It's one thing to be a teen and have your parents share photos of you with family friends by forcing them to look through photo albums of your most recent ballet performance. But it's another thing altogether to have what you consider to be unflattering photos posted online.
The disintegration of community and family structures weakens traditional protection mechanisms and alters behavioral patterns. As a result, child-bearing risks are extremely high, sexual violence and exploitation is pervasive and forced or early marriage is not uncommon.
Like many teachers, I pitch poetry around my classroom precariously, like it's an egg toss at a child's birthday party. I don't want to drop it, turn it, or spend too long holding on to it.
The original image of Merida was precious and clung to by moms who adored Merida for her adventures, her love of her family, and her resemblance to the young girls they know and love.
Recently, I toured a health clinic in India and met a girl named Anju. Anju's family is poor. They live far away in a remote village that has no running water or health care. Although Anju is only 14, her parents expect her to marry and start having children soon.
Kids nowadays are under a tremendous amount of stress with a push from our educational institutions and from parents to get the best grades, do the most extracurricular activities and conform to fit into the highest social circles.
The girls of The Carrie Diaries are loyalists to each other even as they struggle with their own sense of burgeoning identity and the choices (and consequences) that arise as they grapple with the awareness of their feminine power.
Sharing a child isn't as risk free as it might seem. Sure I can appreciate that my daughter has extra people loving her, and she gets to have a different perspective in parenting, but there's a small selfish part of me that still wants to dominate all the highlights.
We, as a society, have got to change. This unhealthy focus on appearance has to stop. It's all pervasive -- every magazine, TV show, movie, video game seems to be just a disguise for a how-to guide on how we're supposed to look, feel, and act.
Does my world perspective help me raise globally conscious kids? Or does my travel across the world mean that they miss out on something essential in what a mother promises her child?
High School students under the age of 19 account for approximately one-third of all newly diagnosed sexually transmitted infections in New York State. And not surprisingly, teen mothers are much less likely to graduate from high school than their peers who didn't give birth.
Here's the point all of us need to recognize: The "how to's" of nurturing sexually healthy children are precisely the same as the "how to's" of nurturing healthy children, period.
To shed anxiety-driven notions about talking to children about sex, we adults need simply to identify and revisit the maladaptive associations we absorbed early in life and use our "we're all grown up now" good sense and perspective to whack them apart.
Does a taste of champagne at a family wedding consign your son to a life of AA meetings? Will the mere mention of sex at home ensure your daughter of a future reality show appearance as a teen mom?