The school year will end before you know it, and NOW is the time to make summer plans for kids.   Some parents look for a summer program that is educational; others look for a program that builds a special skill; many pick a program with hours that match parents work schedules.  Regardless of why a program is chosen, one thing should be certain: that the camp is run in a way to keep children safe. [...]

Parents are the strongest influence on their children’s decisions about sex and sexuality, yet most parents underestimate their own power. A major national survey reported in 2010 that 46 percent of teens continue to say that parents most influence their decisions about sex, while just 20 percent say friends most influence their decisions. At the same time, parents overestimate the influence media and friends have on their children’s decisions about sex and underestimate their own. The same [...]

Superintendent John Deasy of the Los Angeles Unified School District took a courageous step  this week  by removing  the entire staff of one of the largest elementary schools in the country in the face of  evidence  supporting allegations of sexual abuse of children by his staff.  Of course, the fact that the most notoriously botched investigation of child sexual abuse  (the McMartin pre-school case which generated a trial lasting from 1987-1990) took place in a neighboring [...]

I guess  it’s understandable that the big question right now seems to be what Joe Paterno knew and when he knew it.   As a Penn State alum, this makes me beyond sad.   As an undergraduate, I actually  had President Spanier as a professor in the College of Human Development, and my first masters degree is from what was then the College of Health and Physical Education.  Parterno was  among that faculty in my day, so [...]

As the back to school transition eases into a comfortable routine, this is a good time to consider  a finding published in a report by the U.S. Department of Education: Various studies show that as many as 5 percent of kids report a sexual contact with a school employee sometime during their school experience. Section 5414 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), as amended required a study of sexual abuse in U.S. [...]

So what if April is Child Abuse Prevention Month? Every month is dedicated to somebody’s favorite cause, and we all have a really short attention span. Child abuse and neglect seem to be under the radar right now. We can all be thankful  when we have a week or month  without reports of  tragic deaths or damning reports of bad decisions by  public agencies.   But lately, not a week goes by that another person in the [...]

Anyone see the Today Show this morning (3-8-11) ?  Two experts joined Matt Lauer to debate the pro’s and con’s of parents ‘spying’ on their teens internet activities.  Is it an act of dishonesty between the parent and the child or a prudent safety measure?  Any parent can imagine the indignant scream of a 14 year old caught in a racy IM chat, or the sound of a foot-stomping, door-slamming 15 year old confronted about [...]

Kids learn about sex from the media.   That’s been demonstrated again and again.  The American Academy of Pediatricians tell us that kids wills see over 40,000 TV ads each year, many of them using sex to sell.    The Kaiser Family Foundation research tells us that “seven in ten (71%) have a TV in their bedroom’  and kids spend 4 1/2 hours each day  with their eyeballs glued to a screen. There’s sex n the media [...]

Bill Zeller was a brilliant graduate student who could unwrap the mysteries of the digital world but was unable to find comfort and joy among people. The words of his poignant suicide note, in which he discussed his childhood rape by an unnamed man, will be parsed by many looking for an answer, a perpetrator, or a moral. Most of us will be tempted to point the finger at his parents, therapists or neighbors, and [...]