Asking permission or begging for trouble?
And we wonder why kids these days are out of control. How about asking an infant permission to be picked up?
Modern parenting too often equates to zero parenting and 100 percent enabling and/or utopian experimentation. Whatever it's called, the stage is set for a backfire of unanticipated lovelies when Junior is no longer small enough to be picked up – either with or without consent. The result? A generation of adults who are big, bad-mouthed, beyond spanking, and determined to do whatever they feel like doing.
Nisha Moodley, a young San Francisco mother, is one such example. This zealot is determined, no matter what the ludicrous fallout, to instill in her child the absolute, unassailable fact that one's body belongs to oneself, and others have a right to their bodies, too. "[N]o one gets to make choices about someone else's body!" she says.
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Only child Raven – a six-month-old boy for those who couldn't tell from the name – is always asked by his mom whether or not she has permission to pick him up. The practice began at Raven's birth (did Raven consent to this?). According to Yahoo, Moodley states that she "always feels for his 'yes.'"
"I don't ever want my son to be a sexual perpetrator or the victim of one, and the best thing I can do is honor his choices about his own body," Moodley tells YahooBeauty. "I also want him to pay attention to his instincts, and forcing physical touch could interfere with that."
But the mentality in which parents must ask (not direct) their children – even when it comes to picking up an infant – is being encouraged ... not just by other mothers, but by professionals.
"This idea is part of the wonderful RIE parenting philosophy, which is essentially respecting a child's timetable and allowing him or her to participate in the full range of experiences as the result of a decision," parenting expert Sharon Silver Silver told Yahoo Beauty. "It's the underlying premise of positive parenting."
Silver admits there is a downside to giving young ones too many options. (Ya think?)
"Some parents trap themselves because they don't follow through on correcting behavior and wind up losing power," she says. For example, instead of saying to an older child, "Put on your shoes now" (and forgoing an opportunity for the child to "find their own muscle of cooperation"), Silver suggests saying something like, 'You have 10 minutes to put on your shoes any way you want – then, if you're not ready, I'll have to do it for you.'"
The trap, however, is often that of being roped into exhaustive explanations and giving young people the idea that there is any choice at all. Want to bet that in 20 years we'll be berated with the damaging effects of constantly setting your child to a ticking clock that threatens consequences when time runs out and the parent's overbearing expectations aren't met?
Watch out for that pain
"Oh the pain, the pain!" Who can forget the lamentations of Dr. Smith, the obnoxious stowaway from the 1960s television show "Lost in Space" who, through his own fault, was trapped on the spaceship that took off in 1965 and never returned to earth. (Take a gander at the vintage clip above to refresh your memory.)
But "Lost in Space" was a fantasy show, not reality. What's real today is being confined in even smaller spaces – like on a commuter train – with whiners whose "pain" is forced on everyone else. Some lucky travelers in Warwickshire, England were treated to the real-life drama of a group of teens creating a show starring – you guessed it – themselves!
Daily Mash relates the circumstances:
Hollis, 15, said: "We'd just got on when I received a text from Lucy saying she's not into Simon anymore, so obviously I had to scream really loudly to register my surprise.
Then Kate started getting one of her panic attacks due to being in an enclosed space and we all had to keep shouting at her to keep calm and breathe deeply.
Luckily it passed but Jason thought we might be on the wrong train and had to sprint down the carriage to look at the map and shout, '[Bleep]! Where the [bleep] are we?'
All the stress was too much for Gavin and he got really depressed. He's been in a really dark place since his goldfish died.
Somehow we made it to Nuneaton, but then Lucy phoned to say she thinks she's lost her geography coursework. Why does all this crazy [bleep] keep happening to us?
Oh the pain, the pain.
One may scoff at the level of such suffering, but Stephen Malley, who was riding along with this bunch said: "I doubt I'll be able to sleep tonight for worrying about Stacey thinking Gemma was really nice but it turning out she's fake."
What's real is whether or not this crew of teens will ever make it back to Earth.
So who's the man behind the Barney suit?
Think playing Barney was nothing more than donning a costume and acting goofy? Think again.
The term "tantra," most commonly associated with reaching the heights of some mystic love connection, actually derives from Sanskrit and means, "loom, warp, weave," according to Wikipedia. And weaving previously untapped energies into his performance and subsequently the living rooms of countless millions is exactly what the man inside the Barney suit aimed at doing:
David Joyner is a former Texas Instrument's analyst who animated the Barney suit from 1991 to 2001. He began studying tantra at age 19. He also began his quest to fill Barney's jumbo purple feet with the understanding he would get the role. Joyner, who fancies his family to be clairvoyant, relates having a dream the night before his audition about having to give the beloved character mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The next day, on the journey to the studio, he happened upon a billboard that indicated if one breathed life into life, he or she would be on vacation. And that is how Joyner views his time spent sweating inside a 70-pound costume.
Even so, his job was "no easy feat," he said in an interview with E Online. "The head (Barney's) doesn't come off. The head doesn't swivel. There's no facial expressions that can be made. I can only see a certain amount, because of the peripheral of Barney's mouth. And when Barney's mouth is closed, I can't see anything. So, what I would literally do is I would walk around my apartment as if I was blind. I would close my eyes, and I would try to feel energy. And try to feel the energy of anything that was around me. And then try to pick things up."
Joyner has been feeling the love for quite some time in Hollywood. He's also appeared on shows like "Shameless," "That '70s Show," "E.R.," "Swat," "24," and "The Young and the Restless," finally picking up the role of Hip-Hop-Harry, a live-action bear that runs an after-school center on Discovery Kids Channel.
Whatever you may think of Barney the Dinosaur or Joyner, nobody can deny the warp of success he's woven by picking up opportunity and making the most of it.
Would you want to have a head transplant?
Check out the following video that insists that the faster we "change," the better situated we are to outrun human extinction:
Thanks, but living forever doesn't sound that appealing. And neither does outrunning logic for the sake of change.