Possibly the hardest job in the world is to be a good parent. On the one hand you want your kids to grow, to be confident, to have a spine; on the other your want them to pay attention, to mind what you say, to actually listen.

No child should ever experience random violence from his mother or father. However, the idea of consequences, verbal, physical or at some other level needs to be ingrained from the go. Children are very basic: from a very early age they are aware of right and wrong. Which does not mean they cleave to the right. Rather it means that they test the rules their parents make. And a rule without consequence is no rule at all.

Go read the whole post.

“Teaching kids to hate is harmful per se. It seems to me, based upon the precautionary principle, that it’s up to you to prove otherwise.” dr dawg

I think this is an exceptionally dangerous view of the nature of the role of parents, the state and the culture. First off it opens parents to losing their children as the result of thought crime. While these poor kids’ mother is hardly a brilliant parent, if, as Dawg conjectures, the rule is “teach hate, lose kids” then her capacity as a parent is not in issue one way or another. So on that basis the Khadr’s would have lost their kids the instant the authorities became aware of the jihadi views of the parents. I certainly hope Mohamed Elmasry doesn’t have kids because his political/religious views might count as hatred. Anti-Zionist? Lose your kids. Black mother in the Jane Finch corridor blaming whitey for black peoples’ problems - better watch her step. Catholics and fundamentalist who teach their children that abortion is murder and abortionists murderers…no kids for you! Environmentalists who tell their children that the people who run big corporations are killing the Earth and should go to jail…kidless.

But, and one cannot help but notice what this lame brained mum did, maybe we should set the standard higher. Perhaps the test should be that you have to actually do something like draw on your kids. (Frankly I’d start with the parents of the cringing little moppets who are stuck having their faces painted for National holidays.) For example telling your female children that they have to wear a head scarf (or a sack) or Uncle Ali will be over to behead them? Perhaps it would make sense for teachers, as soon as they see a little Muslim girl wearing the hajib to ask if Fatima really wants to wear it and to keep pushing until they are absolutely certain Fatima is not being coerced at home.

The choir at Elmdale Public School did not sing its controversial version of the song Silver Bells at its closed-door concert Thursday after receiving dozens of angry reponses, including some containing foul language.

Lynn Scott, chair of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, said some callers accused the school of being anti-Christian and some threatened teachers and officials at the school.

“It’s appalling to me that people could be so intolerant and disrespectful and hateful at a time of the year like this when we’re supposed to be thinking about generosity and peace and good will,” she said. “I’m not seeing very many Christian values in the reaction we’ve had.”

Teachers had originally intended to replace “Christmas time” and other Christmas references from the song’s original 1951 lyrics with words referring to “a festive time.” cbc

And pray why was there a need to replace a perfectly good lyric with a PC lyric?

“intolerant and disrespectful and hateful at a time of the year like this”. Honey, this is not the emailers’ problem, it is your problem for being stupid, provocative and tone deaf at this very time of year.

Of course this is anti-Christian in the sense that Christmas is a profoundly Christian holiday. Deleting all references to it in a “Christmas concert” quite rightly outrages people. As for Christian values - they only go so far and when PC driven secularists take it upon themselves to take the Christmas out of “Festive Time” it is well past time to go Crusader on the dolts who come up with this sort of loonieness.

And people wonder why I homeschool.

Update: I wonder if a complaint to the HRCC might lie in this matter. Personally, as a Christian - albeit of the Anglican sort - I feel demeaned. Hurt. Offended. Hmmmm.

About half of British homes no longer have a dining table. People do not eat meals together - they graze, finding what they want in the fridge, and eating in a solitary fashion whenever they feel like it (which is usually often), irrespective of the other people in the household.

This means that they never learn that eating is a social activity (many of the prisoners in the prison in which I worked had never in their entire lives eaten at a table with another person); they never learn to discipline their conduct; they never learn that the state of their appetite at any given moment should not be the sole consideration in deciding whether to eat or not. In other words, one’s own interior state is all-important in deciding when to eat. And this is the model of all their behaviour.

Young patients now eat in doctors’ offices; they eat above all in the street, where of course they drop litter as unselfconsciously as horses defecate. This is not evil, though it is antisocial, but you can easily see how people who attach such importance to their own desires, and lack any other criteria to help them decide to behave, come to do evil. front page via Edward Michael George

At our house we have a dinner table. And around that dinner table we have rules. Some are about using utensils - which is a bit tough for Max at just four but he tries and that is what counts - others are about conversation and the general idea that talking and listening are both required. Some are about wearing a shirt and, well, pants, some are about saying “thank you” and “please”. When we can we dim the lights and light candles. And, for, say, twenty minutes, a certain culture, a particular set of manners, are passed from our parents to our children.

Captain Greene dictated this from his wheelchair. Alan, at GenX at 40 has been updating Captain Green’s astonishing progress since he had his head split open by a Taliban wielding an axe.

My little boys and I will be spending a bit of time today remembering the sacrifices of their grandfathers and their great grandfathers. But we will also take some time to remember the Canadian soldiers who are fighting in Afghanistan. And we will start with Captain Greene’s article.

So if you go whoring after minorities, big surprise, you end up in a minority. All the more so if you are a Tory.

The school funding issue was a classic unforced error. Other than a few zealots there were not gazillions of Ontarians dying to fund madrassas.

Had Tory gone with a voucher approach he could have achieved the same end without stirring up the growing resentment of particularist sects within Canada. While the ethnic vote may be important the truth is that the parallel school system constitutionally entrenched in Ontario does a pretty good job of dealing with the Canadian reality of a Protestant/Catholic split. Adding Muslims, Hindus and Lord knows who else to the mix was not going to be attractive.

Why Tory felt he needed to suck up to noisy newcomers in such a spectacularly suicidal fashion beats the Hell out of me. It is not as if his kids are likely to see the inside of a publicly funded school. Nope, this was just dumb.

When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere.

It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision.

Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas’s eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom.

He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300 yards from home. daily mail

It’s a depressing read.

My partner and - in theory - free range kid raiser (I say in theory because as the boys are six and three the issue has yet to come to a head) pointed me to this lovely article,

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930’s 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s !!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking. As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle. the silly wagon

On the one hand I am delighted we now know enough to get rid of the lead based paint and I think car seats are smart; but the point is generally well taken.

The right to roam, the ability of kids to engage with the world, is worth a bit of risk. The problem is that with tiny families of one and two children, parents have a huge incentive and the time to micro manage that engagement. Which means children have lost several degrees of the freedom which makes childhood so amazing.

In response to the accumulation of evidence provided the citizens of France since November 2005 of serious societal decline, President Nicholas Sarkozy condemns as responsible–get this–the French themselves! Now this is a novelty, isn’t it? Imagine suggesting that a country is responsible for the things that happen within its own borders! That its citizens take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions! Scandalous!

To elaborate: Monsieur Sarkozy apparently believes that neither gasoline nor matches are the determining factors in, say, a nationwide blight of car burnings. Rather, he’s under this weird impression that a preponderance of bad behaviour has something to do with the fact that good behaviour isn’t being encouraged or even taught. (For those who don’t know our other official language see here). edward michael george

Indeed.

The Television and Entertainments Licensing Authority (Tela), which oversees the publishing industry, said it had received 208 complaints that text within the holy book was indecent. religious news blog via magic stats

Quick, call Kate. Lot’s daughters??

Of course, to be fair, there is not much chance of the Bible being an assigned text in a Canadian public school so our children are safe.