You are here: Home / Archives for Family

Thick shelled

January 14, 2012 By

Mussels adapt to predatory crabs in a Long Island salt marsh by growing a thicker shell, concluded Samantha Garvey, after two years of research. The 17-year-old, a semi-finalist for the $100,000 Intel science prize, has a pretty thick shell herself. She’s been living in a motel and then a homeless shelter with her parents and three siblings since their eviction on New Year’s Eve.

Her mother, Olga, a nurse’s assistant, was out of work for eight months following a car accident in February, and her father, Leo, could not keep up with the bills alone on his salary as a cab driver.

The family will move into a rent-subsidized three-bedroom home in 10 days.

Before the eviction, the Garveys had rented a home for six or seven years, Leo Garvey said. Before that, the family had also lived in homeless shelters from time to time; Leo Garvey described himself as a recovering alcoholic.

Samantha said that she had worried for several months before the eviction, knowing that her mother was ailing and money was tight.

Garvey plans to become a marine biologist. She’s applied to Yale and Brown.

 

Filed Under: Education, Family Tagged With: , ,

Merry Christmas to all

December 25, 2011 By

Christmas is about family. My daughter’s here from New York City. My sister, her husband and my nephew (unemployed college graduate) live nearby. My brother, his wife and their three kids are visiting from Portland.

But my mother’s not here. A few weeks ago, she fell and hit her head. She’s now in a nursing/rehab facility trying to regain her mental abilities.  At first, the doctors said her confusion was a result of the head injury and predicted she’d recover. Then she got worse.

Three weeks ago, my mother was doing the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. Now she is very confused and disoriented. She starts sentences and can’t finish. Her memory — short-term and long-term — is very poor. She can recognize family members, though.

My sister was there for the first week after the accident. My daughter and I flew down last weekend. My niece and her boyfriend, who live in LA, are spending the holiday weekend with her. Then my brother and his family will drive down to see her. I’m flying down for a second visit in two weeks, when we hope she’ll be going home with a live-in caregiver.

I’m so grateful for being in a family that pulls together in times of trouble as well as cheer.

 

 

Filed Under: Family Tagged With: , ,

Judges redefine parenthood

December 24, 2011 By

California courts are redefining who counts as a parent, reports the Sacramento Bee. A woman who never adopted her ex-girlfriend’s children was declared a co-parent by a Sacramento appeals court because she “acted like one – providing for them financially, cleaning up after them when they got sick, and volunteering at their school.”

As a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, the woman couldn’t have adopted the children without risking expulsion from the military under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the court ruled.

In recent years, courts have assigned parental rights and responsibilities to adults who aren’t biological or adoptive parents, said McGeorge School of Law Professor Larry Levine.

“The state has a great interest in having those who want the benefits of parenthood to take on the responsibilities and obligations that go with parenthood,” he said. “That’s true for straight and gay couples.”

“Now the courts are starting to ask, ‘Who do these children think their parents are?’” said Deborah Wald, who handled S.Y.’s case at the appellate level. “Courts aren’t willing to take children away from people whom they rely upon.”

S.B.’s lawyer, Elizabeth Niemi warned single parents to “be careful about who you allow to have a relationship with your kids.”

Filed Under: Family, Parenting Tagged With: , , , ,

Immigrant blacks outperform natives

December 20, 2011 By

Africans outperform African-Americans in Seattle schools: Even the children of destitute Somali refugees do better.

The district compared blacks who speak English at home with those who speak other languages at home but aren’t considered English Language Learners.

Amharic-speaking students from Ethiopia scored the highest, nearly reaching the district average in reading. Somalis did worse than other African immigrants, but much better than English-only blacks.

• Only 36 percent of black students who speak English at home passed their grade’s math test, while 47 percent of Somali-speaking students passed. Other black ethnic groups did even better, although still lower than the district average of 70 percent.

• In reading, 56 percent of black students who speak English passed, while 67 percent of Somali-speaking students passed. Again, other black ethnic groups did better, though still lower than the district average of 78 percent.

Black immigrants attend college at a much higher rate than U.S.-born blacks or whites, concluded a John Hopkins study in 2009. The immigrants were educated, successful people in their home countries, researchers said.

However, that’s not true of the very poor Somalis who found refuge in Seattle.

Seattle School Board member Betty Patu, who has worked for decades with community groups serving students of color, said she has noticed that all immigrant families, regardless of socioeconomic status, place high value on education.

“Their motivation is different,” she said. “When you leave your country, you come here to do something. You don’t come here just to sit around and do nothing.”

In short, it’s the culture, stupid.

However, Marty McLaren, a board member and former teacher, blames “a culture of low expectations . . .  dating back to the days of slavery” for American blacks’ poor performance. Faced with institutionalized racism, students give up, she said.

 

 

Filed Under: Culture, Education, Family Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Thankful

November 24, 2011 By

We’re celebrating Thanksgiving in Maryland with my husband’s three children, son-in-law and future son-in-law plus the grandkids, toddler Julia and baby Lily.  Last year, their mother, four months pregnant, was in the hospital suffering — and I do mean suffering — with ulcerative colitis. We’re very thankful to have a healthy, happy Lily with us and nobody in the hospital.

I’ve been watching Little Einsteins with Julia. Every episode features a bit of classical music, a “mission” in a rocket ship and information about things like the difference between adagio, moderato, allegro and presto. I’m not sure this is information toddlers need, but Julia, who’s 2 1/2, enjoys it. Her obsession with Elmo seems to be over.

Julia talks quite a bit and has a large fund of knowledge for someone who hasn’t mastered the potty. I started telling her Goldilocks and the Three Bears as part of a discussion on whether her ‘toni (rigatoni) was too hot. She began telling it to me. No cultural literacy problems here.

I am “Nana Joanne.”

Filed Under: Children, Family Tagged With: , ,

‘Nothing worked’

October 9, 2011 By

Nathan Glazer’s Warning should be heeded, writes Howard Husock in City Journal.  In The Limits of Social Policy, the Harvard sociologist reviewed the research on education, training and poverty programs including the Job Corps, Head Start, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the school breakfast program and early-childhood education programs.

“At least some of the states known for high expenditure on education and social needs have shown remarkably poor records.”

“After having done badly in schooling, we do not do well at making up for the failure through work-training programs, though we have certainly tried.”

And crucially: “The evaluations of specific programs that were available during the first ten years after the launching of the [War on Poverty] confirmed the verdict: nothing worked, and, in particular, nothing that one did in education worked.”

A neoconservative, Glazer came to see social policy as grandiose and too focused on “remaking” individuals instead of supporting families, writes Husock.

 Any social policy, he writes in Limits, must be judged against “the simple reality that every piece of social policy substitutes for some traditional arrangement, whether good or bad, a new arrangement in which public authorities take over, at least in part, the role of the family, of the ethnic and neighborhood group, of voluntary associations.”

Traditional agents are weakened and the needy are encouraged to depend on the government, Glazer wrote. That increases the demand for more social programs, which inevitably fail to produce the desired results.

 

 

Filed Under: Careers, Education, Family Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Bronx teachers make house calls

September 6, 2011 By

Before school starts, teams of sixth-grade teachers at a public middle and high school meet new students and parents at home, reports the New York Times. Dressed in his new school uniform, Christopher Lopez signs a contract promising to be “respectful to everyone” and to “ask for help when I need it and offer help to others.”

Filed Under: Education, Family Tagged With: , , ,

School is haven for foster kids

July 16, 2011 By

Designed for foster children and others in troubled families, a Bronx charter school offers “a small student-teacher ratio, an extended school day, many tutor options and special training” for teachers,  reports AP.  The Haven Academy is sponsored by the New York Foundling, a private child-welfare agency, and has access to the agency’s large staff of counselors.

Private donations pays for the extra support.

The school has three full-time employees who focus solely on the social and emotional needs of the students. On any day, five to 10 Foundling counselors may be enlisted for student visits lasting from 30 minutes to a full day. All 200 Foundling counselors are invited to school functions.

The school was formed mindful that the only way students will progress academically “is to address the social stuff,” said Gwendy Fuentes, who coordinates support services between the school staff and child welfare workers.

Fuentes said it is not uncommon for counselors to help children who have been removed from their parents or have moved, sometimes multiple times a year.

Test scores are rising: 84 percent of second graders perform at or above grade level in reading and writing.

Filed Under: Education, Family, Parenting Tagged With: , , , ,

Mom’s in the kitchen, all’s right with the world

May 2, 2011 By

Economist Paul Krugman’s vision of Paradise lost is the middle-class suburb where he grew up in the ’50s and early ’60s, notes a New York Times Magazine profile.

“All the mothers waiting to pick up the fathers at the train station in the evening,” he says, remembering. “You were in an area where there were a lot of quiet streets, and it was possible to take bike rides all over Long Island. We used to ride up to Sagamore Hill, the old Teddy Roosevelt estate.”

If service workers were unionized, Krugman says, we might return to that broad prosperity.

Jim Manzi, who grew up in a small town a few years later than Krugman, recalls the “almost unbearable sweetness of this kind of American childhood.”

The safety and freedom that Krugman describe are rare now even for the wealthiest Americans – by age 9, I would typically leave the house on a Saturday morning on my bike, tell my parents I was “going out to play,” and not return until dinner; at age 10, would go down to the ocean to swim with friends without supervision all day; and at age 11 would play flashlight tag across dozens of yards for hours after dark. And the sense of equality was real, too. Some people definitely had bigger houses and more things than others, but our lives were remarkably similar. We all went to the same schools together, played on the same teams together, and watched the same TV shows.

Krugman sees that exceptional moment in time “as primarily the product of policies like unionization, entitlements and high taxes,” writes Manzi, who sees it as the product of lucky circumstance.

Megan McArdle, who’s younger and grew up in Manhattan, sees something else: In the Good Old Days, mothers are home.

Families only need one car because Mom, who doesn’t herself work, is available to drive Dad to work every morning before she heads to the grocery store. And the kids can play unsupervised because, of course, in this neighborhood–in all neighborhoods–there is a network of constantly watching eyes. Meanwhile, the poor people and minorities are somewhere comfortably distant . . .

“The income gains of the 1950s and 1960s were real,” she writes. But the suburbs Manzi and Krugman remember were  “completely dependent on other forms of inequality: of the ability to move away from social problems, which is harder now; of generations of women whose sole destiny was the kitchen”

Steve Sailer’s Pussycat Mother had plenty of time for volunteer work, he responds. Middle-class parents could afford a home on one salary in the idyllic San Fernando Valley. There was no need to pay private-school tuition, no reason for Mom to chauffeur the kids to “high-end after-school resume fillers” so they can get into top colleges. Sailer got into UCLA without all that.

Biking all over town, playing on our own, cutting across the neighbors’ yards to get to the park, wives picking up husbands at the train station in the evening, Mom at home, except when volunteering . . . Me too.

Filed Under: Children, Family, Parenting Tagged With: , ,

Home!

April 11, 2011 By

My step-granddaughter Lily went home from the hospital today.  She was born March 1, nine weeks early, weighing two pounds, five ounces.  She’s now a hefty four pounds and change. She has no health problems.

Thank you, modern medicine.

Filed Under: Family Tagged With:
« Older Posts