Parenting

Parenting - Imagine your little baby in her nursery. So happy in the colorful new home you have prepared for her. Watching the Mobile. Lying down comfortably in her crib.

Comfortably in her crib. That depends on the bedding sets you use. Babies have very delicate skin. A baby's skin is so much thinner than adult skin. Some babies are very sensitive to their surroundings.

The first thing you have to take into consideration when it comes to baby bedding, is comfort. Will the fabric make baby's skin itch?

Ideally, the best fabric to use for baby bedding is cotton. Preferably 100% cotton sheets in summer, soft warm flannel for winter. Wool may be itchy but that depends on the baby.

Next, because babies have such sensitive skin, you must keep the crib bedding clean and dry. Babies urine and pass motion frequently in their clothes. If their nappies leak, the bedding gets stained.

Disposable diapers are way more convenient as compare to cloth nappies. With cloth nappies, the nappies leak every time the baby urines which can be nightmarish for an exhausted new mother to clean up after. Disposable diapers allow the baby to stay dry after a few rounds of urine, but once baby strains her face and you know she has just moved her bowels, do change her diaper.

When baby dirties herself, clean her up right away. Leave her in dirty nappies longer than necessary and she will probably develop a nappy rash. Babies with nappy rash itch, cry a lot and are generally miserable. Keep a tube of diaper rash cream at hand to treat the problem, just in case.


A vinyl cover over the mattress itself keeps the mattress from getting soaked through. Remember to cover it with clean cotton bedding and to change it whenever it gets dirty. You do not want baby to suffer from skin allergies from dirty bed linen.

For safety sake, get baby to sleep face up or on the side. Don't let baby sleep lying on its stomach. Here is a BBC article about cot deaths links cot deaths with the baby sleeping on its stomach.

Finally, since baby is going to spend most of her time in the crib, even while she is awake, give her something to look at cotton baby bedding with friendly patterns, little animals, or other interesting pictures keep her occupied, and stimulate her mind. Plain white crib bedding sets without any patterns are really boring. They do not give baby anything to look at. To make matters worse, plain sheets show up stains glaringly. Patterned bedding sets are more forgiving in this aspect. Besides, babies would find pattern bedding more interesting.

Blog : The Love is Beautiful
Post : Parenting

READ MORE - Parenting

'Tiger Parenting' Tough on Kids

'Tiger Parenting' Tough on Kids - "Tiger mom" and Yale professor Amy Chua caused an uproar last year with a Wall Street Journal article about the superiority of her strict, Chinese-style version of parenting. Now, research suggests that critics of the piece may have had a point: High-achieving Chinese-American children do, in fact, struggle more with depression, stress and low self-esteem than their equally high-achieving European-American counterparts, and the reason involves parenting style.

Chua's piece, excerpted from her book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" (Penguin Press, 2011), extolled the virtues of strictness, blunt criticism and an unyielding insistence on academic perfection. In the essay, she tells the story of making her 7-year-old daughter sit at the piano without food or bathroom breaks until she mastered a difficult piece.

Strict parenting and stellar academic achievement are common in Chinese immigrant families, according to Desiree Baolian Qin, a professor in the department of human development and family studies at Michigan State University. But unfortunately, so are depression, stress and other so-called "internalizing" disorders.

"If you're doing well, you should be feeling good," Qin told LiveScience. "But what I've found persistently in my research is that that's not the case."

Family and mental health

In a new study to be published in the Journal of Adolescence, Qin compared 295 Chinese-American ninth graders with 192 European-American ninth-graders at the same highly competitive U.S. school. This high school, in a northeastern U.S. state, accepts only the top 5 percent of applicants by test scores. Thus, all the children in the study were academic all-stars.

Earlier research had turned up disturbing patterns of mental health struggles in Chinese-American high-achievers, Qin said. She wanted to understand why. So she and her colleagues had the two groups of ninth graders fill out questionnaires to measure their grades, levels of anxiety and depression and the amount of conflict in their families. The researchers also asked about how much warmth and support they felt from their parents, a measure called family cohesion.

"It wasn't completely surprising, but I was still a little shocked that in all these measures of family conflicts and cohesion and mental health, we see the Chinese kids were more disadvantaged," Qin said. "They reported higher levels of conflict, particularly around education, and they report much lower levels of cohesion."

Not only that, but they were more stressed and depressed than the Euro-American counterparts, and they had lower self-esteem.

The culprit, Qin found, had everything to do with family. The more conflict and less cohesion in a teen's family, the more likely they were to have poor mental health. When the researchers removed conflict and cohesion from the statistical analysis, essentially erasing those differences between the white and Asian kids, the mental health difference also disappeared.

"Parent-child relations are the main factors that contribute to their lower levels of reported mental health," Qin said.

Academic strife

In a second study, Qin conducted in-depth interviews with18 of the Chinese students at the school. She found that academics are an enormous point of contention in Chinese-American families. The students complained that their parents talked constantly about academics and reacted emotionally to failure.

"They just take everything so literally, and exaggerate," one female student told Qin, "like if I get one bad grade, they think, 'Oh no, you're going to fail school, you're going to become one of those bad girls who do drugs.'"

Students also struggled with being compared to other children or family members, such as an older sibling who went to an Ivy League college. They even mentioned struggling with a cultural gulf between themselves and their parents. For example, one student said that she had a tough time in her relationship with her mother because American culture values standing up for oneself, while her Chinese-born mother feels that children should respect their parents and do as they're told.

While East Asian culture has a deeply ingrained focus on education, many of the issues that arise in these families are migration-related, Qin said. All the Chinese children in the larger sample had immigrant parents, she said, while almost none of the European-American kids did.

"My co-authors and I are not pathologizing Chinese kids and saying, 'Oh my God, Chinese kids are oppressed,'" Qin said. "The findings really point to immigration and the challenges created by migration in families."

"When children are caught in between their parents' old way of parenting and being and culture and the new in the U.S., then that can be very, very tough for children in a variety of ways."

Finding a middle ground

Not all Chinese parents take the "tiger" approach, of course. In fact, Qin's in-depth interviews, to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, found that even strict "tiger parenting" is not black and white. The parents of the kids in the study worried about their children's health and happiness, and expressed sympathy when the children were overworked.

"They have a lot of internal conflict," Qin said of these parents. "They want them to be successful in the new land, and they want them to be healthy."

Fortunately, both are possible, Qin said. In a 2008 paper, Qin compared high-achieving Chinese-American students who were distressed with Chinese-American high-achievers who were mentally healthy. She found that the teens in families where parents take a strict "tiger mom" approach were the distressed ones. The high-achieving Chinese-American kids with more flexible parents did just as well in school, but were happy, too.

That's the important message for all parents, "tiger" or not, Qin said. It's not a problem to have high expectations for your child, she said. You just have to communicate those expectations with love and warmth.

"You can have a happy child with high achievement," Qin said. "A lot of families do have that." ( LiveScience.com )

READ MORE - 'Tiger Parenting' Tough on Kids

I Let My Kids Drink Coffee

"I want coffee!!!"

This battle cry is frequently heard most mornings in my house in what I have dubbed the Toddler Java Revolt. My two young children, Kenya, 4, and Chloe, 2, watch me brew a pot of coffee every morning but have recently started to not take it well when I tell them they can't have their own cups. Now mind you, I drink decaffeinated coffee which is probably fine, but something just doesn't sit right with me as I think about watching my little ones kick back every morning with a steaming cup of morning thunder. Not to mention, I probably couldn't deal with our dentist telling me at our next cleaning appointment why my kids are candidates for Pepsodent.

Unsurprisingly, as soon as I told them, "I'm sorry, you're both too young to have coffee," they wanted it even more (funny how that works). So I decided to take the same approach to this parental beverage dilemma as I would to candy or any food I'm not keen on them developing a habit for. Moderation in all things is a good rule to live by and I find that if you let kids try a bit of a food or drink every now and then, it becomes less taboo and a lot less precious.

Trust me, this comes from experience. Growing up, my mother never let us have anything sweet, and I soon became the kid that would sneak into the pantry to down whatever sweets I could get my hands on, be it a bag of Oreos or an entire glass jar of Flintstone vitamins in a single sitting (true story). The same was true for the caffeinated coffee my grandparents drank. They would allow us a sip here and there, but as soon as my parents saw what was happening they would put an end to it which of course made me want to drink it even more. Whether I can blame the major sweet tooth and thirst for coffee I have today on my parents' strict food rules is up for debate, but I still opt for moderation with my own kids.

So now on Sundays after we come home from the farmer's market and settle into an afternoon of lounging around the house, I'll pour the kids a thimble full of decaf (and let them pour a half a cup of milk in it) to enjoy. They rarely finish the entire serving, but you can see how empowered they feel to be enjoying something that mommy loves.

Is it the most nutritious drink for kids? No. Are they going to become brewtus addicts when they're older? Who knows? But at this point in the game, it feels like the lesser of many evils. ( huffingtonpost.com )

READ MORE - I Let My Kids Drink Coffee

Are Parents Obsessed With Their Kids' Popularity?

Are Parents Obsessed With Their Kids' Popularity? -- Recently, a friend of mine told me about her daughter's friends -- two teenage girls who are touting beer cans in their Facebook profile photos. These are under-aged kids. 14-year-olds.

"Why are their parents letting them put pictures of themselves with beer on the Internet?" I said.

"I think a lot of these parents are more concerned about their kids' popularity than they are with anything else," she said.

What does this mean? Is it a bullying backlash?

Newspaper headlines point to relentless bullying stories that end in suicide -- Phoebe Prince's 2010 suicide which stemmed from slut-shaming, and most recently, Tennessee teen Jacob Rogers's suicide due to severe anti-gay torments, come to mind.

Has the quest for popularity become so anxiety-provoking that parents, who are otherwise involved in their children's lives -- sports, arts, grades, clothing -- would allow their child to pose drunk with a beer can on the Internet? Of course there is the idea that the parents don't know what's happening in their kids' lives, but I don't believe this. Experts have been drilling parents about monitoring Internet activity for at least a decade, so sheer ignorance can't be to blame.

So I asked a friend in another town who generally takes a stand-offish approach with her 13-year-old, "I don't care where she fits in with the social pool, as long as she feels secure," she says. She mentioned a mother who is on Facebook every single day "friending" girls for her not-so-much-of-a-social-butterfly daughter. This woman is an anomaly my friend says in one breath, and then quickly admitted, "There are people who are on top of who's who in their child's life for safety reasons, but I think some people are doing it to see where their kid falls on the social ladder."

Rosalind Wiseman, author of "Queen Bees and Wannabes", who has studied tens of thousands of children and their social navigation, suggests that parents shouldn't confuse what we think is good for our children "and what we're just reacting to through anxiety."

If anxiety (you also know this as helicopter parenting) is the root cause of over-meddling in our children's lives, then a flurry of confusing boundaries have erupted as a result, provoking all sorts of open-ended questions like: how much should I be involved in my child's social life? Am I doing great harm to them if I rear my ugly adult head? And am I doing harm if I don't?

But friendships present different rules. Kids are always going to struggle with some form of social difficulty. What's changed is our level of unease around our kids' discomfort.

Alyssa, another friend of mine and a mother of two boys, admits to a similar experience. "My son might be happy one night to just watch a movie, and I say, 'Why don't you invite friends over?' I'm a 40-year-old woman, but I would feel bad if my son wasn't invited somewhere," she says. "We don't always let our kids fall where they may socially. We're pushing them into the direction of where the party is at."
So what's the answer? I'd like to think that there's a boundary that we can establish with our children that allows them to be individuals and be accepted by their peers without crossing that creepy line. There are always going to be kids who want attention and they'll do it in anyway possible -- holding beers on Facebook, being the class clown, or bullying someone because it makes them look powerful. But it's our job as parent to say: It's not your popularity that's most important. It's your friendships. It's your self-worth. It's your kindness. It's your intelligence. This should be your focus. ( huffingtonpost.com )

READ MORE - Are Parents Obsessed With Their Kids' Popularity?

Tiger Mothers may have it wrong as new studies suggest highly-pressured children are more prone to depression and anxiety

Tiger Mothers may have it wrong as new studies suggest highly-pressured children are more prone to depression and anxiety - Tiger mothers, made famous by author Amy Chua, may actually have got it all wrong.

Fiercely pushy Chinese mothers, who heap pressure on children to succeed both academically and in their leisure activities, may in fact contribute to low self-esteem and high levels of depression.

Ms Chua's book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, is a memoir of how the Yale law professor raised her two daughters the strict Chinese way.

Not such a Tiger Mom: Professor Desiree Qin, pictured, found that academic success may come at the price of happiness

But Professor Desiree Qin conducted two studies that found, in contrast to Ms Chua's theory, high-achieving students at a top New York high school are more anxious than their less pressured counterparts.

Speaking to the New York Daily News, she said: 'Amy [Chua] said Western children are not happier than Chinese ones.

'But at the same time, research from our study does show that when parents place a lot of pressure on their kids, the children are less happy.'

The professor, whose findings are due to be published in medical journals, believes that success and happiness do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Le Tigre: Amy Chua stands by her Tiger Mom parenting diktat

Her research, before Ms Chua's controversial book was published, was, according to the Daily News, carried out at Stuyvesant High School, known for being highly selective.

Chinese-Americans at the school spoke of the constant stress of having pushy parents, despite winning places at the elite school.

One student told the professor: 'She’s like, "Oh, you have to do good on your SATs ... you have to work on your essays" ... They just repeatedly talk about work'.

Another spoke of their parents' fear of failure: 'If I get one bad grade, they think, "Oh no, you’re going to fail school, you’re going to become one of those bad girls who do drugs and things like that"'.

By conducting hundreds of interviews between 2007 and 2008, she found there to be more of a sense of conflict in the homes of Chinese- American students than in those of European descent, says the newspaper.

While Ms Chua's daughters score consistent As and can play the violin, they may, suggests the research, not be as contented as if they had been awarded the odd B. ( dailymail.co.uk )

READ MORE - Tiger Mothers may have it wrong as new studies suggest highly-pressured children are more prone to depression and anxiety

The Greek parents too poor to care for their children

The Greek parents too poor to care for their children - Greece's financial crisis has made some families so desperate they are giving up the most precious thing of all - their children.

One morning a few weeks before Christmas a kindergarten teacher in Athens found a note about one of her four-year-old pupils.

"I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her," it read. "Please take good care of her. Sorry. Her mother."

In the last two months Father Antonios, a young Orthodox priest who runs a youth centre for the city's poor, has found four children on his doorstep - including a baby just days old.

Another charity was approached by a couple whose twin babies were in hospital being treated for malnutrition, because the mother herself was malnourished and unable to breastfeed.

Cases like this are shocking a country where family ties are strong, and failure to look after children is socially unacceptable - they feel to Greeks like stories from the Third World, rather than their own capital city.

Unemployed and homeless, Natasha's mother said she could no longer cope

One of the children cared for by Father Antonios is Natasha, a bright two-year-old brought to his centre by her mother a few weeks ago.

The woman said she was unemployed and homeless and needed help - but before staff could offer her support she had vanished, leaving her daughter behind.

"Over the last year we have hundreds of cases of parents who want to leave their children with us - they know us and trust us," Father Antonios says.

"They say they do not have any money or shelter or food for their kids, so they hope we might be able to provide them with what they need."

Requests of this kind were not unknown before the crisis - but Father Antonios has never until now come across children being simply abandoned.
Handouts

One woman driven by poverty to give up her child was Maria, a single mother who lost her job and was unemployed for more than a year.

Emotional scars

Stefanos Alevizos - Greek psychologist

Parents who are not able to provide for their child will feel despair, loneliness and anger. They will carry an enormous weight of cultural stigma and shame.

Children absorb the emotions of their parents, so the child will internalise all the feelings of their parent - particularly guilt. Often they feel they are to blame.

Children taken into care may avoid forming a bond with their carers because they are afraid it would be a betrayal of their parent, and might mean their mother or father will not return for them.

When they get older, they are likely to have problems with trust and that will manifest itself in difficulties with relationships.

"Every night I cry alone at home, but what can I do? It hurt my heart, but I didn't have a choice," she says.

She spent her days looking for work, sometimes well into the evening and that often meant leaving eight-year-old Anastasia alone for hours at a time. The two of them lived on food handouts from the church. Maria lost 25kg.

In the end she decided to put Anastasia into foster care with a charity called SOS Children's Villages.

"I can suffer through it but why should she have to?" she asks.

She now has a job in a cafe, but makes just 20 euros (£16) a day. She sees Anastasia about once a month, and hopes to take her back when her economic situation improves - but when that might be she has no idea.

SOS Children's Villages' director of social work, Stergios Sifnyos, says the charity is not accustomed to taking children from families for economic reasons and does not want to.

"The relationship between Maria and Anastasia is very close. You can say you cannot see any problem, [any reason] why this child has to be far away from her mother," he says.

"But it's very difficult for her to feel comfortable to take back the child when she is not sure she will [still] have a job the next days."

'Act of violence'

“Start Quote
The truth is that the biggest need any child has is to feel the love of its parents”

Father Antonios Head of Kivotos youth centre

In the past when SOS Children's Villages took children into its care, the cause was mostly drug and alcohol addiction in the family. Now the main factor is poverty.

Another charity, The Smile of a Child, also focused in the past on cases involving child abuse and neglect. It too is now catering for the destitute of Athens.

Its chief psychologist Stefanos Alevizos, says that when a parent puts a child into care, the child feels its entire foundations have been shaken.

"They experience the separation as an act of violence because they cannot understand the reasons for it," he says.

But The Smile of a Child's Sofia Kouhi says the biggest tragedy, in her eyes, is that those parents who ask for their kids to be taken into care may be the ones who love their children the most.

Damaged safety net

• Greece's crisis has caused more poverty than its welfare system is equipped to deal with, so charities fill the gap
• However, donations are down and charities now have to pay taxes they were once exempt from
• "Charity associations like ours are doing 50% of the work that the Greek state should be doing and instead of thanking us they are penalising us," says director of SOS Children's Villages, George Protopapas
• Most cases of families giving up children occur in Athens, where traditional family and neighbourhood ties are diluted

"It is very sad to see the pain in their heart that they will leave their children, but they know it is for the best, at least for this period," she says.

Father Antonios disagrees.

He believes that no matter how poor parents may be, the child is always better off with its family.

"These families will be judged for abandoning their children," he says.

"We can provide a child with food and shelter, but the truth is that the biggest need any child has is to feel the love of its parents." ( bbc.co.uk )

The names of children in this report have been changed to protect their identities.

READ MORE - The Greek parents too poor to care for their children

Men's Testosterone Drops After Fatherhood

Men's Testosterone Drops After Fatherhood, Study Says - Women aren't the only ones biologically programmed to take care of kids. It turns out men are also hardwired to be fathers, says a new study out of Northwestern University.

As soon as men hit fatherhood, testosterone plummets. And it continues to drop the more he gets involved in childcare duties like feeding and changing diapers, reports The Telegraph.

But perhaps you might assume men with lower testosterone are more likely to settle down and have kids. But researchers say if anything the opposite is true. "On the contrary, the men who started with high testosterone were more likely to become fathers, but once they did, their testosterone went down substantially," said Lee Gettler, an anthropology doctorate who worked on the study.

Carol Worthman, an anthropologist at Emory University who also was not involved in the study, explained to the New York Times this is part of a guy being invested in a relationship. "What's great about this study is it lays it on the table that more is not always better. Faster, bigger, stronger - no, not always," Worthman concluded.

The final surprise out of the report? Hormones don't just affect behavior, but men's behavior can affect hormonal changes. And one ultimate shocking finding: Women were meant to have child care help.

Of course, research linking relationships, behavior and hormones is nothing new. Women are said to have better memory if they take the pill. Whereas as a Harvard study as far back as 2003 found that the more time men spend in relationships, particularly marriage, they are more likely to have lower testosterone. ( huffingtonpost.com )

READ MORE - Men's Testosterone Drops After Fatherhood

How to write to your kids

How to write to your kids - Let’s say you’re ready to make the big leap. You’re going to record your personal family history for your kids. Good for you. Still, you might be asking yourself some questions: Where should I start? How do I say what I want to say? And so on, into infinity and beyond.

As it happens, I devoted two years to writing for both my kids, compiling more than 100 vignettes, amounting to nearly 70,000 words. In the process, I gleaned a few tips. So here goes:

1. Decide to do it.

No, really. You’re either in or you’re out. Here’s a little trick I used long ago when wondering whether to marry my then-girlfriend, Elvira. Every day for about a month I asked myself, “Should I marry her?” Day after day, the answer that came back was yes. That self-survey helped me decide. We’ve now been married 34 years.


2. Plan it out.

Do at least an outline. Even Shakespeare needed one. Call it a GPS for the flow of your thoughts. Before I jotted down a single word, I daydreamed for weeks. Then I took shorthand – “gleaned my teeming brain,” as John Keats wrote. “Caroline singing for Nanna,” one note said. “Michael going out late at night,” said another. All my recollections served as clues to the stories that ultimately came.


3. Vote for reality.

Kids can smell spin from a mile away. So opt for the truth, however much it might hurt you to do so. Personally, I’m big on facts. My son Michael and I sometimes butt heads. That’s a fact. My daughter Caroline sometimes resists my advice. That’s a fact, too. All of us occasionally feel tempted to paint the past only with bright, sunny colors. But kids have an inherently keen sense of truth. Whatever you say, they will find you out.


4. Single out the highlights.

Draw only from the richest memories at your command. Even though you can write about anything, you’ll be better off writing about something — and better still, something specific, even, if possible, singular. Look to tell the story that is yours and yours alone to tell. Zero in on a single action or comment or incident or series of episodes. Capitalize on experiences that resonate as special, that matter, that mean something. Seize, above all, on moments, and therefore on the momentous, the revealing, the revelatory.


5. Keep it spontaneous.

First thought, best thought, poet Allen Ginsberg famously said. Theoretically, then, you’ll bring yourself within flirting distance of the genuine. I know — this tip directly contradicts tip No. 2. Let me explain: I planned the journals precisely so I could then be spontaneous. If you start with a general sense of the direction to take, you’re already halfway home. I went pretty much with whatever I felt the impulse to say — went what Robin Williams, in describing peak experiences in stand-up comedy, once called “full-tilt bozo.”

6. Briefer is better. It’s the soul of wit, no? Enough said.


7. Remember:

Anyone can write. I know that sounds like lip service, so let me clarify here. We all have stories to tell. And nobody knows your story better than you. Writing is different from talking, of course. It takes a lot more time and patience. Do you have to be a writer? No. It comes down to harnessing a certain power we all have within us. Period.

Even so, my only expertise here is my experience. So please regard these tips as merely a starter kit. Your life is your turf; you can rightly claim absolute sovereignty — and you get final cut. So go at this however you wish. Go with your gut. That’s my only real edict.

After all, I’m me and you’re you. To thine own self be true, and all that. And if you’re lucky, you might find your true voice. A voice your children will hear loud and clear. A voice they’ll cherish for the ages. ( washingtonpost.com )

READ MORE - How to write to your kids

How to Avoid Raising a Bully

How to Avoid Raising a Bully - Parents who don't want their children to become bullies should stay positive, talk to their kids and meet their children's friends.

That's according to new research presented May 1 at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Denver. Using data from a nationally representative phone survey, researchers found that some factors — including parents who frequently feel angry or bothered by their children — raise the risk that a child will become a bully. But other parenting behaviors protect kids from taunting others.

"The protective factors that I think can really be helpful, if we can focus on building them, is having parents who share ideas, talk well or very well with their child, and have met most or all of their child's friends," study researcher Rashmi Shetgiri of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas told LiveScience. The focus, she said, should be "helping parents to manage the negative emotions that they may have."

How to Avoid Raising a Bully

Home-grown bullies?

The devastating effect of bullying on victims is well-known, but bullies are at risk of hurting themselves, too. Research has shown that bullies are at greater risk than non-bullies for psychological problems, substance abuse and delinquency. One study, presented in 2010 at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, asked bullies why they torment other kids and found that they often hold negative views about themselves.

As part of a national phone survey, Shetgiri and her colleagues asked parents of children ages 10 to 17 whether their kids were ever cruel to other children. They also collected data on the parents' own mental health and emotions. Using data from 2003 to 2007, they found that 23 percent of children had bullied another kid at some point in 2003. In 2007, 35 percent of parents reported that their kid had been known to bully others, a 52 percent increase. In 2007, 15 percent of kids were "frequent" bullies.

Across the years, a few risk factors for bullying emerged. Children who had emotional, behavioral or developmental problems were more likely to bully. Kids of parents who said they often felt angry or bothered by their child were more likely to be bullies. And moms with mental health problems were also more likely to have kids that bullied.

Preventing potential bullies

On the other hand, parents who had communicative relationships with their children and knew most of their kids' friends were unlikely to raise a bullying child.

Shetgiri and her colleagues can't say from their research whether parental anger and impatience cause kids to act out by bullying, or whether bullies are more likely to make their parents angry. Discovering the cause of the bullying will require long-term studies of the same group of children over time, Shetgiri said.

The study also didn't look at cyberbullying, which Shetgiri hopes to research in the future. Her main goal, however, is to develop parenting interventions to either prevent or reverse the development of bullies.

"Interventions that help parents become more involved in their children's lives and that help parents communicate better with their children may be helpful," Shetgiri said. ( LiveScience )

READ MORE - How to Avoid Raising a Bully

‘Tiger Mom’ daughter starts a blog, heads to Ivies

‘Tiger Mom’ daughter starts a blog, heads to Ivies - America's best-known "Tiger Mother," Yale Law Professor Amy Chua, may soon face some literary competition from her daughter.

High school senior Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, who along with her younger sister is featured in their mother's book advocating an intensely strict mode of parenting, started a blog earlier this month called "New Tiger in Town," where she sounds off on some of the controversy around her family. (Chua, whose memoir "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" came out in January, says she's even received death threats for her parenting stance. NPR talked to a panel of mothers who were "horrified" at the restrictions Chua said she placed on her children.)

"When the whole world's calling you a mindless robot, you kind of get the urge to start talking!" Chua-Rubenfeld writes of why she started the blog. "Even though 'Sophia' in the book is much more impressive than Sophia in real life. I think I'm sullying my impeccable image one post at a time, but so be it."

The accomplished pianist jokes that she hopes to "sleep all day, rave all night. Learn by osmosis," while at college. She also published a lively and funny defense of her mother in the New York Post. "One problem is that some people don't get your humor," she writes. "They think you're serious about all this, and they assume Lulu and I are oppressed by our evil mother. That is so not true. Every other Thursday, you take off our chains and let us play math games in the basement."

The blog Above the Law first reported on April 1 that Chua-Rubenfeld was accepted to both Harvard and Yale (and planned to attend Harvard). The post was titled the post "Tiger Mom Triumphant," suggesting that Chua's controversial child-rearing methods were vindicated in her daughter's Ivy League prospects.

Chua-Rubenfeld took to her blog to set the record straight, writing that she is "seriously considering both Yale and Harvard," and hasn't yet decided where to go yet.

The national debate started for Chua (and "Sophia") when part of her memoir was excerpted in the The Wall Street Journal. She wrote:

Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do: attend a sleepover; have a playdate; be in a school play; complain about not being in a school play; watch TV or play computer games; choose their own extracurricular activities; get any grade less than an A; not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama; play any instrument other than the piano or violin; not play the piano or violin.

She told NPR that she eventually let her younger daughter, Lulu, give up the violin after she was worried her insistence on making her a play an instrument she hated would alienate her daughter forever. But Chua stands by her overall message that discipline is important. "If you just tell your child, you're great, you're great, you're perfect, I'm not sure that's the best way, because eventually your child's going to have to go out into the real world," she said. ( yahoo.com )

READ MORE - ‘Tiger Mom’ daughter starts a blog, heads to Ivies

Could kids be to blame for new parents' bad health habits?

Could kids be to blame for new parents' bad health habits? - A study found that mothers of young children were heavier and ate more calories, sugary drinks and fatty foods than childless women. Dads and moms in the study were less active than their peers without kids.

Sheri Lee Schearer, 34, says the results reflect her life with a 5-month-old son. Before, when she worked as a paralegal, she had time to make a spinach salad or go out for one. Now, as a stay-at-home mom in southern New Jersey, she grabs whatever is easiest and quickest.

"I often find that his needs come before mine," she said. "Do I get to the gym? No. Do I eat always healthy? No."

Quick, easily prepared foods are often high in fat and calories. Parents who choose these foods may end up serving them to their children, perpetuating a cycle of unhealthy eating, the study authors said.

"This isn't a study about blame," said co-author Jerica Berge, a University of Minnesota researcher. "This is about identifying ... a very high-risk time period" for parents that doctors should be aware of so they can offer solutions, she said.

That may include diet advice, parent-child exercise classes, or just getting parents to take walks with their kids, the researchers said.

The study involved 1,520 adults aged 25 on average, including parents with children younger than 5 years old. They were among more than 4,000 Minneapolis-area public school students enrolled in a study in their teens; the new study includes those who responded to two follow-up health surveys and answered questions about their diet and activity.

Results are published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

Mothers ate more fatty foods and drank about seven sugary drinks weekly, versus about four among childless women. Moms also had an average of 2,360 calories daily, 368 calories more than women without children. With that many calories, women that age would need to be active to avoid gaining weight, walking more than 3 miles daily at a moderate pace.

But mothers got on average a little more than two hours of at least moderate activity weekly, versus three hours weekly among childless women. Mothers had a slightly higher average body-mass index than childless women — 27 versus 26. Healthy BMIs are in the 19-24 range.

Fathers ate about the same amount of daily calories as childless men and both had an average BMI of about 25, but fathers got less physical activity — about five hours weekly, compared to almost seven hours among childless men.

Among study participants, more of the parents were black and had low incomes than the childless adults, but the researchers took race, income and other factors into account that might have affected diet or activity levels.

The study has several limitations; there's no data on how many women recently had babies, whose weight would still reflect pregnancy pounds. There's also no information on the number of single parents, who likely face even more diet and exercise challenges than married parents.

Sarah Krieger, an American Dietetic Association spokeswoman and St. Petersburg, Fla. dietitian who works with new mothers, said some of the mothers may have had postpartum depression, which might affect their eating and exercise habits.

Schearer, the New Jersey mom, said she's lost half the 40 pounds she gained while pregnant and doesn't care if she never loses that last 20 pounds.

Becoming a mom "has been the best thing that ever happened to me," she said. ( Associated Press )

READ MORE - Could kids be to blame for new parents' bad health habits?

Nearly a third of mothers are now working full-time

Nearly a third of mothers are now working full-time - The number of mothers working full-time has increased from less than a quarter to almost a third over the past 15 years, official figures revealed yesterday.

The Office for National Statistics said 29 per cent of mothers worked full-time at the end of last year, up from 23 per cent in 1996, driven by a growth in full-time working generally.

A higher proportion of mothers worked part-time rather than full-time, while there was also a narrowing of the gap between employment rates for mothers and for women with no dependent children.

New figures show 29 per cent of mothers were working full-time at the end of last year

In 1996 the employment rate for mothers was 61 per cent, while for women without children it was 67 per cent. By the end of last year the gap had almost gone, with 66 per cent of mothers and 67 per cent of women without children in employment, the figures showed.

Since the onset of the recession, the employment rate for women without children has fallen back from its peak of 70 per cent in 2006, driven mainly by a fall in employment for those aged 16 to 24.

ONS statistician Jamie Jenkins said: 'Over 15 years the proportion of mothers working part-time hasn't changed much but the number of full-timers has risen markedly, which is what's driving the increase in working mothers.'

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: 'The rising proportion of mothers in work over the last 15 years is a ringing endorsement of family-friendly working practices such as better parental leave and pay, and the right to request flexible working.

'The expansion of quality, affordable childcare through Sure Start centres, now under threat due to local government cuts, has also helped parents find work.

'It is deeply worrying that the Government is about to turn the clock back by abandoning plans to extend family-friendly working, cutting childcare tax credits and forcing hundreds of thousands of women out of work through mass public sector job cuts.' ( dailymail.co.uk )

READ MORE - Nearly a third of mothers are now working full-time

Parents, Not Kids, Are the Biggest Abusers of Technology

Parents, Not Kids, Are the Biggest Abusers of Technology - Parents complain that their kids spend too much time texting and surfing the Web.

But it may be that the biggest abusers of new technology are parents themselves. Sherry Turkle, a clinical psychologist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies how people use technology, says she has found that children are worried that their parents’ love affairs with BlackBerries, iPhones, and computers are fracturing their families. Turkle elaborates in her new book, Alone Together (Basic Books, $28.95), and in this edited interview.

Your book surprised me because you really take parents to task for paying more attention to their technology than to their children. Did you expect that when you started the project?

I expected to be writing a book about teenagers driving their parents crazy. It turned out to be a much more compelling story of parents texting in the car, parents texting at dinner, and kids not knowing what to do. It was a very surprising finding. And very moving. The stories really were about children wanting parents’ full attention.

What did the kids tell you during interviews?

They’re tired of being pushed on the swing with one hand while [Mom reads] her E-mail on the phone with the other.

I was really shaken by the story of the mom who never looked up from her phone while picking up her daughter from school.

When children come home from school, that’s the moment when they’re desperate to make eye contact with you. In this case, a 13-year-old girl [emerges] from school [where] her mother is waiting in the car. And the mother never looks up from her phone. To make it worse, the [girl’s] parents are divorced, [so] it may [have been] four days since she [last saw her daughter]. And she still won’t look up. The car is moving and she still doesn’t look up. The girl describes such a sense of longing. What is [her] mother doing that’s so much more important than looking at her?

Then I interviewed the mother. And it turns out that this is not an abusive, uncaring situation. This is a loving mother. But she is overwhelmed. Here is someone who is unthinkingly not giving her daughter something her daughter so desperately needs. We can do better than this.

You say we often fail to unplug under the mistaken belief that we’re being more efficient. What do you mean by that?

My favorite story is of [a] girl who is Skyping with her grandmother. She’s also doing her E-mail. From the grandmother’s point of view it’s great. But the girl is miserable, because she feels as if she’s paying no attention to her grandmother, [when] the whole point of this is to be there for her.

And you say there’s a biological explanation for why we love to multitask.

The reason multitasking feels so good [is that] our brains give us extra shots of dopamine [a brain neurotransmitter that affects mood] for every new task we multitask. We’re actually being rewarded chemically for every new task. But with every new task our performance is degrading. So if you’re emailing and putting contacts in the Rolodex, maybe it’s OK if your performance is a little degraded. Those things are degradable. But when we use these technologies of efficiency and bring them into our intimacies, we bring them into an area where we do ourselves damage.

So what should we parents do?

The mom who’s on the phone while pushing the kid on the swing has defeated the whole point of taking him to the playground. The whole point is to give each other full attention, and to create what I call sacred spaces around certain aspects of life.

What spaces should be sacred?

Dinner. No devices at dinner. That is a time that’s precious. We really just need to be with each other at dinner. Obama puts a basket for phones outside of the Oval Office. It doesn’t strike me as a bad idea to put one outside the kitchen. It’s just not the place.


And even though it doesn’t seem like it, the car is also a sacred space. It’s for driving and for conversation. Watching sports with your kids—in between plays, during commercials—that’s a time when the child is willing to talk to a parent.

You say that using electronic gadgets is different than reading a book or doing chores; it’s harder for kids to get parents’ attention.

There’s a very big difference between your mother doing the dishes and not giving you her full attention, which is what most people grew up with, and your mother being immersed in E-mail,or texting, or being online and not giving you full attention. One is an immersive gripping interactive activity, and the other is the kind of thing where the volume and velocity and pacing allows for interruption and shared attention. ( usnews.com )

READ MORE - Parents, Not Kids, Are the Biggest Abusers of Technology

The idiocy of text-message adultery

The idiocy of text-message adultery - Stop me if you've heard this one before: A woman says Tiger Woods had sex with her. No, really. Her name is Raychel Coudriet. It's the same story we've heard from other women: She liked Woods, he wanted her, he propositioned her, she said yes. He was sitting next to her at a party when he made his move. Did he touch her? Raise an eyebrow? Whisper in her ear? Nope. He texted her.

Woods may go down in history as the greatest golfer of all time. But he'll also be remembered as the king of sexting. He takes his place in a pantheon of lechers who have sated the world's oldest urge through the latest communications technology. Bill Clinton used the phone; Mark Foley used online chats; Mark Sanford used e-mail; Woods used text messages. Sitting right next to Coudriet, Woods went for his phone. He "texted her constantly," says the National Enquirer, echoing reports by other women. He was more addicted to texting than he was to sex.

Tiger Woods

The picture of Woods sitting there with Coudriet, discreetly sending her messages that would show up later in the Enquirer, captures the bottomless folly of extramarital sexting. Cheaters seem to think their phones send secret mating signals only their girlfriends can pick up. They couldn't be more wrong.

In the months since Woods' adultery was discovered, scores of his messages to various girlfriends have been leaked. So have the texts of Jesse James, the philandering husband of Sandra Bullock. If those aren't raw enough for your taste, try the X-rated pager messages between former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his then-chief of staff, Christine Beatty. No detail is spared. You can find out exactly how Beatty debriefed Kilpatrick and which holes Woods liked to play.

But that's only half of what makes these messages creepy. The other half is the cheaters' constant worry about being caught. Their thumbs work the keypads, pleading for secrecy. "Don't text me back till tomorrow morning. I have [too] many people around me right now," Woods told Jaimee Grubbs, a cocktail waitress. To Joslyn James, a porn actress, he texted: "Don't come down here yet. Lots of people in the hall. I will let you know when it clears." Later, he chastised her: "You almost just ruined my whole life. If my agent and these guys would have seen you there, Fuck."

Fuck, indeed. Everyone with an Internet connection now knows plenty about Woods' sex life. But we don't know it from a bimbo getting caught in a hallway. We know it from his texts. His comments to Coudriet—"Are you touching yourself? I want to f--- you"—are reprinted verbatim in the Enquirer. He treated his phone as a private channel, a place where he could hide his darkest thoughts from the world. Instead, the phone manifested and published them. His trysts are gone. His marriage is on the rocks. But his texts? They're immortal.

Bullock's husband, Jesse James, made the same mistake. "I'm texting you in secret," he told one of his girlfriends. That message, along with 194 others, is now in her possession and is among several, "many of them extremely graphic," that she has reportedly shown to TMZ, the celebrity gossip site. Too late, he has learned that there's no such thing as texting in secret.

So has Kilpatrick. "THEY WERE RIGHT OUTSIDE THE DOOR. THEY HAD TO HAVE HEARD EVERYTHING," he told Beatty after a night together. When she joked that they'd been "busted," he replied, "DAMN THAT. NEVER BUSTED. BUSTED IS WHAT YOU SEE! LOL."

That's the folly of the cheating sexter. He thinks that to be busted, he has to be seen with his girlfriend. He has it backward. A physical encounter can be broken up in seconds, leaving only the uncorroborated memory of a putative eyewitness. But a text is objective and self-incriminating. Busted isn't being seen. It's being read.

In hindsight, the exposed sexters seem almost poignantly naive. James' electronic attempt at just-between-us intimacy—"*wink*"—has been pasted all over the Internet. Kilpatrick's and Beatty's frequent reminder to each other—"ERASE!"—has been preserved as a warning to all who think their messages were purged. And Woods' leaked promise to Grubbs—"secretively we will always be together"—has become a self-refuting joke. The promise was a fantasy. So was the secrecy.

Remember that the next time you wander off the fairway of marriage. Lust isn't love, and texting isn't whispering. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The cell phone knows. Soon, the rest of us will know, too. ( slate.com )

READ MORE - The idiocy of text-message adultery

Working mothers spend 81 minutes a day looking after their children

Working mothers spend 81 minutes a day looking after their children - Working mothers in Britain spend just 81 minutes each day looking after their children - including mealtimes - a report has found.

It is the dilemma facing every working mother - how to devote enough time to their children, while juggling career demands with household chores.

Now, a new study has disclosed that in Britain, those who work outside the home spend on average one hour 21 minutes a day looking after their families - including meal times.

Stay-at-home mothers managed almost twice as much time directly caring for their children, with 2 hours 35 minutes dedicated to activities like meals, bathtime and playing games, according to the research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The report, which compared surveys in 21 leading industrialised nations found the time UK working mothers spent caring for their children was almost half that in some other countries.

According to recent studies British working mothers spend on average one hour 21 minutes a day looking after their families, including meal times

Those in Ireland spent 150 minutes a day caring for their children, while those in Australia managed 137 minutes, with working mothers in the United States, Canada, Italy, Sweden and Spain all spending more time looking after their children than those in Britain.

Family campaign groups said the emotional development of children was being damaged, because too many women felt under pressure to work long hours, while others prioritised careers over time at home.

But psychologists said it was more important how the time caring for children was used, and that less time than 81 minutes could be enough if it included fun activities which were sufficiently bonding.

The report examined how much time parents spent involved in childcare as a "primary activity" - covering things like meals, dressing, playing, and reading bedtime stories to children, and excluding time when the parent's main focus was on another task.

Of all parents, fathers with jobs spent the least time on such care - just 43 minutes a day.

Even when they did not work, fathers spent less time than mothers looking after their offspring - on average just 63 minutes a day - 18 minutes less than a mother who goes out to work.

The statistics for Britain included time spent with children at weekend - meaning that on working days, the average amount of time parents spent caring for their children was even less.

Dr Sandra Wheatley, a family and child psychologist said: "I don't think parenting is a numbers game - the important thing is that children get opportunities to have fun with their parents.

"If a mother gets home from work and spends 45 minutes haring around the living room dressed up as a belly dancer, or making drums out of yoghurt pots, before a quick dinner and bed, that could easily be good enough.

"The important thing is that some of the time is spent on activities that are child-led."

She said it was "curious" that stay-at-home mothers did not spend more of their time directly caring for their children, suggesting the figures might offer some comfort to working women who felt guilty about the time they spent out of the home.

"I think a lot of working mothers might think it's quite surprising - and maybe reassuring - that others who spend their time at home only spend just over an extra hour a day looking after their children."

But Margaret Morrissey, from lobby group Parents Outloud said too many children of working mothers were being short-changed.

She said: "A lot of children growing up in Britain today have no concept of a traditional family life.

"For some children, nurseries and childminders can work very well, but when so many children are spending so little time with their parents, the risk is that their emotional development is damaged."

Across all 21 countries, the research showed distinct differences in the type of childcare that women and men provide.

Mothers spent 60 per cent of their time on physical care, such as dressing, feeding, changing nappies, providing medical care and supervision.

But fathers were much more likely to spend time on educational and recreational childcare - helping children with their homework, reading and playing games.

They spent 40 per cent of their childcare time on this compared with 27 per cent of women.

Earlier this month, BBC newsreader and mother of three Sophie Raworth, provoked debate after disclosing that she is following a US parenting scheme called FAST, which teaches time-starved to give each child 15 minutes of "undivided attention" each day.

She investigated the eight week programme for a BBC Two documentary, Parents Under Pressure, and is now following its guidelines to bring up her children Ella, six, Georgia, five, and three-year-old Oliver.

The number of mothers who stay at home to look after their children has dropped dramatically in the past two decades.

Of women of working age, just two million are at home caring for family members full-time, a figure which includes those looking after elderly relatives, compared to more than 13 million in work.

Justine Roberts, co-founder of parenting website Mumsnet, said Britain's long hours culture made it hard for working mothers to get away from the office.

She said: "There is a culture in this country which means that despite the talk of family-friendly policies, women fear that rushing off early at the end of the day to see their kids will damage their career prospects."

Most parents could simply not afford to manage on one income, or take a pay cut to shorten their hours, she said.

When working mothers did get home, most tried to spend as much time with their offspring as possible, though they often felt stressed and tired, she said.

"Women aren't superhuman - we all end up feeling guilty but sometimes after a long day at work it can be hard to face starting a jigsaw puzzle," she added. ( telegraph.co.uk )

READ MORE - Working mothers spend 81 minutes a day looking after their children

Woman, 61, gives birth to her OWN grandson after being surrogate for her daughter

Woman, 61, gives birth to her OWN grandson after being surrogate for her daughter - Giving birth at 61 years of age is remarkable in itself - but Kristine Casey's delivery was made all the more unique because her bouncing baby boy was her own grandson.

Mrs Casey, certainly the oldest women in living memory to give birth in Illinois, broke several local records for being the surrogate mother for her daughter, Sara Connell, who had been trying for years to have a baby.

Mrs Connell and her husband, Bill, are the biological parents of the child Mrs Casey carried, which grew from an embryo created from the Chicago couple's egg and sperm.

Odd family tree: Sara Connell and Kristine Casey with son Finnean. After being a surrogate for her daughter, Mrs Casey is both Finnean's mother and grandmother

Mrs Connell told the Chicago Tribune that she and her mother held hands as Finnean Lee Connell was delivered by cesarean section at 9.47pm on Wednesday.

she said: 'When the baby let out a cry, I lost it. It's such a miracle.'

Dr Susan Gerber, who delivered the baby at the Northwestern Memorial Hospital, said it would have needed a heart of stone to not be moved by the amazing event.

She said: 'The surgery itself was uncomplicated, and the emotional context of this delivery was so profound.'

The rareness of the birth was certainly not lost on Dr Gerber. Successful childbirth for post-menopausal women is rare, but numbers have been rising due to advances in IVF treatments.

'The surgery itself was uncomplicated, and the emotional context of this delivery was so profound'

According to state health department records, the oldest woman to give birth in Illinois was 58 when she had her baby in 2006.

At 61, Mrs Casey certainly leaves that record far behind - but statists experts say data on births after 2008 are not yet available.

The Connells decided in 2004 to try to have a baby, but Sara - now 35 years old - soon discovered she wasn't ovulating.

After undergoing infertility treatment at the Reproductive Medicine Institute in Evanston, she got pregnant but delivered stillborn twins, and later she suffered a miscarriage.

Mrs Casey's pregnancies had all been without incident - albeit her last being 30 years ago.

The Connells and Mrs Casey came up with this unique plan and, for the past 39 weeks, they have been counting down the days until the healthy boy's arrival.

Now they have to prepare from the more difficult part - trying to explain to the young boy where he comes from. ( dailymail.co.uk )

READ MORE - Woman, 61, gives birth to her OWN grandson after being surrogate for her daughter

In the Age of Alternative Reproduction, Who Are a Child's Parents?

In the Age of Alternative Reproduction, Who Are a Child's Parents? - Thanks to modern medicine, more traditional and non-traditional couples and individuals are able to become parents through assisted reproductive methods, including anonymous and known sperm and/or egg donation, surrogacy, and second parent adoption. States have varying laws on sperm donor rights and responsibilities, the legality of surrogate motherhood contracts, recognition of same-sex marriages or civil unions, the need for court-approved adoptions, and whether second parent adoptions are available.

Because there are no reporting requirements by fertility clinics and sperm banks or any identifiers on birth certificates to calculate the number of children who are the product of home-based artificial inseminations, there are no clear statistics on the annual total of children born via sperm and egg donation (or a combination of the two) in the United States.

Commentators estimate the number of people using alternative reproductive technology (ART) to be as low as 5,000 to as high as 60,000 annually. My guess is that the number is at the higher end, if not significantly more, based on the demand for sperm and egg donation, the leaps in science allowing for more successful assisted reproduction rates, infertility issues caused by a delay in starting families (10 to 15 percent of married couples have fertility problems), and the large number of medical and legal entities offering services to facilitate non-traditional means of family planning. And you know something is on the increase when it becomes a huge Hollywood fad -- think "Baby Mama," "The Switch," "The Back Up Plan," and "The Kids Are Alright." (full disclosure -- I have an ART child).

One would think given this increase that there would be legal uniformity as to parental and financial rights and responsibilities. In fact, state legislatures have mostly punted this hot-button issue, declining to readdress the definition of parentage in recent years and instead allowing their judicial systems to render inconsistent verdicts. However, some scholars have begun to take note. For example, in March 2011, the American University Washington College of Law is hosting a conference entitled "The New Illegitimacy: Revisiting Why Parentage Should Not Depend On Marriage."

The inconsistencies create an enormous amount of uncertainty ranging from inheritance rights to child support and visitation. Additionally, there has been an increase in the questionable practice of commercially contracting with foreign surrogate mothers in countries such as India. And what if, for example, a family undergoes alternative family planning in one state but then seeks dissolution of their marriage or union in another that has conflicting definitions of parentage?

And just because one State supports one non-traditional parentage does not necessarily mean that it tolerates another. For example, in Washington, D.C., surrogacy is a felony. On the flip side, in 2010, it became the first jurisdiction to confer the status of legal parent on both lesbian mothers who plan a child using donor insemination, rendering second parent adoption unnecessary.

Some States even have conflicting rules relative to egg and sperm donation because some define genetic mothers as the legal mother but deem a married man the parent of a child conceived from an anonymous sperm donor. In other words, under this scenario, if a married couple used a donor egg and a donor sperm using a surrogate, then the anonymous woman who provided the donor egg is considered the legal mother, but the husband is considered the legal father.

Is your head spinning yet?

A sample of notable state laws and judicial rulings in the past few years reflect how unsettled, inconsistent and controversial the question of parentage is:

• In Pennsylvania, the trial and appellate courts initially forced a sperm donor to pay child support even though the mother was married to someone else at the time of insemination, and he had a contract that was supposed to relieve him of child support obligations. The State's highest court overturned the ruling, stating that the decision in line with the lower courts would undermine the legal status of sperm donors, including anonymous donors at sperm banks, and would force women to seek sperm via sperm banks rather than from men in their acquaintanceship that they admire.

• In Michigan, a married couple with fertility issues contracted with a surrogate mother, who had acted as a surrogate for three other children previously for other women. The resultant twins were produced by fertilizing an egg and a sperm from anonymous donors, so no party shared any DNA with the children. Upon hearing that the wife had a psychological disorder, the surrogate decided to object to legal transfer at the required guardianship hearing. The court sided with the surrogate because Michigan strongly opposes surrogacy contracts and, in fact, deems such contracts as a crime punishable by up to five years in prison as well as fines.

• In California, as well as some other states, if a person or couple is assisted by a licensed medical professional (even if the insemination is done at home), then the sperm donor automatically loses all claim to the child, and if the mother is married, the husband automatically becomes the legal father (assuming he and the mother sign a consent form to that end). But if you do not meet the above criteria, then the donor may assert claims.

• To the contrary, in Florida, the distinction as to where insemination occurs is irrelevant -- donors waive parental rights and responsibilities. Florida also permits surrogate agreements. But before you believe that Florida is at the forefront of tolerance on this matter, note that it does not allow same-sex adoptions.

• Now, contrast that with New York, where contracts regarding sperm donation between a couple and a known sperm donor are generally unenforceable, and the court will only look at the best interests of the child in determining the rights and duties of the donor as opposed to the parties' intent. More recently, although the state's highest court granted "legal parent" status to a non-biological mother to a child born after the couple had entered into a civil union in Vermont, the ruling does not extend to same-sex couples who fail to enter into such unions or same-sex marriage, both of which are unavailable in New York. However, New York's decision to honor Vermont's laws does not mean that other States will do so. Yet unlike Florida, New York allows second parent adoptions.

• In Indiana, the Court of Appeals reversed a trial court's ruling that the legal mother of a child was a non-related surrogate. In that case, a married couple enlisted the wife's sister to carry her child as a gestational surrogate. The court remanded the case back to the trial court with instructions to conduct an evidentiary hearing to determine motherhood based on biological, not gestational relationship. Unlike Michigan, the fact that Indiana law does not recognize the validity of surrogacy agreements was basically ignored.

Additionally, many cases differentiate between anonymous and known donors. But further muddying the waters is the fact that since 2005, many sperm banks offer "ID consent" donors, who have agreed to have their identities released to any resultant offspring when they reach maturity. Banks that handle egg donors have not yet done so, but given the trends one can foresee that possibility. Adding yet another wrinkle is the fact that Donor Sibling Registries are now available -- think about how, for example, that might affect sibling rights to inheritances. Given the existing legal confusion, one can easily imagine future litigation on these points as well without uniform guidance.

The Uniform Parentage Act, last revised in 2002, is a model statute that was created by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws to serve as a guide for drafting family legislation. It recognizes that as many as five adults can be involved in the production of a single child, and adopted a functional family definition as opposed to one dominated by genetics. With regard to assisted conception, it encourages that States:

• Authorize gestational surrogacy agreements as valid contracts requiring court approval similar to adoptions.

• No longer require that at least one of a child's intended parents be genetically related.

• Recognize that egg and sperm donors are not the legal parents of a child under any circumstances.

Unfortunately, only nine states have adopted versions of the 2002 Act, and for those who did, half have limited the parental rights to opposite sex married couples or declined to include the provisions related to surrogacy. Likewise, the Act does not acknowledge same sex couples, instead defining parents as a "man and woman."

My opinion? Whether you like it or not, families created through alternative reproductive methods are on the rise. States must acknowledge this trend and instead of seeking to prevent their use should enact the following legislation:

• Establish a method to report the offspring produced as a result of ART;

• Uniformly deem enforceable contracts between known sperm and egg donors and recipients and provide guidelines regarding drafting of same;

• Uniformly deem enforceable surrogacy contracts and establish guidelines for judicial approval;

• Create guidelines and clarify parental and sibling legal rights relative to ID Consent donors and Sibling Registries; and

• Adopt a version of the 2002 Uniform Parentage Act that includes a broader definition of parentage to include same sex couples. ( huffingtonpost.com )

READ MORE - In the Age of Alternative Reproduction, Who Are a Child's Parents?