Climber Dallin Smith and his girlfriend are depicted chilling out in their self-made lawn chairs that they attached 350 feet high on a cliff wall in Utah. You can look at the amazing pictures here. Smith weaved his own lawn chairs and explains “the springs aren’t bolted in. They just rest nicely in a crack.” Did someone say…
If you read parenting blogs (and maybe even if you don’t) you might have read the now famous Texas mother Kim Hall’s letter to teenage girls. The post went viral last week and stirred controversy in as crowded parts of the blogosphere as Huffington Post and BlogHer. Apparently she lives right here in Austin, but…
Last week I had the opportunity to attend a conference about the generation after the millennials. This entailed the latest stats and survey results from this youngest group of Americans on and an effort to (re)name the youngest generation – the one that is currently called the Homelanders. This event was part of the annual YPulste Mashup and…
While brooding over an article on the topic of internet sharing and privacy, an example of what some prefer to call “tough love parenting” passed my radar:Mother Violates Daughter on Facebook. I have argued before (here and here) that despite the impressions we may get from media, younger generations are not all happy-go-lucky with technologies…
Lenore Skenazy, aka “America’s Worst Mom” and creator of the name and movement Free Range Kids is my favorite dispatcher of Onion type (but true!) news stories from Securistan. Yesterday she shared an article about the perceived threat of a sledding hill. “Paxton, a small town in Illinois, where the land is flat as flat…
A whole generation of single children have come of age, revealing some interesting sociopsychological observations. Although China’s one-child policy implemented in 1979 has helped curb population growth, their aspiring leaders and innovators are showing some undesirable tendencies that are not as prominent among children with siblings. Only a quarter of Chinese families had single children in 1975 compared with 91 %…
Do As I Say, Not As I Do? Pew Research is one of my main, probably the main go-to source for generational statistics. But for once I am a little disappointed. The culprit is their recent study “Parents Concerned About Teens’ Online Activities and Privacy.” The title captures it all. By focusing only on young…
“How do I love (bankrupt) thee? Let me count the ways.” This election year it’s hard not to take note of all the various ways in which the next generation is screwed. Younger cohorts will struggle with student loans, possibly endure continued high unemployment rates, foot most of the bill from the national deficit and…
Children who grow up in the typical fourth turning crisis era are extremely over-parented. The New Silent/ Homeland generation is no exception. I think there are various reasons for this trend and they are often driven by fear of the future. Parenting has become a market place for many conflicting theories and they all thrive…
