There is (rightly) a lot of buzz these days around the insidious, incremental erosion of a woman’s right to choose whether she will give birth to a child she has conceived, but virtually nobody is talking about the drastic erosion of a woman’s right to choose how she will give birth to her term baby. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Parenting for Peace’ Category
Can You Hear Me Now, Mama…?!! Cell Phones & Pregnancy
In the conception chapter of Parenting for Peace, I devote a section to the 21st century issue of EMFs (electromagnetic fields) — cell phone radiation, wireless and electronic gadgetry, the whole shebang — and a discussion of how it might perturb the minute processes around conception and early embryonic development. Well, yesterday came news of a new Yale study finding ADHD-like symptoms and other brain abnormalities in mice whose pregnant mothers were exposed to cell phone radiation. (more…)
Womb Peace to World Peace: Protecting Children From Toxic Stress
“Building a strong foundation for healthy development in the early years of life is a prerequisite for individual well-being, economic productivity, and harmonious societies around the world.”
So reads the opening line of one of the most important articles published this year that you will most likely never read or even hear about. The article, entitled “An Integrated Scientific Framework for Child Survival and Early Childhood Development,” was published in a recent issue of Pediatrics, the prestigious journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Not exactly bedside table reading. Or what’s tops on your Kindle. (more…)
Of Love & Milk: Facing Our Breastfeeding Ambivalence
Most parents know mother’s milk is the best nourishment for their babies, but they may not know how really miraculous the biochemistry of breast milk is. Nature has prepared it as a most exquisite elixir, to perfect and complete our journey from one fertilized cell to a young human being. Given the evidence about the comprehensive benefits of nursing our babies, why is there so much ambivalence about breastfeeding? Why do mothers wrestle with the choice of will I or won’t I breastfeed?
This inner tug-of-war about breastfeeding is not a modern burden: (more…)
Epigenetics, DNA, and True Intelligence
In the seven years since I started writing Parenting for Peace the term epigenetics has graduated from being a practically unheard-of, esoteric branch of biology to an increasingly mainstream concept. (That worked out nicely, since my book’s entire premise turns on the epigenetic notion of just how much influence we have in who we and our children shape up to be.) In a recent post on Eco Child’s Play, author Jennifer Lance does parents a solid by gathering wide-ranging information and insight into why they need to understand and care about epigenetics.
Unlike what we learned in basic biology class, we are not immutably defined nor are our children unalterably determined by DNA. (more…)
I’ve adopted!!
Once the title was set for my book, of course I set out to lay claim to the matching domain name. To my dismay, parentingforpeace.com belonged to someone else. I’d simply have to use a different name. The frontrunner was parentingforpeacebook.com. Didn’t really like it, not much. Too cumbersome. When one of your principles is simplicity, it doesn’t do to complicate up your URL with extraneous words.
In the 11th hour, I made a bold move: (more…)
Beauty as a Verb
In difficult times you should always carry something beautiful in your mind. •Blaise Pascal•
It sometimes seems to me that we’ve lost a sense of the importance of beauty in daily life. There is a coarseness and crassness to so much of the personal and cultural discourse we’re exposed to, that we’ve grown callouses over our “beauty receptors”—out of sheer survival! And, we’re all so busy, so techno-distracted, so efficient. Just don’t have the time to pick a few flowers for vase on the table… to smooth out the clutter by the front door… to hang just the right pictures on the wall. This relates to P4P Principle #3, Rhythm. (more…)
