Author Archives: lily

The article of NYTimes.com talks about most parents are in effort to pay for their children’s activities which can not guarantee their later success according to many experts.  They pay for their children to take music lessons, gymnastics, horseback riding, tutoring, and summer-long residential camps, etc.  In fact, they believe these experiences are not just for good grades, or are the key to the right college, but also are for the opportunities they give children.  Somehow, not offering children every possible opportunity makes parents feel that they are in bad parenting.  They believe that every child has a “hidden talent”, and they will fail their kids if they do not do everything possible to bring it to light.  So a lot of parents are exhausted by their own overparenting which takes up much of their money, time, and emotional energy.  However, there is no evidence that supports that sore of parental choices can be correlated at all with academic success according to Professor Levitt, a co-author of the New York Times blog Freakonomics.  Professor Levitt also says that being rushed from one event to the other is just not the way most kids want to live their lives. Moreover, Professor Doherty suggests that parents have to move away from the idea that if they do not start children early, they will not reach their full potential.

I think this article is interesting because it describes a very common parenting issue in our society.  Actually, I have known that a lot of my friends and relatives just like most parents think good parenting is to give their children everything possible.  They believe that a myriad of skills are very important to their kids’ future success.  One of their kids starts her drawing class when she is only 3 years old.  As a parent, I think that there is no single answer for the question of how we should do so we can help our kids get a better future.

The article of NYTimes.com talks about students of public middle and high school will be required to take sex-education classes beginning this school year for the first time in nearly two decades in New York City.  This new mandate is announced by the Bloomberg administration in order to improve the lives of black and Latino teenagers who are far more likely to have unplanned pregnancies and contract sexually transmitted diseases than the whites according to city statistics.  The administration wants to teach teenagers as young as 11 about safe sex in the hopes of reducing pregnancy, disease and dropouts.  It calls for schools to teach a semester of sex education in 6^th or 7^th grade, and again in 9^th or 10^th grade by using Health Smart and Reducing the Risk, out-of-box sets of lessons.  For those schools that have not been offering sex education, the department will offering training sessions before the start of the classes Sept.8.  In fact, students in the city have taken at least five class sessions of H.I.V. education each year from kindergarten through 12^th grade.  However, those classes only teach students about sex but not about preventing pregnancies.  In the new sex-education classes, teachers will describe how and why to use condoms in which are distributed for more than 20 years in high schools. 

I think it is relevant to our class because we talk about how the majority white powers think the minority people, like Afro-Americans have a different culture from them.  They think those Blacks are poor because they are too lazy to find a job.  At the same time, in order to improve their lives, those Blacks need to be taught with their contributive help.  Similarly, the article talks that the New York City’s administration mandates sex-education to teenagers in public schools to improve the lives of young minority men in the city.  How and why the administration can not just says to improve the lives of young men?

This article of NYTimes.com talks about many parents in U.S. like to spend significant sums on building playhouses for their children in nowadays troubled economy.  In fact, the playhouse makers report that they are as busy as ever and the playhouses they have built become larger in sizes and more expensive in costs.  Many parents who buy playhouses state that the goal of having playhouse is to inspire their children to play outside and promote their creativity.  According to those parents, the fun the children have in the playhouse is priceless.  However, child psychologists think that parents do not have to spend much money to encourage the kind of unstructured imaginative play.  On the other hand, the playhouses are often custom-built based on parents’ specifications.  For example, John Schiller and his wife spend $50,000 to build a customized playhouse which has the same Cape Cod style as the Schiller’s expansive main house for their 4 year-old daughter, Sinclair in Texas.  Interestingly, the playhouse builders think that the playhouse is not only a place for children to play, but also a decorative expansion of their parents’ houses.  Actually, a psychology professor at City University of NY, Steven Tuber thinks that those playhouses may meet the parent’s sense of impressiveness, but they are not relevant to the child’s need and desires for a play space.

I think this article is relevant because we discuss how the childrearing exports tell parents about creating an ideal playroom for their children in order to revitalize their home in our class.  Progressives think that the playroom benefits both the children and their parents.  It is a space that satisfies children’s developmental needs for self-directed play and also frees mothers from frequent disorder.  Furthermore, playroom authorities urge parents to furnish the playroom to suit children’s tastes.  Many designers think that decorating playrooms is the opposition of the room’s purpose.  They believe that an empty, unfurnished room will guide children in the direction of using their imagination.

This article in CiteMan talks about social class is closely associated with people’s buying behaviors.  According to the author, social class segmentation involves two basic issues.  The fundamental one is which approach better explains consumer behavior by using social class and income in segmenting markets.   He suggests that many lifestyle items show the significant correlations with the index of social class.   Moreover, social class is the better predictor of consumers’ living patterns in compare to income.   He claims that income is often irrelevant in analyzing markets and explaining consumers’ shopping habits, store preference, and media usage.  In fact, he describes that the radical differences in the spending patterns of three families belonging to different social classes with the same among earning per year.  An upper middle-class family likes to buy houses in a prestige neighborhood, expensive furniture, and clothing from quality stores.  A middle-class family has a better house but not in a fancy neighborhood and buy furniture that is not done by name designers.  A working class family has a small house, but has a larger newer car, more expensive kitchen appliances.  This family usually spends less on clothing and furniture.

This article is relevant to our class because it also illustrates the social class makes impact people’s buying behavior.  In our class, we talk about that the working class often retain their distinctive class values, lifestyles, and tastes even though they have the same buying power as the middle-class.   The working-class women think their primary role as house workers, while middle-class women define themselves as wives.  For example, the working-class women buy a lot of top-of -the- line appliances because they contribute a more cheerful kitchen environment and make their work easier.  They pay more attention to the useful function of  applicances.  In contrast, the middle-class women want the latest appliances to make their escape from the kitchen easily.  They are more concern about the designs of applicances.

In the article “Who’s on the Family Tree? Now It’s Complicated” of New York Times, the author explains that having children by using donor’s sperm makes the relationship between people and the family tree become more complicated in our society.  Moreover, can cause pains to kids in an unexpected way.  Jennifer Williams helps her sister Laura Ashmore to have a baby girl named Mallory with donor’s sperm because Ashmore and her husband cannot conceive a child.  At that time, she lives with her lesbian partner and already has a biological son, Jamison who also is conceived through a sperm donor.  After Mallory is born, the sister’s lives become more complex.  They both wonder where Mallory should sit on their family tree and how she can call for Jennifer.  Even though they all agree that Jennifer is Mallory’s aunt, Jennifer’s son Jamison sometime still mentions Mallory as his sister at home.   Therefore, there is no space for the sperm donors in Ashmore’s family tree.  In contrast, Sue Stuever Battel and Bob Battel include their four children in their family tree even though only one of four is conceived naturally.  Actually, they conceive one with a sperm donor and adopt two toddler boys.   They also outline the life of their children’s birth parents as baby books for their four kids.  On the other hand, Rob Okun as a sperm donator of a lesbian couple, Patria Kogut and Lynne Dahlborg keeps
connection with each other.  Interestingly, he even includes the children who born with his donated sperm in his own family tree after his mother die.

This article is related to our class because it also describes the family relation and kin connection when the construction of families is through donor insemination.  In our class, we have discussed that the different experiences of many couples construct their families by using sperm donors or adoptions.   Some of them believe that kinship is more like a process in which is revealed to be social constructions.   We also discussed about that it could be a bad influence on the children’s behavior and character development if they know their true origins.