and play on the same volleyball team.
Their tenuous friendship is threatened when Neyssa goes to a party at Bijou’s mansion and is raped. She tells no one. At school, Neyssa picks a fight with Bijou and punches her.
Cheesman and James vibrated with anger and frustration during Monday afternoon’s performance.
Lefebvre coaxed emotionally acute performances out of both actors, leaving little time for the audience to exhale, but then this is a play for teenagers who are pretty much on hormonal high alert 24/7, so the ferocity fit.
In the detention hall, the girls faced off while sitting on raised metal chairs. Their verbal sparring touched on issues of culture, sexuality, betrayal, class and race. At one point, Bijou stopped just short of using the “N” word.
Teenagers attending Monday’s performance listened carefully – the ultimate compliment – and responded thoughtfully during a question period following the show.
“It’s a risky thing having an ending where a rape is hidden instead of reported,” Moscovitch said.
“But when I interviewed the (girl students), they said it was what they would do. I’m hoping the teachers will talk about what went on and what should be done.”
Moscovitch is Ottawa-raised, Toronto-based and a National Theatre School graduate. Her mainstage play East of Berlin – about the son of a Nazi war criminal coming to terms with his father’s past – is a hit with theatre critics this season.
Youtheatre presents In This World at Théâtre Calixa-Lavallée, 3829 Calixa-Lavallée Ave., tomorrow at 7 p.m. For info, call 514-844-8781.
kgreenaway@thegazette.canwest.com
Kids with freedom get more exercise
British Study; Research paves way for examining play environments
Reuters
From: http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/parenting/Kids+with+freedom+more+exercise/1223010/story.html
Children whose parents give them more free rein to roam are also more physically active, new research from the United Kingdom shows.
Parents are becoming less and less likely to allow their children this kind of independence, Dr. Angie Page and her colleagues from the University of Bristol point out, and more research is needed on how to change the social and physical environment to allow parents to feel more comfortable giving their children more autonomy.
Page and her team looked at the independent mobility -- the degree to which the children were allowed to move around without adult supervision. An example would be allowing children to walk to school or to a friend's house without being accompanied by an adult.
Parents may be becoming increasingly reluctant to let their children wander on their own due to concerns about traffic dangers or the threat that their child might be molested, the researchers note, or they may also want to spend more time interacting with their children.
Research has shown that children with more independent mobility interact more with other children and their environments, while lower levels of independent mobility could "negatively influence children's emotional, social and cognitive development," and may lead to more sedentary behaviours, putting them at risk of obesity, Page and her colleagues write. Evidence is mounting, they add, that children are spending less time on their own outside the home, and more likely to travel by car when they go out.
To investigate the relationship between independent mobility and physical activity, they looked at 1,307 boys and girls, 10-to-11 years old, attending 23 different schools in a large city. Children wore a device called an accelerometer to measure their physical activity for a week. The researchers looked at both local and area independent mobility, and asked the children how often they were allowed to go to various places on their own or with friends.
Overall, the researchers found, boys had more independent mobility than girls. And the greater a child's independent mobility, the more active he or she was on weekdays. However, the researchers found no link between independent mobility and weekend physical activity.
"Understanding the factors that influence independent mobility is necessary to determine the optimum social and physical environment that encourages parents and adult carers to allow their children to be physically active outside unsupervised," the researchers say.
"This should be in addition to encouraging children [and parents] to be more physically active outside together. Both of these approaches may be important mechanisms to promote increased physical activity in young people," they conclude.
British Study; Research paves way for examining play environments
Reuters
From: http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/parenting/Kids+with+freedom+more+exercise/1223010/story.html
Children whose parents give them more free rein to roam are also more physically active, new research from the United Kingdom shows.
Parents are becoming less and less likely to allow their children this kind of independence, Dr. Angie Page and her colleagues from the University of Bristol point out, and more research is needed on how to change the social and physical environment to allow parents to feel more comfortable giving their children more autonomy.
Page and her team looked at the independent mobility -- the degree to which the children were allowed to move around without adult supervision. An example would be allowing children to walk to school or to a friend's house without being accompanied by an adult.
Parents may be becoming increasingly reluctant to let their children wander on their own due to concerns about traffic dangers or the threat that their child might be molested, the researchers note, or they may also want to spend more time interacting with their children.
Research has shown that children with more independent mobility interact more with other children and their environments, while lower levels of independent mobility could "negatively influence children's emotional, social and cognitive development," and may lead to more sedentary behaviours, putting them at risk of obesity, Page and her colleagues write. Evidence is mounting, they add, that children are spending less time on their own outside the home, and more likely to travel by car when they go out.
To investigate the relationship between independent mobility and physical activity, they looked at 1,307 boys and girls, 10-to-11 years old, attending 23 different schools in a large city. Children wore a device called an accelerometer to measure their physical activity for a week. The researchers looked at both local and area independent mobility, and asked the children how often they were allowed to go to various places on their own or with friends.
Overall, the researchers found, boys had more independent mobility than girls. And the greater a child's independent mobility, the more active he or she was on weekdays. However, the researchers found no link between independent mobility and weekend physical activity.
"Understanding the factors that influence independent mobility is necessary to determine the optimum social and physical environment that encourages parents and adult carers to allow their children to be physically active outside unsupervised," the researchers say.
"This should be in addition to encouraging children [and parents] to be more physically active outside together. Both of these approaches may be important mechanisms to promote increased physical activity in young people," they conclude.
Extreme kids
If your child jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?
By Debbie Olsen, For The Calgary Herald
From: http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/parenting/Extreme+kids/1402036/story.html
Extreme sports like bungee jumping are becoming more popular with people of all ages. Many activities that were once the domain of adventurous adults are available for the younger set--providing they have parental approval. The tough thing as a parent is deciding whether an activity is too extreme for your comfort level--or theirs.
When it comes to risk-taking, sometimes it's best to let your children stretch their wings with carefully controlled activities. On a recent trip to New Zealand, our two teenaged boys were excited to try bungee jumping. The other four members of our family were not as eager, but we all climbed up the Auckland Bridge and stood beside the bungee platform to cheer on the dare devils. The experience gave new meaning to the old question: "If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump to?"
Here are some ideas for extreme (and not so extreme) activities.
THE ORIGINAL BUNGEE JUMP
In 1986, A. J. Hacket made his first jump from Auckland's Greenhithe Bridge. He opened the world's first permanent commercial bungee site at Kawarau Bridge near Queenstown not long afterward. He is one of the world's largest commercial bungee operators with permanent sites in New Zealand and around the world.
Two of our boys decided they'd like to bungee jump with the world's original operator off the Auckland Bridge. Like millions of adventurous souls before them, they lived to tell the tale.Info:It costs about $85 Cdn to bungee jump off the Auckland Bridge and that includes an A. J. Hackett Bungee T-shirt. (bungy. co. nz).
Hint: For about $24 Cdn per person, you can climb to the bungee platform and watch your friend or family member take the plunge off the Auckland Bridge. The views from the top are worth the fee, but seeing your loved one drop from the top is priceless.
ZORBING
As we rounded the stretch of New Zealand highway that leads into Rotorua we caught our first glimpse of the Zorb, a large sphere that looks like a giant beach ball. Inside the larger ball was a smaller one and inside of that was a tourist who was running down the hill like a hamster in an exercise ball. Our kids knew it was something they just had to try.Info:The zorb was invented in New Zealand and there are several places there and around the world where you can experience zorbing. It costs about $30 Cdn for one ride in Rotorua. (zorb. co. nz).
TANDEM PARASAILING
Sammy Duvall's Watersport Centre at Disney's Contemporary Resort in Florida offers a unique parasailing experience for families that provides a bird's-eye view of Walt Disney World that maxes out at 180 metres in height.Info:Parasailing flights start at $95 US for a single rider or $170 for two tandem riders. All fliers must be over six years old and the total weight on the parachute must be between 57 kg and 150 kg. ( sammyduvall.com).
TANDEM HANG-GLIDING
It takes months of training to be able to solo hang-glide, but novices can enjoy a tandem flight in a single morning. With an instructor by your side, you are towed 2,000 feet into the air and free fly for 15 to 20 minutes. While in the air, your instructor teaches you how to steer the glider using your body weight. People from ages four to 40 have enjoyed the experience and on a recent visit to Orlando, my 10-year-old daughter and I gave it a try. Exhilarating!
Info: A standard tandem instruction flight costs $120 at Wallaby Ranch near Orlando.( wallaby.com).
SAFETY FIRST
It's important to check out a company's safety measures as well as its safety record prior to participating in any type of extreme activity. Wearing proper safety gear for the activity such as helmets, pads, and proper clothing and having adequate travel medical insurance in place is also a must.
Debbie Olsen is an Alberta-based freelance writer and mother of four children.
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
If your child jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?
By Debbie Olsen, For The Calgary Herald
From: http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/parenting/Extreme+kids/1402036/story.html
Extreme sports like bungee jumping are becoming more popular with people of all ages. Many activities that were once the domain of adventurous adults are available for the younger set--providing they have parental approval. The tough thing as a parent is deciding whether an activity is too extreme for your comfort level--or theirs.
When it comes to risk-taking, sometimes it's best to let your children stretch their wings with carefully controlled activities. On a recent trip to New Zealand, our two teenaged boys were excited to try bungee jumping. The other four members of our family were not as eager, but we all climbed up the Auckland Bridge and stood beside the bungee platform to cheer on the dare devils. The experience gave new meaning to the old question: "If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump to?"
Here are some ideas for extreme (and not so extreme) activities.
THE ORIGINAL BUNGEE JUMP
In 1986, A. J. Hacket made his first jump from Auckland's Greenhithe Bridge. He opened the world's first permanent commercial bungee site at Kawarau Bridge near Queenstown not long afterward. He is one of the world's largest commercial bungee operators with permanent sites in New Zealand and around the world.
Two of our boys decided they'd like to bungee jump with the world's original operator off the Auckland Bridge. Like millions of adventurous souls before them, they lived to tell the tale.Info:It costs about $85 Cdn to bungee jump off the Auckland Bridge and that includes an A. J. Hackett Bungee T-shirt. (bungy. co. nz).
Hint: For about $24 Cdn per person, you can climb to the bungee platform and watch your friend or family member take the plunge off the Auckland Bridge. The views from the top are worth the fee, but seeing your loved one drop from the top is priceless.
ZORBING
As we rounded the stretch of New Zealand highway that leads into Rotorua we caught our first glimpse of the Zorb, a large sphere that looks like a giant beach ball. Inside the larger ball was a smaller one and inside of that was a tourist who was running down the hill like a hamster in an exercise ball. Our kids knew it was something they just had to try.Info:The zorb was invented in New Zealand and there are several places there and around the world where you can experience zorbing. It costs about $30 Cdn for one ride in Rotorua. (zorb. co. nz).
TANDEM PARASAILING
Sammy Duvall's Watersport Centre at Disney's Contemporary Resort in Florida offers a unique parasailing experience for families that provides a bird's-eye view of Walt Disney World that maxes out at 180 metres in height.Info:Parasailing flights start at $95 US for a single rider or $170 for two tandem riders. All fliers must be over six years old and the total weight on the parachute must be between 57 kg and 150 kg. ( sammyduvall.com).
TANDEM HANG-GLIDING
It takes months of training to be able to solo hang-glide, but novices can enjoy a tandem flight in a single morning. With an instructor by your side, you are towed 2,000 feet into the air and free fly for 15 to 20 minutes. While in the air, your instructor teaches you how to steer the glider using your body weight. People from ages four to 40 have enjoyed the experience and on a recent visit to Orlando, my 10-year-old daughter and I gave it a try. Exhilarating!
Info: A standard tandem instruction flight costs $120 at Wallaby Ranch near Orlando.( wallaby.com).
SAFETY FIRST
It's important to check out a company's safety measures as well as its safety record prior to participating in any type of extreme activity. Wearing proper safety gear for the activity such as helmets, pads, and proper clothing and having adequate travel medical insurance in place is also a must.
Debbie Olsen is an Alberta-based freelance writer and mother of four children.
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
Beauty and the Feast
The Cosmetic Industry's Female Feeding Frenzy
from http://bitchmagazine.org/article/beauty-and-the-feast
The first thing you see is food--a breastlike dome of cake towers at the top of t¬he ad, frosted pink with a raspberry on top. “It’s like dessert for your legs,” declares the text, and just in case this copy wasn’t clear, below it a pair of cellulite-free gams balances a bottle of Skintimate After-Shave Gel in lieu of icing. A cartoonish, disembodied bald head floats in the background, licking his lips, orbited by three quotes: “In the shave aisle!,” “Soothe and moisturize!,” and “3 luscious flavors.” The unexclamated “flavors” reveals a strange equivocation in terms of hunger and beauty. This shaving gel is inedible and can hardly claim more than a “luscious” fragrance, yet the ad presents the product as a kind of snack for the skin, an external form of nourishment that offers the sensual experience of food without the sugar, fat, and shame so commonly associated with real-life eating.
A glut of “flavored” cosmetics and those emphasizing the vitamins, proteins, and other elements of proper nutrition point to a new imperative in the beauty industry: physical nourishment through external consumption. These days, everything from drugstore staples to high-end status brands carry with them a food frisson. While some of these products contain actual edibles—the Body Shop, for instance, goes through 70,000 bananas each year to make its products—many others merely adopt names and descriptions that would be more at home in a cookbook or on a dessert menu. The Body Shop has offered a full line of epicurean options since 1976, from the aforementioned banana hair conditioner to kiwi lip balm to “body butters” scented with mango and papaya, complete with promotional copy that reads like a restaurant review, waxing poetic on the natural goodness and nutritive prowess of their ingredients. A boutique line of cosmetics called Fresh does a brisk trade in Milk lotion, Rice facial oil, and Brown Sugar body scrub, while the Philosophy line offers a set of body washes called “The Cookbook” that allows hungry bathers to lather up with Coconut Cream Pie, Blueberry Pie, and Key Lime Pie in what their ad copy calls “a guiltless indulgence.”
Beauty-product ads pitch the food angle ad nauseum, and the exceptionally long shelf life of the trend proves they’ve tantalized consumers’ tastebuds. Still, there’s clearly more than just sales strategy happening here: By imbuing these products with the power to fulfill cravings beyond the realm of looking good, advertising reveals female desire en masse. Judging by the language of the ads and the scents of fattening, forbidden treats packed into plastic bottles and destined for every part of our bodies but our mouths, it would seem that women are, in a word, hungry—physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
The physical hunger should come as no surprise. With the ideal body size shrinking to negative numbers and half of American women on a diet, thoughts about food claim an increasing amount of women’s time and energy. Though the diets currently in vogue may not be of the traditional Ladies’ Home Journal, lose-10-pounds-on-grapefruit-only variety, there’s been a recent surge in popularity of “health”-focused diets that are just as stringent. (No wheat. No chicken. For god’s sake, no carbs.) And while advertisers exploit images of food to attract the hungry consumer’s wandering eye, pictures of impossibly thin and relentlessly airbrushed models peer out from every newsstand and billboard, reminding her of the virtues of this abstention. Is it any wonder that so many women are feeding their skin and hair with the same treats they regularly deny their stomachs?
Homegrown recipes for things like avocado hair ¬conditioners and cucumber-slice eye depuffers have certainly been around since the invention of the slumber party, if not longer, but only in the last two decades have manufacturers mainstreamed the refrigerator facials of yore into neatly bottled concoctions that are chemically engineered to remind us of everyday food products—or, in the case of “natural” and “organic” beauty lines like the Body Shop and Lush, that urge you to rub actual food on your body and into your hair instead of ingesting it.
Though nourishment needs to go in your mouth rather than on your face to do any good, cosmetic companies regularly enlist scientific and medical discourse to pitch their makeup and promote the myth of living skin—living, that is, apart from the woman to whom the skin belongs.
The idea of living, nourishable skin first emerged in Estée Lauder’s 1982 campaign for its Swiss Performing Extract. The two-page spread featured a closeup of a model and a facing page of pseudocientific advertising copy, complete with an imitation fact sheet that announced:
Now: Estée Lauder and today’s technology bring you super-rich nourishment.... Fact: Swiss Performing Extract is more than a moisturizer. It is a super nourishing lotion blended in the U.S.A. with natural ingredients including soluble protein: a substance plentiful in young skin. Fact: Science tells us this natural substance has outstanding capabilities. It penetrates right down to the base layer of cells to help promote resilience, good tone and to maintain optimum moisture balance…. Because makeup and moisturizers can’t do it all.
The language and imagery of these ad campaigns recast female skin as an abstruse entity full of mysteries that science has only begun to unearth, a newly discovered passage to the internal body that asks to be penetrated and thus transformed. Much like the female body of traditional medicine, the skin is estranged from the woman, who must turn to science for understanding and maintenance.
A year after Estée Lauder’s Swiss Performing Extract hit the scene, Lancôme advanced the so-called science of skin care further in an ad for Nutribel, a “Nour¬ishing Hydrating Emulsion” billed as “a very important means of sustenance...for the moisturizing care and feeding of your skin.” The Nutribel ads treated the idea of living skin as a breakthrough—it had, of course, been alive all along, but its discovery was brand new. This meant that the skin had been neglected; other products were not meeting its needs, and it was hungry.
Nutribel was introduced at a time when the average female consumer could easily believe in the hunger of her skin because her own hunger was undoubtedly growing stronger. Issues of Cosmopolitan from the early ’80s feature models far slimmer than their predecessors, while the advent of aerobics, NutraSweet, and meal-replacement products brought us images of women happily burning calories in pink leotards and purple leg warmers, a Crystal Light in one hand and a frothy glass of Slim-Fast in the other.
Today, thanks in no small part to these pseudo¬scientific “advances” responsible for both NutraSweet and the medical language of cosmetics, we are more aware than ever of how our bodies stack up against cultural ideals, and appetites are raging in response. We are told to look to science as the day spa of our dreams, as though its ever-expanding technology only exists in service to the whims of beauty. Indeed, another societal hunger is at work in this approach: the hunger for faster, prettier, better living through chemicals. Even if scientists are taking their own sweet time to trot out the male birth-control pill, at least we know they’re plugging away at all hours to end the wrinkle epidemic once and for all.
“Believe in beauty,” urges Lancôme. “Reveal sensational skin with pure Vitamin C. For soft, flawless skin.” In this 2003 ad for Sensation Totale, “a perfecting complex,” a model’s face and a luminous pink rosebud provide concrete evidence for the concept of perfection. A zipper is attached to the rose’s outer petals, half pulled down. Below it, the text coos, “A unique time-release reservoir of pure Vitamin C works with skin’s natural enzymatic activity to reveal healthy-looking, sensational skin.” So though the ad tells us -little about just what this “complex” is (a cream? a serum? a gas?), we do know that, just as the rose-zipper reveals tender new petals, so the complex will reveal new skin—a face-zipper, if you will. The deliberate word sequence of “vitamin,” “enzyme,” and “healthy” cleverly mimics the natural process of digestion. The ad thus acknowledges true internal hunger just as it exploits socially imposed hunger for external perfection. Furthermore, the fulfillments of these hungers have been deemed mutually exclusive. Enter the sale.
This cycle of self-denial and appeasement through moisturizing lotion is also enacted on an emotional and spiritual level. You might not have realized it, but your skin has needs, too. In a recent print ad for Dove Essential Nutrients Day Cream, a vitamin caplet—apparently formed by rainwater from a big green leaf at the top of the page—drops into a jar of cream. A block of pale, lowercase text floats tranquilly at the center, informing us that this potion is “made with a perfect blend of skin-loving nutrients plus vitamins, pure spring water, and green tea extract. It has what’s essential to moisturize skin so it can glow with health.”
The inclusion of green tea and spring water implies purity and calm, while the simple visual scheme provides a sort of quiet, meditative space where one can contemplate the pressing metaphysical questions involved in moisturizing. The consumer’s emotional and spiritual longing is projected onto her exterior in simple yet convincing terms: The phrase “skin-loving nutrients,” for instance, transforms the skin into an entity both capable of digesting nutrients and extracting love and comfort from the experience, thus imitating a very human relationship with food.
An ad for Estée Lauder’s Day¬Wear Plus echoes this sentiment: “Wear DayWear Plus and your skin will thank you.” By using gratitude as shorthand for a state of beauty, the text evokes a complex give-and-take relationship between the consumer and her skin. Like a pet or a child, the skin is recast as a point of pride and responsibility; if its owner feeds and cares for it well, it will mirror her virtue to the world.
Similarly, the connection between food and sensual pleasure is also played out through cosmetics marketing. In a typical ad, for Gillette Satin Care Shave Gel, an extraordinarily tall and slender model rolls around naked in a pile of citrus fruit. She smiles widely, her eyes closed in ecstasy, as if all that grapefruit were delivering a serious contact high: It’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying food more even if she were actually eating it. At her toes, the ad’s text reads, “Introducing Satin Care Citrus Infusion Shave Gel. Its zesty fragrance with moisture-rich skin nourishing vitamins leaves legs feeling soft and satiny smooth.”
The ad would have us believe that the model is overwhelmed with pleasure at the mere idea of food, and it’s that idea that has proven so appealing to consumers. Calgon employs the same tactics in an advertisement for its Ahh...Spa! line. A model’s seemingly flawless skin covers most of the page, digitally retouched to glow with garish highlights. Below her is a row of various tropical fruits; beside her, a bottle of Nourishing Body Butter containing “Nourishing Fruit Complex with Mango Extract.” The slogan “Pleasures of the tropics, pampering of a spa” evokes sensual pleasure and loving care, all under the pretense of nourishment—if the customer can’t hope for such treatment, at least her skin can.
Over time, the creation of hundreds of products for hair care, body moisturizing, body-hair removal, wrinkle fighting, and so on has compartmentalized feminine features like a Petrarch sonnet, alienating women from their whole selves and breaking them into parts that can then be scrutinized accordingly. The resulting insecurity behooves the cosmetics industry just as it did religious, academic, and professional institutions of the past. The beauty tower might topple if women were widely exposed to a more holistic approach to body maintenance—like, you know, eating vitamins and protein instead of slathering them on our legs, reducing stress through division of household tasks and improved childcare, and finding ways to attend to our bodies that don’t involve plucking, scrubbing, or loathing.
Sadly, female hunger is rarely acknowledged outside of beauty copy. By transferring our human needs to our skin, advertising attempts to placate consumers with the notion that real satisfaction is only $10, $20, or $70 away. It trivializes our desires by making them a simple matter of appearance, denying the importance of what deeper needs lurk beneath our skin and inside our bellies. We are encouraged to bear our hunger like a shameful secret, lest our guilty pleasures become societal demands and incite real changes that can lead to satisfaction that goes beyond the corporeal. With their let-them-eat-body-butter take on our hunger, marketers continue to make it viscerally clear that where women are concerned, it’s still what’s outside that counts.
Juliana Tringali is a freelance writer living in Oakland, Calif., and a firm believer in the healing powers of chocolate.
The Cosmetic Industry's Female Feeding Frenzy
from http://bitchmagazine.org/article/beauty-and-the-feast
The first thing you see is food--a breastlike dome of cake towers at the top of t¬he ad, frosted pink with a raspberry on top. “It’s like dessert for your legs,” declares the text, and just in case this copy wasn’t clear, below it a pair of cellulite-free gams balances a bottle of Skintimate After-Shave Gel in lieu of icing. A cartoonish, disembodied bald head floats in the background, licking his lips, orbited by three quotes: “In the shave aisle!,” “Soothe and moisturize!,” and “3 luscious flavors.” The unexclamated “flavors” reveals a strange equivocation in terms of hunger and beauty. This shaving gel is inedible and can hardly claim more than a “luscious” fragrance, yet the ad presents the product as a kind of snack for the skin, an external form of nourishment that offers the sensual experience of food without the sugar, fat, and shame so commonly associated with real-life eating.
A glut of “flavored” cosmetics and those emphasizing the vitamins, proteins, and other elements of proper nutrition point to a new imperative in the beauty industry: physical nourishment through external consumption. These days, everything from drugstore staples to high-end status brands carry with them a food frisson. While some of these products contain actual edibles—the Body Shop, for instance, goes through 70,000 bananas each year to make its products—many others merely adopt names and descriptions that would be more at home in a cookbook or on a dessert menu. The Body Shop has offered a full line of epicurean options since 1976, from the aforementioned banana hair conditioner to kiwi lip balm to “body butters” scented with mango and papaya, complete with promotional copy that reads like a restaurant review, waxing poetic on the natural goodness and nutritive prowess of their ingredients. A boutique line of cosmetics called Fresh does a brisk trade in Milk lotion, Rice facial oil, and Brown Sugar body scrub, while the Philosophy line offers a set of body washes called “The Cookbook” that allows hungry bathers to lather up with Coconut Cream Pie, Blueberry Pie, and Key Lime Pie in what their ad copy calls “a guiltless indulgence.”
Beauty-product ads pitch the food angle ad nauseum, and the exceptionally long shelf life of the trend proves they’ve tantalized consumers’ tastebuds. Still, there’s clearly more than just sales strategy happening here: By imbuing these products with the power to fulfill cravings beyond the realm of looking good, advertising reveals female desire en masse. Judging by the language of the ads and the scents of fattening, forbidden treats packed into plastic bottles and destined for every part of our bodies but our mouths, it would seem that women are, in a word, hungry—physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
The physical hunger should come as no surprise. With the ideal body size shrinking to negative numbers and half of American women on a diet, thoughts about food claim an increasing amount of women’s time and energy. Though the diets currently in vogue may not be of the traditional Ladies’ Home Journal, lose-10-pounds-on-grapefruit-only variety, there’s been a recent surge in popularity of “health”-focused diets that are just as stringent. (No wheat. No chicken. For god’s sake, no carbs.) And while advertisers exploit images of food to attract the hungry consumer’s wandering eye, pictures of impossibly thin and relentlessly airbrushed models peer out from every newsstand and billboard, reminding her of the virtues of this abstention. Is it any wonder that so many women are feeding their skin and hair with the same treats they regularly deny their stomachs?
Homegrown recipes for things like avocado hair ¬conditioners and cucumber-slice eye depuffers have certainly been around since the invention of the slumber party, if not longer, but only in the last two decades have manufacturers mainstreamed the refrigerator facials of yore into neatly bottled concoctions that are chemically engineered to remind us of everyday food products—or, in the case of “natural” and “organic” beauty lines like the Body Shop and Lush, that urge you to rub actual food on your body and into your hair instead of ingesting it.
Though nourishment needs to go in your mouth rather than on your face to do any good, cosmetic companies regularly enlist scientific and medical discourse to pitch their makeup and promote the myth of living skin—living, that is, apart from the woman to whom the skin belongs.
The idea of living, nourishable skin first emerged in Estée Lauder’s 1982 campaign for its Swiss Performing Extract. The two-page spread featured a closeup of a model and a facing page of pseudocientific advertising copy, complete with an imitation fact sheet that announced:
Now: Estée Lauder and today’s technology bring you super-rich nourishment.... Fact: Swiss Performing Extract is more than a moisturizer. It is a super nourishing lotion blended in the U.S.A. with natural ingredients including soluble protein: a substance plentiful in young skin. Fact: Science tells us this natural substance has outstanding capabilities. It penetrates right down to the base layer of cells to help promote resilience, good tone and to maintain optimum moisture balance…. Because makeup and moisturizers can’t do it all.
The language and imagery of these ad campaigns recast female skin as an abstruse entity full of mysteries that science has only begun to unearth, a newly discovered passage to the internal body that asks to be penetrated and thus transformed. Much like the female body of traditional medicine, the skin is estranged from the woman, who must turn to science for understanding and maintenance.
A year after Estée Lauder’s Swiss Performing Extract hit the scene, Lancôme advanced the so-called science of skin care further in an ad for Nutribel, a “Nour¬ishing Hydrating Emulsion” billed as “a very important means of sustenance...for the moisturizing care and feeding of your skin.” The Nutribel ads treated the idea of living skin as a breakthrough—it had, of course, been alive all along, but its discovery was brand new. This meant that the skin had been neglected; other products were not meeting its needs, and it was hungry.
Nutribel was introduced at a time when the average female consumer could easily believe in the hunger of her skin because her own hunger was undoubtedly growing stronger. Issues of Cosmopolitan from the early ’80s feature models far slimmer than their predecessors, while the advent of aerobics, NutraSweet, and meal-replacement products brought us images of women happily burning calories in pink leotards and purple leg warmers, a Crystal Light in one hand and a frothy glass of Slim-Fast in the other.
Today, thanks in no small part to these pseudo¬scientific “advances” responsible for both NutraSweet and the medical language of cosmetics, we are more aware than ever of how our bodies stack up against cultural ideals, and appetites are raging in response. We are told to look to science as the day spa of our dreams, as though its ever-expanding technology only exists in service to the whims of beauty. Indeed, another societal hunger is at work in this approach: the hunger for faster, prettier, better living through chemicals. Even if scientists are taking their own sweet time to trot out the male birth-control pill, at least we know they’re plugging away at all hours to end the wrinkle epidemic once and for all.
“Believe in beauty,” urges Lancôme. “Reveal sensational skin with pure Vitamin C. For soft, flawless skin.” In this 2003 ad for Sensation Totale, “a perfecting complex,” a model’s face and a luminous pink rosebud provide concrete evidence for the concept of perfection. A zipper is attached to the rose’s outer petals, half pulled down. Below it, the text coos, “A unique time-release reservoir of pure Vitamin C works with skin’s natural enzymatic activity to reveal healthy-looking, sensational skin.” So though the ad tells us -little about just what this “complex” is (a cream? a serum? a gas?), we do know that, just as the rose-zipper reveals tender new petals, so the complex will reveal new skin—a face-zipper, if you will. The deliberate word sequence of “vitamin,” “enzyme,” and “healthy” cleverly mimics the natural process of digestion. The ad thus acknowledges true internal hunger just as it exploits socially imposed hunger for external perfection. Furthermore, the fulfillments of these hungers have been deemed mutually exclusive. Enter the sale.
This cycle of self-denial and appeasement through moisturizing lotion is also enacted on an emotional and spiritual level. You might not have realized it, but your skin has needs, too. In a recent print ad for Dove Essential Nutrients Day Cream, a vitamin caplet—apparently formed by rainwater from a big green leaf at the top of the page—drops into a jar of cream. A block of pale, lowercase text floats tranquilly at the center, informing us that this potion is “made with a perfect blend of skin-loving nutrients plus vitamins, pure spring water, and green tea extract. It has what’s essential to moisturize skin so it can glow with health.”
The inclusion of green tea and spring water implies purity and calm, while the simple visual scheme provides a sort of quiet, meditative space where one can contemplate the pressing metaphysical questions involved in moisturizing. The consumer’s emotional and spiritual longing is projected onto her exterior in simple yet convincing terms: The phrase “skin-loving nutrients,” for instance, transforms the skin into an entity both capable of digesting nutrients and extracting love and comfort from the experience, thus imitating a very human relationship with food.
An ad for Estée Lauder’s Day¬Wear Plus echoes this sentiment: “Wear DayWear Plus and your skin will thank you.” By using gratitude as shorthand for a state of beauty, the text evokes a complex give-and-take relationship between the consumer and her skin. Like a pet or a child, the skin is recast as a point of pride and responsibility; if its owner feeds and cares for it well, it will mirror her virtue to the world.
Similarly, the connection between food and sensual pleasure is also played out through cosmetics marketing. In a typical ad, for Gillette Satin Care Shave Gel, an extraordinarily tall and slender model rolls around naked in a pile of citrus fruit. She smiles widely, her eyes closed in ecstasy, as if all that grapefruit were delivering a serious contact high: It’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying food more even if she were actually eating it. At her toes, the ad’s text reads, “Introducing Satin Care Citrus Infusion Shave Gel. Its zesty fragrance with moisture-rich skin nourishing vitamins leaves legs feeling soft and satiny smooth.”
The ad would have us believe that the model is overwhelmed with pleasure at the mere idea of food, and it’s that idea that has proven so appealing to consumers. Calgon employs the same tactics in an advertisement for its Ahh...Spa! line. A model’s seemingly flawless skin covers most of the page, digitally retouched to glow with garish highlights. Below her is a row of various tropical fruits; beside her, a bottle of Nourishing Body Butter containing “Nourishing Fruit Complex with Mango Extract.” The slogan “Pleasures of the tropics, pampering of a spa” evokes sensual pleasure and loving care, all under the pretense of nourishment—if the customer can’t hope for such treatment, at least her skin can.
Over time, the creation of hundreds of products for hair care, body moisturizing, body-hair removal, wrinkle fighting, and so on has compartmentalized feminine features like a Petrarch sonnet, alienating women from their whole selves and breaking them into parts that can then be scrutinized accordingly. The resulting insecurity behooves the cosmetics industry just as it did religious, academic, and professional institutions of the past. The beauty tower might topple if women were widely exposed to a more holistic approach to body maintenance—like, you know, eating vitamins and protein instead of slathering them on our legs, reducing stress through division of household tasks and improved childcare, and finding ways to attend to our bodies that don’t involve plucking, scrubbing, or loathing.
Sadly, female hunger is rarely acknowledged outside of beauty copy. By transferring our human needs to our skin, advertising attempts to placate consumers with the notion that real satisfaction is only $10, $20, or $70 away. It trivializes our desires by making them a simple matter of appearance, denying the importance of what deeper needs lurk beneath our skin and inside our bellies. We are encouraged to bear our hunger like a shameful secret, lest our guilty pleasures become societal demands and incite real changes that can lead to satisfaction that goes beyond the corporeal. With their let-them-eat-body-butter take on our hunger, marketers continue to make it viscerally clear that where women are concerned, it’s still what’s outside that counts.
Juliana Tringali is a freelance writer living in Oakland, Calif., and a firm believer in the healing powers of chocolate.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Canada: Feminist activist targets male-dominated government, ice rinks
Article here. Excerpt:
Public toilets and ice time are just two of a "million" things that could be better planned with women in mind, says Prabha Khosla.
'The feminist planner, researcher and activist, who is a founding member of Toronto Women's City Alliance and the author of a recent UN-HABITAT publication on gender and local government, will speak at the city's International Women's Day Celebration in council chambers March 9.
Khosla, who works internationally and lives between Toronto and Vancouver, says administrators in charge of Toronto's skating arenas allotted ice time for hockey players based on who had held slots in the past.
"Because guys had been getting all that ice time, they always got the first dibs," she said.
Once decision makers consciously consider equity and equality, they realize change is needed, Khosla says, so that women and girls don't have to slap pucks at 3 a.m.
...
Decisions about infrastructure, sports and recreation, public transit, public toilets and neighbourhood design would better suit women, seniors and multicultural groups if they were considered through a gender lens, Khosla says, who cited the example of better lighting around bus stops.'
Khosla argued International Women's Day, March 8, is an important moment to acknowledge the struggles and strengths of women.
Women have been marking an International Women's Day since 1911 when activists fought for the right to vote, to hold public office, to work in safe working conditions and fair wages without discrimination, and for all citizens to live peacefully and without poverty.
The United Nations began celebrating March 8 as International Women's Day in 1975, International Women's Year. The UN proclaimed it the day for Women's Rights and International Peace two years later.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Helping Children Cope with Death
by Dr. Benjamin Spock
(This article could be useful for the EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUACTION program).
Death is a fact of life that every child must grapple with. For some, the death of a goldfish is their first exposure; for others, it is the death of a grandparent. In many cultures, death is viewed as a natural occurrence, and no attempt is made to isolate it from everyday life.
How parents talk about it shapes a child's perception. Our culture, on the other hand, remains very uneasy about the whole thing. People tend to die in institutions, not at home with family present. We use euphemisms to talk about death: "He kicked the bucket, went to sleep, bought the farm" -- anything to distance us from the reality that, in fact, he died. And we wonder whether young children would be too stressed by attending the funeral.
If adults are uncomfortable with the notion of death, it is no wonder that many are even more perplexed about how to help children deal with it. Some would just as soon deny the whole thing.
That dog lying motionless at the side of the road? "He's just resting. He's fine. What did you learn in school today?" Others choose to avoid the concrete and focus solely on the ethereal: "The angels came and took Grandpa and now he's up in heaven with Grandma." Still others duck the question altogether: "Don't you worry about what death is. No one is going to die soon. Where do you get such ideas?"
Talk at your child's level
Like most things in life, children can best learn to deal with death when their parents answer their questions at their level and treat it as a natural subject to talk about. Obviously, the impact and meaning of a child's first exposure to death depend on a number of circumstances:
• How old the child is and her developmental level of understanding.
• What and who died and how close he was to the child.
• The cause of death and whether it was expected or sudden.
For preschool-age children
In the preschool years, children's ideas and misconceptions about death are influenced by the magical tendencies of their thinking in general. Children this age may believe, for example, that death is reversible and that the dead person will come back someday. They are too young to understand death's immutable finality. They also tend to feel responsible for everything that happens in their world, including death, and may fear punishment for unkind thoughts they had about the dead person or animal. They may also view death as "catching," like a cold, and worry that someone else will soon die.
See: Brain Development: How It All Starts
They tend to think in very concrete terms: "How will Uncle Bob breathe if he's in the ground?" Parents can help a child by being equally concrete: "Uncle Bob won't breathe anymore. He also won't eat with us anymore or brush his teeth."
It should be emphasized to children at this age that they in no way caused the death and that death is a part of the life cycle. Parents should also help their child deal with grief by acknowledging that losing a friend or grandparent is very sad and that it is sad to think that person won't be coming back. By dealing with their own feelings, parents can help the child deal with her feelings.
See: Answering Questions about Death
Funerals
Many parents wonder what to do about allowing a 3- to 6-year-old child to attend the funeral of a relative or close friend of the family. I think that if a child wants to attend a funeral, if the parents are comfortable with the idea, and if the parents prepare him for what will happen at the funeral, then children from the age of 3 onward can attend funerals.
They can even accompany the family to the cemetery for the burial. It's important that an adult whom the child knows well is with the child and emotionally available to him at all times, to answer questions and if necessary, to take the child home if he becomes too upset.
(This article could be useful for the EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUACTION program).
Death is a fact of life that every child must grapple with. For some, the death of a goldfish is their first exposure; for others, it is the death of a grandparent. In many cultures, death is viewed as a natural occurrence, and no attempt is made to isolate it from everyday life.
How parents talk about it shapes a child's perception. Our culture, on the other hand, remains very uneasy about the whole thing. People tend to die in institutions, not at home with family present. We use euphemisms to talk about death: "He kicked the bucket, went to sleep, bought the farm" -- anything to distance us from the reality that, in fact, he died. And we wonder whether young children would be too stressed by attending the funeral.
If adults are uncomfortable with the notion of death, it is no wonder that many are even more perplexed about how to help children deal with it. Some would just as soon deny the whole thing.
That dog lying motionless at the side of the road? "He's just resting. He's fine. What did you learn in school today?" Others choose to avoid the concrete and focus solely on the ethereal: "The angels came and took Grandpa and now he's up in heaven with Grandma." Still others duck the question altogether: "Don't you worry about what death is. No one is going to die soon. Where do you get such ideas?"
Talk at your child's level
Like most things in life, children can best learn to deal with death when their parents answer their questions at their level and treat it as a natural subject to talk about. Obviously, the impact and meaning of a child's first exposure to death depend on a number of circumstances:
• How old the child is and her developmental level of understanding.
• What and who died and how close he was to the child.
• The cause of death and whether it was expected or sudden.
For preschool-age children
In the preschool years, children's ideas and misconceptions about death are influenced by the magical tendencies of their thinking in general. Children this age may believe, for example, that death is reversible and that the dead person will come back someday. They are too young to understand death's immutable finality. They also tend to feel responsible for everything that happens in their world, including death, and may fear punishment for unkind thoughts they had about the dead person or animal. They may also view death as "catching," like a cold, and worry that someone else will soon die.
See: Brain Development: How It All Starts
They tend to think in very concrete terms: "How will Uncle Bob breathe if he's in the ground?" Parents can help a child by being equally concrete: "Uncle Bob won't breathe anymore. He also won't eat with us anymore or brush his teeth."
It should be emphasized to children at this age that they in no way caused the death and that death is a part of the life cycle. Parents should also help their child deal with grief by acknowledging that losing a friend or grandparent is very sad and that it is sad to think that person won't be coming back. By dealing with their own feelings, parents can help the child deal with her feelings.
See: Answering Questions about Death
Funerals
Many parents wonder what to do about allowing a 3- to 6-year-old child to attend the funeral of a relative or close friend of the family. I think that if a child wants to attend a funeral, if the parents are comfortable with the idea, and if the parents prepare him for what will happen at the funeral, then children from the age of 3 onward can attend funerals.
They can even accompany the family to the cemetery for the burial. It's important that an adult whom the child knows well is with the child and emotionally available to him at all times, to answer questions and if necessary, to take the child home if he becomes too upset.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Health Care for More Kids
Children's health-care insurance bill passes the Senate
About 9 million American kids are growing up in families that do not have health insurance. But it appears that help is on the way for many families that do not have the money to pay for doctors or medicine.
Last week, the Senate passed a bill that will expand a U.S. government program that provides children's health insurance coverage for families who can't afford it.
The bill is called SCHIP, or State Children's Health Insurance Program. The program provides insurance to children in families that make too much money to qualify for Medicaid coverage, but not enough to afford private insurance.
More than 7 million kids received health care insurance from an older version of SCHIP during 2008. This new version of the bill extends that coverage to an additional 4 million kids.
SCHIP is an important piece of President Barack Obama's plan to reform health care overall.
"Providing health care to more than 10 million children through the Children's Health Insurance Program will serve as a down payment on my commitment to ensure that every American has access to quality, affordable health care," President Obama said in a statement.
The program will be funded by an increase in the federal tax on cigarettes, from 39 cents to $1 a pack. This tax increase will generate $32 billion to finance expansion of the program.
States have different eligibility rules for the program. But in most states, uninsured children below the age of 19, whose families earn up to $44,100 a year (for a family of four) would be eligible under the Senate bill.
This insurance pays for doctor visits, immunizations, illnesses that require a stay in the hospital, and emergency room visits.
Although there was some support for expanding SCHIP from Republicans, many of them have proposed amendments to limit the program. Republicans generally believe the government should have a very limited role in health care. But because Democrats now hold a majority in the Senate, they were able to defeat amendments to the bill.
But even with the expansion of SCHIP, about 5 million children will still be uninsured.
During his election campaign, Obama called for requiring all children to have health coverage. SCHIP may prove a strong step in that direction. The House of Representatives still needs to pass the bill before it can go to President Obama for his signature.
Question:
Do you think this will help or hurt Americans ability to access health care? Why?
About 9 million American kids are growing up in families that do not have health insurance. But it appears that help is on the way for many families that do not have the money to pay for doctors or medicine.
Last week, the Senate passed a bill that will expand a U.S. government program that provides children's health insurance coverage for families who can't afford it.
The bill is called SCHIP, or State Children's Health Insurance Program. The program provides insurance to children in families that make too much money to qualify for Medicaid coverage, but not enough to afford private insurance.
More than 7 million kids received health care insurance from an older version of SCHIP during 2008. This new version of the bill extends that coverage to an additional 4 million kids.
SCHIP is an important piece of President Barack Obama's plan to reform health care overall.
"Providing health care to more than 10 million children through the Children's Health Insurance Program will serve as a down payment on my commitment to ensure that every American has access to quality, affordable health care," President Obama said in a statement.
The program will be funded by an increase in the federal tax on cigarettes, from 39 cents to $1 a pack. This tax increase will generate $32 billion to finance expansion of the program.
States have different eligibility rules for the program. But in most states, uninsured children below the age of 19, whose families earn up to $44,100 a year (for a family of four) would be eligible under the Senate bill.
This insurance pays for doctor visits, immunizations, illnesses that require a stay in the hospital, and emergency room visits.
Although there was some support for expanding SCHIP from Republicans, many of them have proposed amendments to limit the program. Republicans generally believe the government should have a very limited role in health care. But because Democrats now hold a majority in the Senate, they were able to defeat amendments to the bill.
But even with the expansion of SCHIP, about 5 million children will still be uninsured.
During his election campaign, Obama called for requiring all children to have health coverage. SCHIP may prove a strong step in that direction. The House of Representatives still needs to pass the bill before it can go to President Obama for his signature.
Question:
Do you think this will help or hurt Americans ability to access health care? Why?
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