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 It’s hard to believe, but when Amnesty International called many years ago to ask me to translate the CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD into a book that children could read and understand, I had no idea what they were talking about. This crucial declaration of Human Rights for Kids was never even mentioned during my years of training to work with children and to the best of my knowledge, little has changed in this regard. So is it any wonder why Human Rights abuses against children throughout are becoming more prevalent throughout the world then ever? Thank heavens for organizations like Amnesty International that work to defend the defenseless. It is because of Amnesty that I developed the KIDS FOR GLOBAL PEACE program designed to teach children about their Human Rights. And it is why I welcome the opportunity to acknowledge this most honorable organization on May 28^th, Amnesty International Day.

In honor of Amnesty International Day we are giving away a FREE PDF download of the graphic novel, Gig Goes Global as well as two of the original songs.

Just Click Here.

Sorting through any rack of Mother’s Day cards could easily lead one to conclude that motherhood is nothing more than an endless list of caregiving tasks that are more often than not taken for granted. Unfortunately, these Hallmark sentiments often perpetuate the notion that a mother’s self-sacrifice and hard work is the reason she should be honored on Mother’s Day. However, if raising an autonomous, responsible child is the goal, a mother/child relationship in which the mother does all of the heavy lifting is counterproductive. Mothers can become tired and resentful and children can develop inflated senses of self importance and entitlement. Neither outcome is good for anyone. This is why I advocate balanced mother/child relationships in which children are taking on as much responsibility for their own lives as possible while making positive contributions to the family as well. I’ve written an entire book about how to develop and maintain balanced parent/child relationships. It’s called REWARDING PARENT CHILD RELATIONSHIPS. I want to give this book to all of you well-deserving mothers as my FREE Mother’s Day gift to you. Enjoy!

Click Here to Get Your FREE Copy of Rewarding Parent/Child Relationships

For the longest time skeptics have laughed off any reference to climate change. But given the recent unpredictability and drastic changes in the weather, I don’t hear anyone laughing any more. As for me, I became a believer when my high school science teacher warned about what was going to happen to the earth if its inhabitants didn’t start taking better care of it. So when I started writing self-help books for kids, it was inevitable that I would write books about conservation. Even though the books were written years ago, they are as relevant today as they were then—maybe even more so. April 22^nd is EARTH DAY, and in honor of that special occasion, I want to recommend several books and offer a free download of songs about conservation. Hopefully the songs will jumpstart a conversation with your kids about the importance of doing everything possible to take care of the beautiful planet of which all of us are a part.

Click Here for FREE eBooks and Music

For as long as I can remember, the saying “April showers bring May flowers” has been a metaphor that reaffirms the fact that tough times can often bring abt good things. Indeed, in my books in which I teach kids how to deal with difficulties including trauma, I maintain that negative experiences can be positive in that they can help them grow and become better people. I also maintain that negative experiences can help them embrace and appreciate the positive things in their lives. In other words, the best way to endure the “showers” that your child and you are likely to encounter is to remember that just as bad times are an inevitable part of life, so are good times. Consequently, the best way to endure inconvenient April showers is to focus on, and be thankful for, the sunshine and rainbows that are sure to follow.

Click Here for free eBooks and Music.

When I was a just-married, young woman, my husband and I attended a seminar called the Institute in Basic Life Principles founded by a man named, Bill Gothard. Recently an old friend who also attended the seminar with her husband was reminiscing with me about what we were taught at the seminar.

Our main recollection was of the “Chain of Command” concept that establishes a hierarchy for “good Christian families.” According to this theory, God should be the head of the home, the husband should be second in command, the wife should be subservient to her husband and the children should be subservient to the wife.

My friend and I had a good chuckle when we remembered an argument my now ex-husband and I had shortly after the seminar. He ended our back-and-forth with, “I am the head of this home and what I say goes. If I decide that the family is going to live out of the back of a station wagon, that’s what’s we’re going to do and you will just have to go along with it.”

One of the fundamental reasons for my resistance to this Chain-of-Command approach to family life is my understanding that control is proportionate to responsibility. This means that the more control that a person assumes, the more responsibility he or she takes on and in the final analysis, it’s simply not fair to impose on anyone the responsibility for another person’s well-being, happiness and success. Indeed, each of us has all of the responsibility we can handle living our own lives.

There’s another reason I question the viability of a family Chain-of-Command. Throughout the years I’ve observed that the skills needed to make a family successful do not always sort out in exactly the same way. For example, in some families the man is better at money-management while in other families the woman is better at it. Therefore having roles automatically default to family members merely because of their genitalia can be extremely counterproductive.

The most successful families that I know are ones that define family roles and responsibilities according to the actual skills of each family member. The family member who can do something best takes on that responsibility and if two or more family members share the same skills, they share the responsibility equally. That means that sometimes women run the family finances and sometimes men do so. Sometimes women are the family strategists and sometimes men are.

One more thing--people respond best to rules and responsibilities they help establish rather than rules and responsibilities that are imposed on them. This means that in the long run, democratic, rather than autocratic, family structures are often more effective and productive.

(For more information about this subject, see my book titled, Every Kids Guide to Family Rules and Responsibilities.) 

Since the discovery of the eldest son’s sexual transgressions, the Duggars, a Fundamentalist Christian family featured on a reality TV show for many years, has been under fire by the media. So much so, they were the subject of a blog that I wrote not too long ago. That blog was about the importance of viable sex education. This blog is about something entirely different.

In a recent People Magazine article a Duggar family friend was quoted as saying about the eldest son’s wife, “She does not get mad. It is not godly for a woman to get mad. It is not allowed.” This statement jumped off the page and reminded me why, many years ago, I wrote the book titled, Let’s Talk About Anger.

I don’t know exactly when or why humans began to categorize their emotions as “Good Emotions and Bad Emotions.” I just know that it is extremely destructive to do so as it causes perfectly valid emotions to become subverted where they can do more damage than good. This is because emotions that are not acknowledged and handled properly often manifest in destructive ways.

All of my books about emotions—and there a quite a few of them—advocate that, “Feelings are neither good nor bad in and of themselves. It is how one handles them that makes them good or bad.” This notion prompted me to re-label emotions as “Comfortable Emotions and Uncomfortable Emotions.”

Lest you conclude that my labels are the same as the good-and-bad labels, let me explain my belief that uncomfortable emotions have the potential to be just as positive as comfortable emotions—maybe even more so because uncomfortable emotions can motivate people to do things that need to be done.

Think about it. How many of the world’s injustices would be acknowledged and addressed were it not for the anger they provoke? Sometimes it takes people getting really mad to right a wrong.

There are positive ways to handle anger and there are negative ways. Ignoring or repressing anger are some negative ways to handle it. Acknowledging and properly utilizing anger are some positive ways to handle it, and so is saying, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not taking it anymore.”

Just in case you missed it…

According to the New York Post:

Two employees of a New Jersey day care center instigated “Fight Club”-style brawls between the toddlers and shared footage of the pint-sized pugilists on Snapchat. Erica Kenny, 22, and Chanese White, 28, were criminally charged for allegedly staging tussles between kids ages 4 to 6 at Lightbridge Academy, in Cranford. “Approximately a dozen boys and girls at the day care center can be seen in the video clips shoving each other to the ground and attempting to strike each other.”

According to the Huffington Post

Two Ohio day care workers were fired after video surfaced of the adults watching two toddlers fight and even encouraging the behavior. The incident was caught on both a surveillance camera at Stepping Stones Daycare Center in Columbus, Ohio, and cell phone video taken by the workers, WBNS reported. The video shows two 3-year-old toddlers -- a boy and girl -- hitting each other while two female day care teachers can be heard taunting the children to keep fighting, one teacher yelling out “get him back.”

For those who argue that kids need to be toughened up and taught how to fight back, I disagree. If you are going to teach children how to handle conflict, teaching them how to avoid fights and how to resolve conflicts peacefully is far safer and more effective. This is because the “fight back” approach is certain to result in someone getting hurt while the more peaceful approach usually results in no one getting hurt.

In A Children’s Book About Fighting from my HELP ME BE GOOD series, I say:

Sometimes people get angry and want to fight. When people fight they can hurt each other’s bodies, they can hurt each other’s feelings, and they can damage or destroy each other’s belongings. Never do anything to hurt yourself or another person. Never do anything to damage or destroy things. Do these things instead…

I go on to explain how to avoid fights and how to handle situations in which others want to fight. Other books that can be helpful to older kids are my books, Every Kids Guide to Handling Disagreements from my LIVING SKILLS series, and How to Handle Difficult People from my Winning Skills series.

I can only wonder if the situations in New Jersey and Ohio might have been different had the adults who were involved in these travesties would have had access to my books—or better yet—if they had been educated by parents or teachers who used my books.

Considering these possibilities is what keeps me going.

I consider myself to be an open-minded person—especially when it comes to other people’s personal preferences. I truly believe that “One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” and “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Consequently it has been difficult for me to reconcile my steadfast aversion to kids getting tattoos.

It’s not that I agree with those who think that tattoos are a form of in-your-face teenage rebellion, or that they are a way for teens to affiliate themselves with the wrong crowd. While these things might be true in some cases, I believe that there are other less menacing reasons for getting tattooed.

I talked to a girl who wanted to honor her family by tattooing their names on her wrist. Another girl thought a face tattoo would improve her looks. One guy wanted to declare his undying love for his girlfriend. And another wanted to proclaim his unconditional devotion to his favorite band.All of these reasons are understandable, but unfortunately they can quickly go by the wayside when a particular passion made permanent by indelible ink becomes passé or worse, irrelevant. And therein lies the rub.

While all stages of life are transitional, none are more so than the teen years. Teens entering junior high school are often unrecognizable by the time they graduate from high school. Therefore any decisions made during this time are tenuous at best.

It’s a known fact that agility is the key to success. One must be able to change when the situation calls for it. No-turning-back decisions can really hamper a person’s agility both personally and professionally. That’s why I hate to see a young person lock into something that is forever when forever represents an entire lifetime that is mostly in the future.

I realize that some tattoos can be lasered off. But then there’s an ugly scar to contend with. So, while I’m not against tattoos on ethical or moral grounds, I am against them on practical grounds. And parents who hope that their children will be able to move into the future with the least amount of negative baggage would be well advised to avoid encouraging or supporting tattoos before a child is well into adulthood.

But then again, that’s just the opinion of a mother whose teenage daughter got a tattoo on her ankle one summer while visiting friends. She’s a lot older now and can’t recall what motivated her at the time. She only knows that she probably wouldn’t make the same decision if she had the opportunity to do it all over again.

What in the world happens inside the mind of someone like Farid Fata—the doctor who purposely misdiagnosed over 1,200 patients in order to profit from the medications and treatments that they were prescribed but did not actually need. What mental gymnastics did he need to go through to knowingly use his education and skills to harm instead of help others—all for his own personal gain?

Being confined to a life behind bars seems to fall short of a just punishment in situations such as these. Some judicial systems call for “an eye for an eye,” which in this case might require that Dr. Fata be subjected to the dangerous radiation and chemotherapy that he inflicted on his patients that did not need or benefit from the treatments. Indeed, many of them died.

We live in a world in which money reigns supreme. Everyday in every way we are inundated with messages promising that money can buy everything from success to happiness. So is it any wonder that people like Dr. Fata exist?

One of the most important messages that we need to live and pass on to our children and grandchildren is old, but tried and true.

“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his own soul?”

Dr. Fatas of the world, take note.

 I just listened to a fascinating radio interview of Kyeonseo Lee, the subject of a book titled: The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story.

She reported that during the 17 years she lived in North Korea each family was given a mandatory radio that had no knobs or dials. That meant that the radio could not be turned on or off, or up or down. In addition the channel could not be changed. The radio was the government’s diabolical way of indoctrinating its citizens around the clock every single day whether they liked it or not.

Kyeonseo also reported that it was mandatory that portraits of Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s supreme leader, hung in every home and every other building throughout the country. It was also mandatory that these portraits were to be cleaned constantly with special white cloths.

I have always been an unequivocal advocate of the live-and-let-live principle in which countries are allowed to function according to the will of its people. But all bets are off in countries in which people who do not agree with governmental policies are not allowed to leave.

Kyeonseo’s compelling accounts of people being shot in the back while trying to “cross the river” into neighboring countries, were vivid reminders of the fact that while many of us want to abide by the live-and-let-live philosophy, there are many misguided people who perceive that philosophy as an opportunity to impose all kinds of self-serving rules on others—no matter how many Human Rights abuses occur in the process.

Throughout history, an understanding and respect for Human Rights has been imperative for the peaceful coexistence of human beings. This is what compelled me to get involved with Amnesty International, the United Nations and the Red Cross to develop materials that can teach children about their Human Rights. While we created a spark, we need others to help build the fire. To this end, I hope you will check out the Kids for Global Peace (www.kidsforglobalpeace.com) website and figure out a way to share the information you find there with the young people if your life.