Parent alert: the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those “Baby Einstein” videos that did not make children into geniuses.
They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect.
“We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds,” said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years. […]
s, bright colors, and not many words — became a staple of baby life: According to a 2003 study, a third of all American babies from 6 months to 2 years old had at least one “Baby Einstein” video.
Despite their ubiquity, and the fact that many babies are transfixed by the videos, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all for children under 2.
Tagyouth
A follow-up to this post day before yesterday about the troubled teen industry.
The Cult That Spawned the Tough Love Teen Industry
Mount Bachelor, the school mentioned previously, was a CEDU school prior to being purchased by Aspen. CEDU is a first generation offspring of Synanon, the original abuse-as-therapy cult.
Mount Bachelor Academy regularly uses intensely humiliating tactics as treatment. For instance, in required seminars that the school calls Lifesteps, students say staff members of the residential program have instructed girls, some of whom say they have been victims of rape or sexual abuse, to dress in provocative clothing — fishnet stockings, high heels and miniskirts — and perform lap dances for male students as therapy. […]
But because the programs are privately run, what happens within their walls is largely a mystery. No one knows whether the programs succeed or fail. […]
Mount Bachelor’s executive director, Bitz, says her school uses widely accepted psychological treatments to help children overcome their problems. “We also use a psychodrama-treatment approach designed to do one or both of two things,” said Bitz in her statement, “get a student to embrace qualities of their character (such as beauty or courage) about which they have doubt or assist them in recognizing qualities that are unproductive (such as selfishness or conceit) about which they have little insight.” […]
“They told me I was dirty and I had to put mud on myself for being raped,” she said in reference to another Lifesteps session. “They basically blamed me for getting raped.”
Bitz dismissed Jane’s story and called it “very suspect” in an interview with the Bend Bulletin, which also spoke with Jane. “We know that some current students have made a conscious decision to lie about our school, hoping that it will be closed as a result, and that they would then be sent back home,” Bitz told TIME. […]
Synanon began as a drug-rehabilitation program before morphing into a controversial cult and is credited with putting forth the idea that confrontation and boot-camp-style breakdown tactics could cure teen misbehavior and addiction. Synanon’s confrontational techniques influenced est and LifeSpring, which began selling weekend seminars designed to prompt emotional breakthroughs in participants.
Time: An Oregon School for Troubled Teens Is Under Scrutiny
Interesting article on a number of levels:
1) The potential Synanon-inspired abuse of kids right here in Oregon.
2) The implications of the court case for students and school districts.
3) Problems with private schools in general.
4) Problems with public schools, education, and therapy in general.
There’s a follow-up form the author of the article at HuffPo.
(via Metafilter thanks to Trevor Blake)
Text messaging graphic pictures of yourself could soon be legal for teens in Vermont.
Lawmakers there are considering a bill that would make it legal for teenagers 18 and under to exchange explicit photos and videos of themselves – an act that’s come to be known by teens as “sexting.”
Under the current law, teenagers could be prosecuted as sex offenders if they get caught sending graphic sexual images of themselves, even if it was consensual.
WCBSTV: Vermont Lawmakers Look To Legalize Teen ‘Sexting’
Link via The Agitator, pic thanks to Bill Whitcomb.
The American Civil Liberties Union is helping three teenage girls fight back against a Pennsylvania prosecutor who has threatened to charge the girls with felony child porn violations over digital photos they took of themselves.
In a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in Pennsylvania, ACLU lawyers accuse Skumanick (.pdf) of violating the civil rights of three girls. The lawsuit says the threat to prosecute minors for child porn “is unprecedented and stands anti-child-pornography laws on their head.”
The lawsuit comes in the wake of a string of cases around the country in which teens have been arrested on child porn charges for making and distributing nude and semi-nude photos of themselves.
Wired: ACLU Sues Prosecutor Over ‘Sexting’ Child Porn Charges
A 14-year-old girl has been accused of child pornography for posting nearly 30 explicit nude pictures of herself on MySpace.
The charges could force the teenager from New Jersey, US, to register as a sex offender, if convicted. […]
If convicted of the distribution charge, she would be forced to register with the state as a sex offender under Megan’s Law, said state Attorney-General Anne Milgram.
She also could face up to 17 years in jail, though such a stiff sentence is unlikely.
Some – including the New Jersey mother behind the creation of Megan’s Law – criticised the trend of prosecuting teens who send racy text messages or post illicit photos of themselves.
(via Biohabit)
One of every 50 American children experiences homelessness, according to a new report that says most states have inadequate plans to address the worsening and often-overlooked problem.
The report being released Tuesday by the National Center on Family Homelessness gives Connecticut the best ranking. Texas is at the bottom.
“These kids are the innocent victims, yet it seems somehow or other they get left out,” said the center’s president, Dr. Ellen Bassuk. “Why are they America’s outcasts?”
The report analyzes data from 2005-2006. It estimates that 1.5 million children experienced homelessness at least once that year, and says the problem is surely worse now because of the foreclosures and job losses of the deepening recession.
“If we could freeze-frame it now, it would be bad enough,” said Democratic Sen. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, who wrote a foreward to the report. “By end of this year, it will be that much worse.”
The report’s overall state rankings reflect performance in four areas: child homelessness per capita, child well-being, risk for child homelessness, and state policy and planning.
The top five states were Connecticut, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island and North Dakota. At the bottom were Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, New Mexico and Louisiana
The Colony Club in Soho has been a watering hole for hard-drinking creative types since it was founded by Muriel Belcher in the late 1940s. It is a reasonable bet that her confidants – Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Jeffrey and Bruce Bernard, Michael Andrews, Eduardo Paolozzi and other regulars from the art and entertainment world – would have had high IQs. Some members may have been nightmare clients for their bank managers, exasperating husbands, wives or lovers, but no one would doubt their talents, originality and intellectual ability.
Research has now shown a link between high childhood IQ and an adult enthusiasm for alcohol that leads in some cases to problem drinking.
Parents may be aware that the easiest children to have around the house, and those who are also the most likely to have a predictable, comfortable lifestyle when adults, are those with a slightly aboveaverage intelligence, neither too clever, nor stupid.
Full Story: Times Online (Update: This story is now behind the Times’ pay wall)
(via Danielle Hatfield)
Thinking about generational issues made me dig up this old Grant Morrison quote from the online Filth letters pages. In response to someone talking about “the next generation” of magicians, Morrison says “THERE’S ONLY ONE GENERATION. I’M GLAD TO SEE THAT IT NEVER DIES.”
This is a post in reference to this post and this article.
Although Vice has come out and said that the “hipster conservative movement” was a hoax, there are plenty of other examples of this trend. For instance, look at the Suicide Girls blog.
I went to Evergreen State College, one of the most left-wing schools in the nation, and also incidentally, the highest rated school in the Hipster Handbook. Before I went there, I spent 5 years living in Wyoming, one of the most conservative states in the nation. I was right out of high school and full of rebellion. Naturally, living in Wyoming I took on a left-anarchist way of thinking. But when I got out to Evergreen, and was surrounded by liberals, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of these people were un-thinking liberals in the same way I’d been exposed to so many unthinking right-wingers. So I began to lean more to the right, though I tended more to the libertarian right than the neo-conservative right.
But eventually, with enough reading and enough travel back and forth between Olympia and Wyoming, settled into a progressive/social democratic way of thinking. And while I’m constantly interested in challenging my own views and thinking about different approaches to achieving liberal political goals, I definitely identify as liberal.
Anyway, in my last year at Evergreen I definitely noticed some of the younger students falling into the same way of thinking I did when I first came out there: feeling that there was a lot of intellectually lazy leftists out there, and sort of rebelling against the same tendency. In McInnes’s essay he says:
More than ever, there were young people responding with favor to a predominantly right-wing discussion. . . These were a new group of kids sick of how “intellectually lazy” (to quote the Hipublicans) the Left had become. They weren’t necessarily for invading Iraq. They just wanted to discuss the pros and cons in a rational and calm forum, without the liberal hyperbole of their peers. I felt like Dr. Frankenstein: “It’s alive! IT’S ALIVE!”
Now McInnes is claiming all this to be a hoax, but it wouldn’t surprise me much to see a large conservative movement within the youth culture, especially in areas like New York City and the Bay Area where progressive ideology reigns supreme. And I’ve thought for a while that right-wing libertarianism would become the dominate youth-culture politics. Essentially it’s an anti-authoritarian political philosophy that still let’s kids consume all they want and not feel bad about it. It’s the market at work, right?
Of course I don’t believe that libertarianism is about shunning responsibility. Quite the opposite. But it could very easily be interpreted that way, and it could very easily be used as an excuse by the young as a means to justify their every materialistic whim. And another disclaimer: I don’t think that there’s any reason why we should expect rebellious youth to become liberals instead of libertarians in the first place. I don’t mean to suggest that everyone one thinks things through will end up being a social democrat or anything.
(more coming sometime about the racism aspect of all this)
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