rantlust

Posted by anupcs on January 05th 2006 in Parenting, Society, USA
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It has been re-inforced over and over again by my friends who have children, that having the little ones, is the greatest pleasure in life. But is it, really? The readers of this blog who are parents, might be surprised (or maybe not) by a study published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior which states, rather authoritatively, that parents are more depressed than non-parents. For those of us thinking about crossing over to the other side, this is a depressing find.

The data set was 13,000 American adults. Are children really becoming an economic burden rather than the economic advantage they were (extra hands to work in the farm) in previous generations? The study contrasts between western and eastern cultures. Some people say that their children will take care of them when they are old–a rather selfish reason to have kids, but then again, why shouldn’t that be a goal considering the investment? Though I am not sure how true that assumption will be going forward, in these days of nursing homes and retirement communities. The Washington Post article above is quite enlightening. What do you parents think about this?

Thanks to fellow blogger kinnum for sending this link along.

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Posted by tafkap on December 05th 2005 in Parenting, Poetry, Religion, Society
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Anup had the following comment off-blog about my previous post - WTF? So I felt obligated to comment on it a little more with a follow up.

We’ve all at some point heard a variation of the phrase “I want my children to experience the things that I missed out on ….”. That parental conceit partially motivates my attempts at introducing my child to the fine arts. The reading of poetry, for example.

One poem we read recently was about Hanukkah. The inevitable interrogations that followed led to the question ‘Who is Jewish?’. Since she knows about Jesus, I ventured an answer through exemplification. ‘Jesus was a Jew’. To which came the reply. ‘Jesus is everything. He’s an Englishman, Indian, American, Australian, Egyptian, Jewish.’ Another poem was about nature. This time, I asked the question. ‘What is nature’. And her immediate response was ‘Being together with life’.
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Posted by riyer on December 01st 2005 in Parenting
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There is an excellent op-ed piece in the NYT titled A Man’s Right to Choose by Dalton Conley, who is the the director of New York University’s Center for Advanced Social Science Research. He is also the author, of “The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why.”

The Op-ed goes beyond the verbal diarrhea spewed on the subject of abortion, by the liberals and conservatives alike, and makes a very practical argument. It appealed to me because it took into consideration not just modern science but modern values.
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Posted by riyer on October 25th 2005 in Parenting, Religion, Society
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I am going to use this subject line to give you an idea on how stunningly inadequate and confused parents like me feel in discussing certain topics with our kids. This is not truly a conversation as much as these are rambling thoughts and observations resulting from these conversations.

On Sunday, while helping my 5 y.o her with her bath she said “Appa, do you know that everybody has 3 different bosses”. (Appa, in Tamil means dad). Plunging right into it, I asked “And who are these three bosses” - dreading that she will actually tell me the answer, which she did. Her response “Your parents, your teacher and God” surprised me. (Read more…)

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Posted by riyer on October 12th 2005 in Humor, Parenting, Sex
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This is the question my 5 y.o posed a couple of days ago. While it is easy to deal with questions like “Why do the boys stand up when they have to go pee pee” - a question we dealt with recently, questions like “where do you go when you die?” pose interesting challenges.

While my wife managed to answer the question quite well without getting into the issues of cremation and burials and heaven. I figured I should introduce her to different schools of thought on this subject. I even wondered whether it was appropriate to introduce concepts such as ‘Karmaphala‘ and maybe even religion (oooer!). However I wanted to be cautious and actually answer the question in the context it was asked. (Read more…)

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Posted by renéejo on August 23rd 2005 in Parenting
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As I mentioned earlier in my first post, I am expecting a baby girl and apart from Rantlust of course, most of my online reading these days is about babies and parenting. Dr. Mike Brown, the discoverer of the 10th planet (yet to be named something palatable), being the scientist that he is, has put up a website where he charts the feeding, sleeping, and fussy times of his newborn baby girl. He has put up colorful graphs with all this data and the conclusion is scary for any expectant mother.
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Posted by maria on August 16th 2005 in Movies, Parenting, Politics, Rants
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Yesterday we watched my favorite Alan Parker movie “Birdy”. As usual, it made me ponder a wide range of topics, from friendships that we form early in life to general violent nature of human beings.

Most of all, it made me think about how terrible and useless all the wars are in the long run! The only thing they tend to accomplish is to kill a bunch of people on either side and produce a huge number of physically and/or mentally disabled people. I can not think of a single war where the initiating country successfully accomplished its mission (looking from the historical perspective).
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Posted by riyer on August 12th 2005 in Parenting
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Like many of my friends, I am in an inter-cultural, inter-religious, inter-racial and inter-everything marriage. As such most of the time I find myself in discussions where a different value from my own are applied to an issue or moral judgements made on an event that took place several generations ago when current values were clearly not the norm. Typically these value differences emerge because I am from a high-context society and my wife is from a low-context society - and many are a result of child-experiences immersed in these contextual differences
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