Forget the tutor. Parents wanting to help raise their tweens' grades should hire a yoga instructor. Some say that a weekly, hour-long yoga class has been shown to help improve both concentration and academic performance in children as young as four. Namaste.
Moms are so nice, they should get to vote twice. Some Hungarian politicians who will stop at nothing to pander to the mom vote are considering legislation that would grant mothers an extra vote to cast on behalf of their children. It's Tammany Hall goes to daycare, folks.
Does Hollywood misrepresent labor and delivery? In the movies, women scream, contort and curse their spouses out like nobody's business but some say that's not the reality for most women. Do the terrorizing depictions of the birthing process in movies have an effect on our collective psyche and approach to pain medications?
While many couples stay together for the children, one man actually started an entire second family with his mistress. He refused to leave the wife he claims he never loved because he didn't want the children in his first family to suffer the harmful effects of a divorce. His mistress eventually left him and now this "father of the year" laments the fact that he has two families and two partners but no emotional contact with either. We're trying so hard to feel sorry for him but it's just not happening...
One divorced mother of three looks back on her marriage after nine years of separation and finds that her ex-husband has become a better father than he used to be. She also finds she's unable to get rid of some of the mementos from the happier days of her marriage, because she believes it will be good for their kids to know that before the hurt and separation there were good times and that those kids are the products of those good times.
A researcher conducted a study looking at the disparities between breast cancer testing rates in African-American and Latina women. Ho hum. Except that researcher's a 17-year-old high school student who began studying breast cancer after her grandmother succumbed to the disease. The valedictorian will soon be presenting her findings to a national health care panel in Washington, D.C. Nicely done, Jazmin Branch.
Ellen?! What kind of a name is Ellen?! That was the reaction one grandma had when her daughter bestowed that seemingly benign name on her grandchild. The woman was so incensed, she cut her daughter out of her will, leaving the daughter's share of the inheritance to charity. Just imagine the reaction if that kid had received a Hollywood-style baby name like Maddox or Harlow.
Alert the FBI, there's a new mafia in town - the "Montessori Mafia." A new survey shows that a high proportion of creative business executives are alumni of the educational style, which nurtures creativity and inventiveness. Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Julia Child, and Sean "P. Diddy" Combs are all Montessori grads.
If the Montessori approach seems a little too staid for your taste, you might want to consider the Blue School, which was founded by members of the Blue Man Group. The school, founded in 2006 and located in Manhattan, will be moving to a new, permanent location next fall. The private preschool and elementary school's emphasis on creativity extends to the very halls, which are not hallowed but use black lights to jump start the imagination.