Did you hear? They’re bringing back The Electric Company. Not the original, with Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno. No, I don’t believe kids today would be adequately entertained by that. I imagine this revisited version will have more flashy content. For shorter attention spans. I wonder if Joan Rivers will reprise her narration of THE ADVENTURES OF LETTERMAN! Faster than a rolling O, Stronger than a silent E, Able to leap capital T in a single bound!

I have a lot of great memories of The Electric Company, not to mention Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and Sesame Street. Of course we watched them; there were only four channels. I was part of the original Sesame Street generation; the show debuted in November 1969, just as I was turning 3 years old. I was their target audience, and part of their broadcast experiment: Can we teach children to read with *gasp* television?? The answer was an unequivocal YES. Read the rest of this entry »

As always, Mother’s Day is a mixed blessing for me: I’m grateful beyond words for the fact that I’ve joined this Mom’s Club (photo to come later today), while I miss my own mother like a pain. In my column Sunday, I realized — as many of you already know (see comments below) – how much Mom’s cooking made a difference for us, and how much I treasure the hot-pink recipe cards she wrote for me.

Also, in case you missed it, Tom Friedman’s column yesterday was a terrific tribute.

So, how did you spend your Mother’s Day? What’s the best Mother’s Day gift you ever got?

A friend of mine just found out that her teenager is cutting.

Not like cutting classes. Like CUTTING. Her skin. With razor blades.

Cutting is a form of self-abuse, like anorexia. It affects 10 percent of American teenage girls. I knew the WHAT of cutting, but I had no idea of the WHY of it, so I started doing some research. Teens cut themselves for relief from bad feelings, emotional pain and pressure. Their coping skills are overpowered by emotions that are too intense. They cut to feel in control.

Cutting is sometimes associated with other mental health problems, such as depression, bipolar disorders, eating disorders, obsessive or compulsive behaviors, or drug or alcohol abuse. For some teens, it’s a way of “waking up” after a sense of numbness following a traumatic experience, such as abuse.

Most teens who cut aren’t attempting suicide. Cutting usually begins on impulse, not as a planned activity. “I never looked at it as anything that bad at first,” said Natalie, a high school junior who began cutting herself when she was in middle school. “It was just a way of getting my mind off something I felt really awful about.”

You know what I feel really awful about? That a young person would feel so bad about anything that she would feel the need to mutilate herself. That’s heartbreaking.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Kleinmanns’ residence, Leanne speaking.”

Those are the words my parents taught me to use when they first let me answer the phone, when I was around the age my son is now. Of course, the calls were never for me, but answering the phone made me feel very grown-up, using my best manners to speak to what I usually discovered were total strangers.

How different the world is for my 8-year-old.

“Hey, Dad,” I heard him mumble into my cell phone last week. (Is it my imagination, or does he deliberately stop speaking clearly when he’s on the phone?) “Fine. Nothing. Yeah. Bye.”

Not for the first time, I realized how different his idea of phone communication is, even now, from the one I grew up with. Click HERE to read the rest of the column.

Nothing breaks my heart or shakes me to the core quite like a story of bullying. Maybe because I’m such a pacifist that I can’t even stomach R-rated movie violence, or maybe because just the thought of someone physically harming my son nauseates me. I don’t know what it is that makes me so unable to hear a story about bullying without suffering a full-blown anxiety attack, but whatever it is that sets me off, this story in the New York Times about a teenage boy in Fayetteville, Ark. had it in spades.

Billy’s parents say the school system refuses to do anything to stop the four years of beatings, despite school bus video proof and even cell phone video by the brother of one of the abusers. They’ve now resorted to suing one of the bullies and other “John Does” and are considering suing the school system.

What do you say?  

It seems it’s always the victim that’s told, “You don’t like it? Move.” But why should the family have to remove their child from an [otherwise] highly-rated school system? What of the school responding that it “looked like Billy got what he deserved?” Is that ever an acceptable response to violence? Or do you think there’s more to the story? Have you or your children ever had bullying issues? What should the parents’ action be? And what is the community’s responsibility in this situation?