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The risk of being your child's best friend

Susan Wholley bought her daughter her first drink, and she was the person her daughters turned to when they had questions about sex and marijuana.

The hospice worker, tutor and single mother to 19- and 22-year-old daughters, said she loves the open relationship she has with them, where nothing is off-limits.

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What would the ultimate child-friendly city look like?

magine you are 10 years old. You live in a medium-sized city and want to visit your best friend, a five-minute walk away, so you can go to the park, another 10 minutes’ walk. The problem is, there’s a big, dangerous road between you and your friend, and another between them and the park. You ask your parents if you can walk, they say no, and they are too busy to take you there themselves.

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How to ‘bridge minds’ with a child to stimulate brain development

A three-year-old boy struggles to thread beads on a string while his older sister watches. She could ignore him or take over the task to get it done quickly. But if she observes him closely, and realizes that he is struggling to hold the string steady, she could offer to hold it for him and praise him for any beads he threads.

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Is Your Child Lying to You? That’s Good

Most of the people would say that parents should be worried if their children lie to them. This is so because we believe that being honest is a good thing and we want to raise our children by making them believe that lying is not good.

You have probably heard of “Pinocchio” as well as “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” and they preset how dangerous it is to lie. Kids who tend to lie are considered as abnormal in their development with the possibility for troublesome life.

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Lies about Santa? They could be good for your child

Christmas is a magical time of year, especially for children. Unfortunately, between elaborate Elf on the Shelf staging and fending off questions about Santa, parents are often left wondering how much of the magic depends on them.

Specifically, many parents worry about whether they should encourage their children’s belief in the physical reality of Santa, about the potential impact of lying to them and what to do when their children realize they’ve been duped.

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Your Child Will Fail, That Much Is Guaranteed

There are few things in life a parent can guarantee their child, but failure at something or with someone is assured. There is one major reason why we can guarantee failure in our child's lives. Children will feel a sense of failure at some things in life because so much about life is subjective.

Very little of life today is bias or judgement-free. Subjectivity is essentially someone's opinion or our own biased view about ourselves or others.

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Winning the war against child sexual abuse together

With every new crisis that the world faces, humanity’s differences appear increasingly intractable. Religion, ethnicity, history, politics and economics have all become tools to denigrate and demean. People seem to be drifting apart and no country is immune from divisive discourse.

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If I Were a Parent: Teaching kids good manners

What happens when you ask a group of elementary-school kids how they would teach their children manners if they were the parents? Based on the group of kids we brought together in Atlanta, you get a number of really good ideas. So, parents, listen up!

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A long-overdue change to Lebanese law

This week, Lebanon’s Parliament repealed the law allowing rapists to escape punishment by marrying the women they abused. Although this is a strong step from politicians in favor of women’s rights, there is still a lot more work to be done!One in three women worldwide experience some form of gender-based violence in their lifetime. In the Arab region, this violence exists in many forms – sexual, physical, emotional and economic. Intimate partner violence is the most common, with approximately 30 percent of women in the region affected.

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We’d all benefit from encouraging children to go outside and take risks

 

Stop popping the balloons. Forget the dew on the grass. Bring back the conkers and the yo-yos. And ditch those hi-vis jackets that make every child look like Bob the Builder. It’s time, says the chief inspector of schools, to blast the bugles, sound the trumpets and chuck out the cotton wool. It’s time, in fact, to set the children of this nation free.

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