This summer, we finally gave in and let our son get a hermit crab at the shore while on vacation.  Each year, we found some excuse to disallow based on his age, his behavior or otherwise.  This year, he’s grown more mature and responsible and was a great kid during vacation, so we said fine.  It’s turned out well so far – he plays with them every day, feeds them, cleans them and he’s very compassionate toward his little buddies.  During casual conversation with some parents of kids in his class, we became aware of a rather bizarre and cruel practice IMO.

Apparently, all kinds of parents do the hermit crab thing each summer, and they do it EACH summer because come spring, there’s no more hermit crab in the house.  Where do the little critters go?  Well, these parents (and this is more than 1 family, and not in a coordinated fashion, so I don’t know where this bizarre ritual came from) wait until Christmas each year and go and put the crab out in the snow to freeze to death.  Aside from the fact that this is cruel and unnecessary, what kind of message is this sending to children?  It’s OK to torture a small critter to death?  So, it’s also OK to stomp a cat or light a dog on fire?  As kids grow up and engage in more reckless behavior, if they don’t have the right baseline on how to treat other people and animals, later in life, the swings in how they behave toward others grow wider and wider.  While I did a lot of stupid, risky stuff as a teenager, I never exhibited any form of animal cruelty, I wasn’t raised that way.

Even though they’re “just hermit crabs”, there were a pet.  It’s not like killing a spider; these were purchased domesticated pets that children cared for and played with and then were killed for no apparent reason – then purchased again to repeat the cycle.

Can anyone enlighten me on whether this Christmas ritual is an American tradition and where it came from?

And do you think this is acceptable?

So, we went to two different fireworks shows this year.  One was in our hometown and then this weekend, our friends in another state had us out for their town’s fireworks.  I’m used to fireworks starting late, as nobody can ever seem to get it together, but this year in North Jersey was outrageous.  The stated start time was 9:30 PM which is already pretty late considering most people bring little children and it’s dark before 9.  Well, these fireworks didn’t go off until 10:15PM.  That’s absurd.  They went until past 11.  So, we got home pretty late, but I can’t help but wonder, why can’t any fireworks show ever go off on time?

It’s the Same Show Every Year!

You would think these towns that hire these contract fireworks outfits or the fire departments – they basically have the same routine every year – forever.  It’s the same personnel setting up, rehearsing, lighting the fireworks, etc.  If you have an entire year to plan for something and say 9:30 start, why is it so difficult to start at 9:30?  I just don’t get it.

Is It Still a Recession?

The other thing I’ve noticed over the past few years is the fireworks shows are getting increasingly shorter (and less impressive).  Maybe it’s me just being an old fart and as I age fireworks just aren’t as big a deal, but it seems like the shows are getting less and less impressive.  One has to question whether it’s municipalities cutting back on their entertainment budgets.

Oh well, not to sound ungrateful; we do enjoy the shows.  But if they could at a minimum, start on time, I’d be much more impressed.

After reading an article that I wished would just go away, it didn’t, so I figured I’d contribute to the dialogue with my observations and assessments.  First, Amy Chua, a fame-hungry professor pushing a book published her account of why Chinese Moms Are Superior at the Wall Street Journal.  I guess they were going for the shock factor, which they got.  Both the title and the premise are utterly ridiculous.  Then, CNN and other networks started weighing in with their own panel of Asian experts patting themselves on the back for similar accolades.

Why Chinese Moms Are NOT superior

While this woman and others like her love to tout the rigidity and discipline with which they raise their children, where are the results?

• “Abnormal” Kids and Adults - I remember toiling away in my Chemical Engineering undergrad at Rutgers wondering what these people were all about.  If you’ve been through a technical undergrad, you’ll appreciate this.  Our class was basically comprised of about 90% Asian/Indian students, about 5% Caucasian, and then about 3-4 kids of other backgrounds combined.  I was in the 5% Caucasian camp.  I used to visit the student center on the night before an assignment was due only to find that the cut-throat students ahead of me had cut required pages out of the book with a razor blade.  I had to make due to my other resources – shame on me for procrastinating.  I’d see then clans of various factions – the Koreans, the Chinese, the Indians moving about in herds and always toiling away all day at the student center.  They tended to not associate with students of other backgrounds, just their own.  While I found this to be odd, and sad in a way, it didn’t impact me.  I ended up joining a fraternity and having a great, fun, diverse and successful college experience.

• They Are Not Leaders - So, where are these kids today that I had to compete against in college?  I graduated with honors and I was raised like a “typical” American kid the author criticizes.  I don’t have a particularly high IQ and my SAT was a mere 1260 – enough to get in, but not enough for a scholarship – and not enough to be “accepted” or praised in one of these rigid households.  I played sports, I did sleepovers and the horror! – I played guitar instead of piano or violin.  As I look around at leaders within my company and others – guess what?  They’re not these kids.  We have plenty of leaders of color, so let’s not cry racism in this day and age.  We have diversity in American leadership – but they’re rarely Asian – probably lower than the actual percentage of representation in the US population at large.  Where are the results?  I thought these brilliant hard working kids should have taken over the world by now, right?

• Why Does the US Continue to Lead? This way of raising kids is no new phenomena.  We’re talking about generations of eastern vs. western values.  And while America may not be on the pedestal it used to be, America still clearly leads the world in virtually all aspects that matter in world standing – military, financial, innovation, desired destination for immigration, opportunity, secondary schooling, medical schooling, you name it.  America is where it’s at.  So, why haven’t Asian nations surpassed America?

This isn’t a knock on Asians or tough parents at all.  I DO think America has a really bad parenting crisis.  I see it with people I know, and kids I grew up with had lousy parents and some of them turned out fine and others ended up in alcohol rehab.  But let’s not oversell the method of drilling and creating drones.  It doesn’t seem to work all that well either.  At least with a balanced, middle-ground childhood, I grew up to be a well-adjusted, successful and happy adult.  Can this be said of all these children?  Based on what I encountered in college and some anecdotal experience with co-workers and folks in town, I just don’t see this purported superiority.

I saw an intriguing 60 minutes segment this week outlining the huge numbers of students (and professionals surprisingly) that are wantonly taking ADHD drugs in college for everything from studying and test-taking to pulling all-nighters and writing otherwise boring papers.  I was struck by both the striking proportion of students who admit to this practice and also the nonchalant attitude toward taking medications in the same class as cocaine to do something we’re supposed to confront with our natural abilities – school – and your job.

Staggering Numbers – Students and Professionals

According to their estimates, Among Upper Classes, 50-60 Percent Using ADD/ADHD Drugs Ritalin and Adderall.  The students interviewed said “It’s the norm”.  According to a survey of nearly 2,000 students at the University of Kentucky, 34% of undergrads took attention deficit drugs illegally without a prescription. For perspective, the percentage of students legally taking the drugs (presumably, only a portion even, of these actually need it) is 4%.

Isn’t This Cheating?

Call me old-fashioned, but drinking a soda and getting some fresh air used to be the way college students stayed alert and pulled all-nighters.  And call me ancient to suggest that perhaps an all-nighter wouldn’t even be required if you didn’t procrastinate until the last minute.  But these days, I now see middle school kids walking out of dunkin’ donuts with coffees (this was unheard of when I was growing up and I’m not old) and highschool and college students are taking drugs meant for clinically diagnosed attention disorders.  Is this really any different than “natural athletes competing against athletes on steroids?  If I’m using my own natural ability to study, retain lecture information and take a test and I’m competing against a classful of students taking drugs that (supposedly) increase mental acuity and performance, is that fair?  Do I then need to start taking drugs just to compete?  I mean, many courses grade on a curve, right?

It Doesn’t Matter – Nothing can be Done to Stop It

Whether this is fair or not doesn’t really matter frankly.  The phenomena has arrived and it’s here to stay.  We can’t even keep drugs that are illegal under all circumstances from flooding our country, how would we reasonably expect to curtail the use of legally prescribed drugs?  According to the students in the airing, they simply go to a doctor and say “Oh, I’ve been having trouble concentrating” and the doctor in turn says “Oh, you must have ADHD – here’s a prescription”.  It’s an obvious wink-wink relationship between the sales reps, doctors and patients that is so prevalent in our society.  The interesting part is that the jury’s still out on a) how effective the use of these drugs actually is for college students and b) what the long-term effects are for chronic use and addiction.

The New Normal

I suspect this trend is another new normal for America.  We’re graduating an entire generation of students who are now entering the workforce that are either overtly addicted to ADHD drugs or at least believe that it’s OK to use these drugs enhance their performance and alertness as needed, so this is our future American workforce.  Personally, I don’t feel threatened because intelligence and alertness are just a couple cogs in the wheel of what actually makes for a successful career, but I wonder about my kids.  Will this work its way down to routine use in highschool and earlier?  Will it be “expected” that if you want to be a top student, you’ve gotta use in order to excel?  Who knows?  I had heard of this before, but I was shocked by the prevalence.

Do You Use ADHD Drugs to Enhance Your Performance?

Do You Think It’s Fair?

Is it me or are some parents (usually moms dictate these terms) overly rigid with their kids’ napping schedules?  I don’t mean to knock moms trying to do right by their kids, because I realize that some kids are completely off the wall if they miss their nap for the day or something, but there are some parents who are so rigid with the napping timeline that it’s a little over the top.

We have some acquaintances that absolutely will not budge by even 30 minutes on plans or a get-together if it doesn’t adhere strictly to their child’s standard nap time.  In one case, my wife hangs with a small mom group and when it hits 11:30, one mother abruptly packs up and jets out of there without barely saying a word.  She murmurs something about Johnny’s nap time and how he can’t start late.  I mean, what would happen if instead of laying him down at noon, he went down a 12:15?  Does he turn into a pumpkin?  The kids were having a great time and boom – end of story.  No flexibility.  We have another friend that won’t drive to our house during the day because their child wouldn’t get a full nap at their usual time.  Meanwhile, it’s OK for us to drive to them and have the kid nap in the car or shift their nap time.

Maybe we’re just too lax or real lucky, but since we’ve had to be pretty flexible after moving and drive our kids all over the place to maintain friendships, make doctor’s appointments, hit speech lessons, etc., our kids nap times have moved around to accommodate schedules, not the other way around.

Here’s the funny part…twice per year, times shift by an hour for daylight savings.  The moms have no trouble shifting a noon nap pre-daylight savings to noon post-daylight savings (a whopping 1 hour shift in the span of a day), yet they wig out at the thought of starting or ending a nap 15 minutes from the “clock” time to accommodate a particular situation.

Can someone please explain this to me?

The universal Preschool movement is picking up steam since Obama took office.  Similar to the bailouts for homeowners and banks that made poor financial decisions by now transferring wealth from the responsible to the irresponsible via TARPs, TALPs and scalps, this effort is meant to provide “free” Pre-K to everyone, which will essentially destroy the one bright spot in American education that hasn’t already been wrecked by government intervention and mediocrity.

How Could Something that’s Free be Bad?

Well, nothing’s free.  It’s a coy political phrase for “taxpayer-funded”, which means you and I (actually, our children, since we are commiting generational crimes with the amount of debt we’re handing to our children).  Right now, pre-schools need to compete with each other for parents’ dollars and enrollment.  As a result of this competition, the schools do their best to hire the best educators, bring the most fun/innovative/educational environment to the children, provide the best services, assurance of safety, etc. – everything you’d want for your youngster.

When a particular teacher or administrator is underperforming, they’re shown the door.  This is American competition/capitalistic reality.  In a public school (free), there are plenty of great teachers (my wife’s one of them), but we’re all familiar with the lousy ones too and with tenure and one of the strongest unions in the nation, they’re there til they want to leave, which, given the generous pensions and benefits, usually means for a very long time.  And it’s not solely a teacher thing really.

The system is broken.  Here’s why:

When we were selecting a preschool for our children, my wife went to 6-8 different preschools, sat in on a class, interviewed the teachers, talked to the administrators and collected information on their programs, hours and costs.  She inquired into the Preschool games, crafts, lesson plans and the overall curriculum to see if it was a fit for our child.  With such diverse options, we were able to sit down and quickly eliminate the schools that failed our critical requirements (i.e. some of the schools employed rather rigid, rote memorization and drills which wouldn’t work for our little guy, perhaps others, but you need to know your kid…another school had a teacher that didn’t seem very warm or friendly which isn’t really a good personality for dealing with 3 and 4 year olds, etc.).  Next, we considered cost.  We could have paid $7500 for “the best” or more like $2500 for our #2 choice.  In taking a pragmatic approach to this level of education and weighing cost/benefit, we went with option #2 (I admit, we didn’t blow the budget to buy “the best” education at 4 years old…we’re saving those dollars now to be able to put our kids through “the best” colleges later which we view as a better ROI).

With public school, you go where you go based on where you live.  There is no competition.  As bad as a school is, kids will continue to go there and taxpayers foot the bill.  There is some accountability, but not enough.  You’re often dealing with administrators trying to fend off angry parents that want to know “what did the teacher do to provoke my child?” rather than looking inward at why their child is acting like a punk and the teacher punished them. They’re also now teaching to the test, focusing so much attention on troubled kids that some students end up board or lost in the mix and so on.

There’s always private school, but my wife’s a public school teacher and that’s a bit hypocritical.  We were both products of the public school system and consider ourselves to be successful, productive and content.  Plus, some of these private schools are charging outrageous fees, more than actual undergraduate college expenses.  I just don’t think the actual difference in performance justifies the fees.  Perhaps if money were no issue to us I’d feel differently about it, but it seems rather silly to me to pay 5 figures for a 1st grade education, on top of the taxes we’re already paying for not sending our kids to a good public school district.  We just moved to one of the better districts and pay the higher taxes to get our kids into a district that’s acceptable to us.  So, we’re voluntarily subjecting ourselves to “the system” for K-12 because the cost/benefit justifies it for the district we’re in, but for Preschool throughout the nation?  Let’s preserve something that’s already working.

What About Parents who can’t Afford Preschool?

Well, most can and those kids already go to Preschool.  And for the ones who can’t afford it, there are Head Start programs and other government funded programs already.  All this proposal would do is shift the burden of payment to all Americans to send all kids to mediocre schools.  So, why should Americans accept the current system of competition and selection of the optimal school for their children and instead settle for government-run public school hell at an even earlier age?

Is there any reason to believe that with lousy performance at the K-12 levels, the government would do any better at running preschools?