"Mother's Day Messages" by Dave Granlund

"Mother's Day Messages" - Dave Granlund, US

Changing a sincerely held belief about Halloween

This article is great in making one of my main points: how a majority of Muslims are forgetting not only their roots but integrating to the point that a couple generations down the road, nobody from their progeny would know who followed Islam in their forefathers or even what Islam is/was.

Take this example of a parent who, after a lot of questioning (& prodding) by kids finally gave in & let the kids enjoy Halloween. Mosques & Islamic centers in North America are coming out with "Halal-oween" to let the kids enjoy Halloween in an Islamic setting. Frankly, I don't even know how one would explain the concept of Halloween in an "halal" setting.

Now, the festivities of Halloween are borne out of a pagan ritual. It's nothing to do with Christianity. There is one another major ritual in Christian world, which is catching on around the world, which also has its roots in pagan rituals: Christmas. Because, as science has already proven it, that Prophet Jesus was born in spring/summer months & not in winter, & certainly, not on Dec 25th.

Anyway, so my concern is with making Halloween as "halal" is that next thing on the agenda would be making Christmas "halal". I mean why can't there be "halal" Christmas? After all, Muslims consider Jesus as a Prophet of God & respect him very much. Muslims consider Jesus as the son of Mary. So, what would stop an Islamic center to label Christmas as "halal"?

Next thing would be "halal" Valentine's Day (Muslim kids can send love messages to their parents or spouses to each other & siblings to each other etc.).

Problem with allowing one's own Muslim children to go out trick-or-treating or Islamic centers hosting "Halal-oween" is that it's a very slippery slope. It won't stop at only Halloween & will start snowballing into other Christian festivities becoming "Halal".

One or two generations down the road kids of today will be parents or even grandparents themselves, & they would be like, "well, I celebrated Halloween, Christmas & other Christian festivals. So no harm in doing it." Their kids will be celebrating it, too. However, those kids won't know the difference between Islamic "Halal-oween" & Christian "Halloween."

Now, it won't merely stop there, but young Muslim parents are also naming their kids with biblical names, e.g. Adam & Sophia. Now, Adam is considered a Prophet in Islam. There are several Prophets or religious men in the New Testament who are also considered Prophets in the Quran & as such respected by Muslims. So, in a few years, we will see Muslim parents naming their kids Jacob, Joseph, John, Mary, Zachary etc.

Now, if we couple the biblical names with celebrating Christian festivals, you may get an idea what will happen. But, if not, let me paint the picture for you:

So, by the mid-to-late 21st century, it might be common that a Muslim Jacob will propose to her Christian girlfriend, saying that "we celebrate the same holidays & I don't even know what Islam is, & hence, I don't even follow it, & you don't even need to convert to Islam. So why don't we get married?" Or a Muslim Mary will propose to her Christian boyfriend, saying the same as above. Their kids will of course wouldn't know the difference between any religion, since their parents are celebrating all holidays as same, & their names are all the same as biblical / Christian names.

Lo and behold, Islam is gone from that generation & Christianity has taken a firm hold on that generation.
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http://www.thestar.com/life/2015/10/25/changing-a-sincerely-held-belief-about-halloween-jalaluddin.html

The first (and last) time I went trick-or-treating, I was 5 years old. The week leading up to Halloween, I watched my best friend Alana’s mother turn yards of pink tulle & glitter into a Glinda the Good Witch dress. There was a sparkly silver wand & she was even allowed to wear frosted pink lipstick.

My mother had no intention of letting me trick or treat. She thought begging candy from strangers was odd. Worse — it seemed ill-mannered, & for my Hyderabadi mother, there is nothing worse than being rude. So she told me Muslims don’t celebrate Halloween, & left it at that.

But mom had a soft spot for my best friend’s mother, who had gifted her with a killer walnut brownie recipe. So on Halloween, when Alana showed up resplendent in her Glinda the Good Witch outfit (& frosty pink lipstick), I begged my mom to let me go.

There was just one problem. I didn’t have an outfit. The two moms cast about & settled on a classic solution.

For my first & only Halloween, I dressed up as a floral-bed-sheet ghost, with hastily cut-out eye holes. Underneath my ugly costume, I was grinning.

Flash forward several decades. My eldest son is 4. On Halloween he goes to school dressed in jeans & a sweatshirt. He tells me about the costume parade afterwards — a popular tradition where the younger grades show off their outfits to the older kids.

“How come I didn’t dress up?” he asked.

“Muslims don’t celebrate Halloween,” I tell him.

Then I pause. That answer is reflexive. But is it even really true?

“It’s not part of our family tradition,” I try again. My son looks a bit confused. “We can buy some chocolate tomorrow if you want,” I say, a little desperately. “It all goes on sale Nov. 1 anyway.”

The following Halloween, the same thing happens. My sons have questions & I don’t have any great answers.

Because here’s the thing: my kids love to dress up.

By the time he was 6 years old, my older son had not one, but 3 Batman costumes. He also had a doctor’s coat, a Viking helmet & various foam swords & shields. My mother sewed them both Harry Potter cloaks with iron-on Gryffindor badges when they went through their Hogwarts phase. My younger son has a Luke Skywalker costume, to match his older brother’s Darth Maul get-up.

So is Halloween really such a big deal for us?

The Supreme Court of Canada says that a religious belief is one that is sincerely held. Many religious & secular traditions avoid Halloween for lots of reasons.

But I didn’t know how I felt about it anymore.

I asked my husband what he thought about trick or treating.

“Why start now?” he argued. “They’ve stayed away all these years. Playing dress up & knocking on people’s doors are two different things.”

“Didn’t you go trick or treating until you were 12?”

“Fourteen. That’s not the point.”

I polled my friends. Some let their kids dress up for school, but skipped the evening candy collection. Some kept their kids home from school. Still others took their kids to events at the mosque dubbed “Halal-oween.” The mosque version includes dinner, loot bags & games. Some mosques hold a movie night.

Last year, my kids came right out & asked if they could go trick or treating. I decided to go with my gut.

“OK. Let’s see what all the fuss is about.”

We walked around the neighbourhood after dinner. It was drizzling slightly, & cold. The kids were dressed up, but you could barely tell under their jackets. They rang the doorbells of brightly lit houses while I hung back, ready to tell them to run if a weirdo opened the door.

No weirdos, mostly just smiling grandparents. It was quiet, & a little bit dull.

They want to go again this year. My younger son has a new Storm Trooper costume & my older son wants to be Darth Vader. We might even check out the mosque Halal-oween party afterwards, to further develop our community participation (& candy collection).

The science is in: God is the answer

A great article. It lays out the science, & scientists' & researchers' narratives for both sides of the argument that believing in a "higher power" is good for your health & believing in a "higher power" is all bonkers. So, the reader has to make up his/her own mind what they think is correct or take it merely as FYI.

What I found interesting is that believing in a "higher power" by an individual, from the heart & mind of that individual, helps that individual deal with life much more resolutely. It becomes a debate about religion vs ritual. People (as teenagers or adults) follow a religion blindly & never question it or reason with it. They don't build on that thinking of logic & reasoning with those hard questions of life. Belief in spirituality or religion has to come from within, & should not be imposed by an outsider (be it a very loving parent).

So, the parental advice from this long article is that, parents should not force their kids into believing a certain religion or spirituality movement or even atheism. Be there as a guide for your children, especially, in their troubled teen years. In those years, those teens will try to form their own identity & hence, will seek out religion / spirituality or even atheism, to deal with their problems & issues. Parents need to be with their teenage kids as their guide & help them along in the exploration of hard questions of believing in a "higher power". Do not be alarmed or desert them if they choose to believe in a religion or movement, which conflicts with your sense of believing in a higher power.
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http://www.macleans.ca/society/science/god-is-the-answer/

18 years ago, Lisa Miller, now the director of clinical psychology at Columbia University’s Teachers College, had an epiphany on a New York subway car. She had been poring over the mountains of data generated by a three-generation study of depressed women & their children & grandchildren. The biological trend was clear: Women with severe—& particularly with recurrent—depression had daughters at equally high risk for the psychological disorder. At puberty, the risk was 2 to 3 times greater than for other girls. But the data seemed to show that the onset &, even more so, the incidence of recurring bouts with depression, varied widely.
 
Miller couldn’t discern why. Raised in a close-knit Midwestern Jewish community, she had already looked for what she says psychologists rarely bothered to seek—religious belief & practice—& found some mild benefit for both mothers & children, but nothing that stood out among the other variants, such as socio-economic status. Then came the subway ride.
 
She was in a subway car crowded at one end & almost empty at the other, because that end was occupied by a “dirty, dishevelled man” brandishing a piece of chicken at everyone who boarded while yelling, “Hey, do you want to sit with me? You want some of this chicken?” The awkward scene continued for a few stops until an older woman & a girl of about 8—grandmother & granddaughter, Miller guessed—got on. The man bellowed his questions, & the pair nodded at one another & said, “Thank you,” in unison, & sat beside him. It astonished everyone in the car, including Miller & the man with the chicken, who grew quieter & more relaxed.
 
The child’s evident character traits—compassion, acceptance, fearlessness—at so young an age prompted Miller’s eureka moment. What struck her was the nod & all it implied: “It was clear as day that the grandchild fully understood how one lives out spiritual values in her family.” 20 minutes later, Miller was in her lab, running equations on the data that were, in effect, a search for “the statistical nod.” She was looking for mother-teen pairs who had reported a shared religion or non-religious spirituality. She calls the results “the most amazing science I had ever seen.” In the pairs Miller found in the data, shared spirituality (religious or otherwise)—if it reached back to the child’s formative years—was 80% protective in families that were otherwise at very high risk for depression.
 
It was the start of a long & sometimes rocky road for both Miller & the place of spirituality—however defined—in mainstream psychological thinking. ... But Miller & other researchers, including so-called “spiritual” neuroscientists like Montreal’s Mario Beauregard & the much-cited American psychologist Kenneth Kendler continued to explore the intersection of religiosity & mental health in studies published in major, peer-reviewed science journals. By the end of it, as Miller sets out in a provocative new book, The Spiritual Child ..., she was convinced not only of spirituality’s health benefits for people in general, but of its particular importance for young people during a stage of human development when we are most vulnerable to impulsive, risky or damaging behaviours.
 
In fact, Miller declares, spirituality, if properly fostered in children’s formative years, will pay off in spades in adolescence. An intensely felt, transcendental sense of a relationship with God, the universe, nature or whatever the individual identifies as his or her “higher power,” she found, is more protective than any other factor against the big 3 adolescent dangers. Spiritually connected teens are, remarkably, 60% less likely to suffer from depression than adolescents who are not spiritually oriented. They’re 40% less likely to abuse alcohol or other substances, and 80% less likely to engage in unprotected sex. Spiritually oriented children, raised to not shy from hard questions or difficult situations, Miller points out, also tend to excel academically.
 
And teenagers can use all the help they can get. Recent research has revealed their neurological development to be as rapid & overwhelming as their bodily change. The adolescent brain is simultaneously gaining in intellectual power & losing in emotional control; its neural connections—its basic wiring—is a work in progress, with connections between impulse & second (or even first) thought slower than in adults. There is a surge in unfamiliar hormones &, as it turns out, a surge in spiritual longing.
 
Humans have an innate tendency to ascribe random & natural events to conscious agents & a hunger to belong to something larger than ourselves—both militant atheists & fervent believers can agree on this. The urge is never sharper than in adolescence, when, in the fraught process of individuation, teens develop their own sense of the world & their place in it. “A teen looks out at what’s been handed to him or her, from family or community,” Miller says, “& asks, ‘What about these values, what about this way of life is me, & what is not me?’ And this ‘me/not-me’ work is the most important work a teen does.”

In Miller’s view, & that of many traditional cultures, individuation—the way children become their own individuals rather than unconscious copies of their parents—is an essentially spiritual process. When that process runs into difficulties, says Miller, the health effects can be severe, especially in terms of depression, to which adolescents are suddenly vulnerable. In fact, half of all adults who have suffered depression had their first experience in adolescence; teens are considered the demographic most at risk for it. Research shows that up to 20% of adolescents have a major depression episode at some point, with an additional 40% or more exhibiting what are known as “sub-threshold” levels that leave them distressed enough to seek treatment at the same rates as kids with major depression—& as much at risk for depression in their adult years.
 
And numbers approaching two-thirds in a single age bracket, Miller argues, are far too high to ascribe to illness alone. Her argument is that brushes with depression are intrinsic to developmental & spiritual awakening. Teens in this often excruciating situation sometimes will turn to substance use, risky sex, physical danger—all of which are shortcuts to transcendence that ultimately have their roots in the same universal drive. On the other hand, adolescents who have supported spiritual lives, especially dating back to childhood, & “practice in asking & living through hard questions, are more prepared to face them,” Miller says.
 
The evidence for a personal religious advantage is overwhelming, Miller claims, drawn from literally “hundreds” of epidemiological & longitudinal studies. In a 2002 article published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, data taken from a 1995 survey of 3,300 teen girls in North Carolina showed that higher frequency of prayer or meditation correlated with decreased risk of depression. It’s worth noting that the advantage was conferred by individual devotion rather than the degree to which the girls believed sacred writings were the literal word of God—spirituality, then, rather than religion.
 
(Other studies have identified this distinction, which was first laid out in Kendler’s landmark twin study in 1997. Examining 1,900 female pairs, identical & fraternal, in the Virginia Twin Registry, he concluded people’s religious practices were broadly determined by environment, but that individual devotion was almost 50% due to a twin’s “unique personal environment.”)

A 2005 study found that a teen with this sort of spiritual connection—as manifested by statements like “I turn to God for guidance in times of difficulty”—was at least 70% less likely to move from substance dabbling to substance abuse. Again, the key was personal engagement; there was no protective factor at all from going to church or taking part in family prayer when those acts came from obligation rather than conviction.
 
And a massive 2012 study from the department of child & family services at the University of Tennessee looked at 9,300 teens from half a dozen countries & regions, from China & India to Palestine & the US. Its authors cited an earlier American study that showed that religion had an inverse correlation with anti-social behaviour, including substance abuse, carrying weapons & drinking & driving, & a positive correlation with what the researchers called “pro-social behaviour,” which included everything from volunteerism to school engagement. Across the world, the Tennessee study found, adolescents who were more religious than their peer groups had lower rates of depression & higher self-esteem. Those teens who reported experiencing such internal states as “relational spirituality” & “meaningfulness of religion” also reported lower levels of depression. “Overall, there is much support for the relationship between religiosity & youth psychological well-being,” the authors wrote.
 
Similar correlations have been seen by neuroscientists who work primarily with adults. Researchers who have used neuroscans to examine people at high familial risk for depression have noted brain abnormalities. One 2004 study pinpointed cortical thinning across the lateral surface of the right cerebral hemisphere, which the authors suspected would produce disturbances in sensory arousal, attention & memory for social cues, a situation they suggested might explain the increased chances of developing depression.

“In our lab, we looked at the brains, through MRIs, of people who had a strong sense of relationship in a transcendental dialogue with their higher power,” recalls Miller. That two-way sacred relationship is central to Judeo-Christian spirituality ... & those people showed a thickening of the cortex in the same region. “They essentially had stronger wiring, through a sustained personal spirituality,” Millar explains. The exact implications of the neurological findings remain tentative, but stronger, thicker wiring is considered beneficial.
 
In his now iconic brain-scan studies of Franciscan nuns praying & Buddhist monks meditating, Andrew Newberg—perhaps the leading American expert on the neurological aspects of religion—saw the same neural pathways being used (& strengthened) whether his subject was seeking God or attempting to become one with the cosmos. So Miller was delighted to learn that her lab’s work with devout Christians was, “in an entirely different lab, in an entirely different sample,” replicated with subjects who were meditating. “This is no longer prayer in the Judeo-Christian tradition, this is experienced meditators,” says Miller. “And they too showed cortical thickening in the same regions.”

Patrick McNamara, whose neurological lab at Boston University studies what happens to the brain in religious practice, says, “There are studies that show that religiosity is associated with better executive function & self-control. Those things are moderating factors on a whole host of health-related behaviours.” Although he is more cautious than Miller & thinks religion’s protective features need more study, McNamara agrees that “in the long run we think that religiosity will confer a protective effect against all kinds of disorders.” McNamara has studied the role of the frontal lobes—the part of the brain that exerts executive control over other regions & which teens, incidentally, find hard to access—in religious experience. “The right prefrontal region is especially important for supporting maintenance of the self,” he says. “People who’ve had strokes in that region have problems with self-concept, & people who have dysfunction in that region show lower scores on religiosity tests—that’s what we found.” A strong self-concept, which tends to be enhanced by religion, he notes, is associated with better health outcomes.
 
In the 2 decades since she began her career, Miller’s field has moved from the fringe to respectability. Universities such as Duke & Baylor have research centres that focus on the intersection of religion & health & publish studies looking at everything from integrating spirituality into nursing care, to private religious activities & cardiovascular risk, to the interconnections of religious involvement, inflammatory markers & stress hormones in chronic illness. In 2012, Columbia’s teachers college, the oldest & largest graduate school of education in the US, began to offer the Ivy League’s first master’s concentration in spiritual psychology.
 
Miller’s ideas may also resonate more with many Canadians than the conventional wisdom about religion’s decline would suggest. University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby pioneered the study of religious trends in Canada. His newest data, gathered in partnership with the not-for-profit Angus Reid Institute, sees more than a quarter of Canadians reject religion, compared with the 30% who embrace it. But there is a vast middle ground, 44%, who file themselves between those two poles. Most of them presumably overlap with the 40% of Canadians who call themselves “spiritual but not religious.” Some of the antagonism to, & hesitation about, religion comes from a reaction to organized religion’s institutional hypocrisies—shunting pedophile priests from one diocese to another, for example—and from what modern Westerners increasingly see as intolerable restrictions on their personal autonomy. But Miller says she frequently encounters mothers who worry the spirituality baby has been tossed out with the religious bathwater. The dogma-free spirituality she recommends (& practises herself), which can be “cultivated in nature, in service, in human relationships,” has appeal for adults, & not just for the benefits it promises their children.
 
But while the public may be open to Miller’s ideas ..., not everyone is sold on her conclusions. Many materially minded social scientists are skeptical of the neurological view & argue that the health benefits conveyed by religion result from the community support it offers. In her 2014 book The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier & Happier, Montreal-based developmental psychologist Susan Pinker cites a 7-year study of 90,000 women from across the US that found that those who attended religious services at least once a week were 20% more likely to have longer lifespans than those who did not. As much as the attendance itself, Pinker points to the ritualistic physical synchrony of religious services, the way “praying, chanting, singing, swaying & rocking all together” is “brain-soothing.”

The social benefit of community is behind the sporadic attempts, mostly in the US & Britain, to establish “atheist churches,” though this “if you can’t beat ’em” thinking ... is repellent to more militant atheists. The human tendency toward religious belief should be resisted in the cause of evidence-based science, not accommodated, even in health care.
 
Their cause is bolstered by religion’s dark side. Tight-knit religious communities can also be over-controlling & outright abusive. “Look at Bountiful,” says Pinker, in reference to the polygamy & child-trafficking charges laid against members of a fundamentalist Mormon community in the small B.C. town. And fundamentalist teens often exhibit high levels of risk-taking because, Pinker says, they have no space for mild rebellion. “They are from families where it is easier to get pregnant at 15 than confess to your parents you don’t believe in God.”

In fact, depression can strike those adolescents harder than teens outside organized religion. A paper by Rachel Dew, a prominent religion & health researcher at Duke University, examined 117 teen psychiatric patients, most from religious families, & found depression in them linked strongly to feeling abandoned by God or unsupported by their faith communities.
 
Dew, one of the most cited researchers in her field, agrees in an interview that there is “overwhelming evidence that teens involved in religion are less likely to fall into drug or alcohol abuse,” particularly teens who “self-identified” with their faith. Still, Dew continues, studying depression rates so far provides less certain evidence of the health benefits of spirituality or religion. Part of the reason for caution, she says, is that researchers are still uncertain how to define religion & are wrestling with questions of correlation & causation. “We know from twin studies that there is a genetic predilection for religion,” she says. When that’s accompanied by a lower risk of depression, is the cause “in the religion or in the same genetic predisposition?” Moreover, many survey tools remain unsophisticated, seeking religious internalization through religious affiliation questions like “Do you go to church?” “Here in the South,” says Dew, “people see no difference between spirituality & religion.”

Miller thinks it all actually proves her case. In a very real sense, she says, debates over social versus natural, or about neural correlates, miss the point. When she talks about spirituality, she says, it’s with the pragmatism derived from clinical experiences, itself born from patients’ experiences. “No one’s laying any theology or implicit theology on the child; it’s his or her emerging natural spirituality,” she says. Look at the narratives of those who come out of addiction, Miller urges. “They say, ‘It was a hunger to feel a sense of connection that got me in, & it was when I found my relationship with my higher power that I came out.’”

Parents don’t need “big answers” for adolescents working through this, Miller says, & certainly not dogmatic answers. “We just need to show up & take an interest, & let them know the work is real, that this is the set-up, the foundation on which they’ll build their house in life.” However defined ... an inclusive spirituality plainly works for human health & well-being, “& that’s why we do this work, to help kids not suffer.”

Social media teacher abuse 'rising'

So now, cyber-bullying is not the exclusive domain of irate & immature kids & teens, but ... surprisingly (& supposedly, mature) parents, too.

So, what & why do we expect kids to stop cyber-bullying when presumably, their own parents are also in on the abusive action? What kind of society is it becoming when teachers are being abused by parents, let alone, the kids?
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http://www.bbc.com/news/education-32145849

Sexist, racist and homophobic remarks were being used by pupils against school staff, as well as offensive comments about appearance, the NASUWT said.
 
There were also examples of parents being abusive on social media, it added.
 
About 60% of 1,500 teachers questioned in a poll said they had faced abuse, compared with 21% last year.
 
In one case, a photograph of a teacher was posted online with an insulting word underneath.
 
In another, pupils used the name of a heavily pregnant school worker to post insults, the teachers' union said.
 
Insulting comments
 
Of those who had been subjected to insults, nearly half (48%) said these remarks were posted by pupils, 40% said they were put up by parents, & 12% said both parents & pupils were responsible.
 
Almost two-thirds (62%) said pupils had posted insulting comments, while just over a third (34%) said students had taken photos or videos without consent.
 
A third (33%) received remarks about their performance as a teacher, 9% had faced allegations from pupils about inappropriate behaviour & 8% had been subjected to threatening behaviour.
 
More than half (57%) of pupils responsible were aged between 14 & 16, & 38% were 11 to 14, the teachers' poll found, with a fifth aged 16 to 19 & 5% were seven to 11.
 
Among the examples published by NASUWT was the case of a student uploading a teacher's photo & then, along with classmates, writing insults underneath.
 
Cancer jibe
 
One teacher had been harassed for nine months by students who sent sexually explicit messages & set up a fake social media account in the teacher's name.
 
The union said it had been told of a teacher receiving the comment "I hope she gets cancer", while the heavily pregnant worker had faced abusive remarks.
 
Another school worker faced comments from a pupil's family member about how they looked & that they were ugly.
 
Chris Keates, the union's general secretary, said: "It is deeply worrying to see that the abuse of teachers has risen by such a huge margin this year. Equally concerning is that it appears that more parents are the perpetrators of the abuse. The vile, insulting & personal comments are taking their toll on teachers' health & well-being, & undermining their confidence to do their job."

As teens learn their rights, they're defending them -- & winning

A great article telling both sides of this issue. This issue is becoming very important. Educators' hands have been tied behind their backs with strict laws against spanking to the point that teachers are afraid of students. Lawsuits have been mounted, tarnishing teachers' respected profession.
 
Parents are exacerbating the problem. On one hand, they want teachers to not only teach the curriculum but also make them a good citizen of the society, but, on the other hand, they also help their kids destroy the lives of good teachers (I'm not talking about those teachers who take advantage of their status as an authoritative figure to abuse their students, e.g. having a sexual relationship with them).

Parents don't have time or are just lazy so they hand this crucial duty of raising a good citizen to teachers but when teachers do take some kind of action, e.g. the teacher in the article tells the kid to not throw a perfectly good banana & make him take that banana out of the garbage & eat it, she gets suspended & reprimanded. Her colleagues' response was "grin & bear it." That's not a solution.

This article started with a case that 2 high school students took their school principal to court because he was planning to put in place a breathalyzer to stop underage drinking at the prom. The students won the lawsuit. Now that's become a precedent, all other schools in Ontario have to follow this rule & not put in place a breathalyzer to stop underage drinking. Although, those 2 kids discussed the matter with their peers for 2014 prom & nobody drank & the whole event went smoothly, but would all high school students in Ontario discuss not drinking with their peers? Obviously, not.

Now, although, those students won the case for all the high school kids in Ontario, but what happens when a high school student is sexually assaulted because he/she was drunk OR he/she dies from alcohol poisoning OR he/she drives off the school parking lot while heavily drunk & kills someone in a drunk driving accident. In some cases, the school administration might be held responsible for the deaths, & even if they don't, they may still have to spend money, effort, & time to go through the whole lawsuit process.

The cases in the article highlight the problem that society seems to be bending to the rules of kids. As a OISE psychologist says that kids are still kids & they don't understand the ramifications of their actions. They haven't gone out into the world & seen that there can be very dire consequences of actions. At the same time, they can argue that adults also don't think thoroughly the consequences of all their actions; all the way down from a hillbilly to all the way up to government leaders. That's one reason, why our world is in this mess.

Anyway, in the light of Islamic teachings, kids should know their rights BUT they should also know their obligations. Everyone has rights AND obligations.

Also, in the light of Islamic teachings, capital punishment should be allowed to discipline kids & raise a good citizen for the society. What kind of a society will we be forming when parents show to their 9 year old kid that throwing perfectly good food is not only ok but if someone reprimands you for doing that, we should stick it to him/her. Heck, parents & their kids are now cyberbullying their teachers. Teachers & parents should be allowed to hit kids, if necessary. As that teacher says in the article that there will always be bratty kids, & they need punishment, not coddling from the society & their parents.

Punishing the wrongdoer is a cornerstone of our civilization, regardless, of ethnicity, race, language etc. In the name of justice, we punish the wrongdoer, like locking up a criminal. Heck, countries go to war & thousands die in the name of justice & punishing the evildoers. Similar to that, kids need to be punished, according to their severity of their wrong actions, so they understand what justice is & their actions have consequences.

Challenging authority for the right reasons is not only needed in our society but should be encouraged. BUT, a line should be drawn. Challenging authority while you are doing something wrong (underage drinking, wasting food, disrespecting teachers, bullying others etc.) is not only wrong but you need to be heavily punished, so you remember that punishment for your future.
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http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/as-teens-learn-their-rights-theyre-defending-them-and-winning/

Teenagers used to be second-class citizens whose rights were, in effect, whatever their parents decided they were. And kids, for the most part, accepted that. But, like all teenagers who have challenged authority, Millennials & Generation Z have started pushing back & the balance of power is shifting. “Young people today are much smarter & more aware of their rights than may be fashionable to admit,” says Sukanya Pillay, executive director & general counsel for the civil liberties group [Canadian Civil Liberties Association] ... . “They’re not taking things lying down. They’re not just going to accept whatever’s prescribed to them.” Kids these days know their rights, &, for better or worse, they’re defending them. And winning.
 
The United Nations had declared 1979 the International Year of the Child, which “really created an excitement,” says David Morley, president & CEO of Unicef Canada, who remembers watching people march through the streets in Brazil in support. Though it may have had more significance in the developing world, where exploitation, health care & education were a concern, Canada wasn’t immune from its effect. For one, the Children’s Aid Foundation was established to support the most vulnerable children in society: those in the child-welfare system. “That year fundamentally changed the way the world thought about the rights of children,” says Morley.
 
... In 1984, the Young Offenders Act established a separate justice system for children between the ages of 12 & 17, recognizing that they did not have the same moral, intellectual or emotional maturity as adults. The 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UN’s most widely ratified treaty, recognized “that childhood is entitled to special care & assistance.” A decade later, after a Charter challenge to Section 43 of the Criminal Code, which permits spanking, the Supreme Court of Canada set out new boundaries on the use of disciplinary force against children.
 
... today’s youth have grown up in a wildly different environment than previous generations. “We always hear about how kids don’t understand privacy rights because they’re ceding their privacy with social media & Facebook.” But Pillay sees Twitter, Instagram, & Snapchat as a testing ground where kids are introduced to the concept of rights by trial & error—who can see what they post, whom they can block & whom they can delete from their online lives.
 
Today’s cohort of teens is the first to grow up almost entirely in a digital, post-9/11 world. Because of their technological sophistication, they can witness & participate in conversations about rights, whether the topic is invasive anti-terror legislation or WikiLeaks & government secrecy. “We’re facing mass state surveillance,” Pillay says. “There’s a trickle-down effect. In schools, administrations are taking a more heavy-handed approach to the students. But the students, exercising their democratic rights, are saying, ‘Wait, that’s not right.’ ”

Parents are still the gatekeepers for their kids’ rights because, until they’re 18 or 19, depending on the province, kids can only launch lawsuits through a litigation guardian. That’s usually an adult, but, in the case of emancipation—where a minor is an adult in the eyes of the law—young people can act on their own.
... in December [2014], another New Jersey student, a 21-year-old who lives with her grandparents, successfully sued her divorced parents for nearly $17,000. In a blog post called “The age of entitlement,” her mother describes her daughter as a hard-drinking, rebellious runaway who managed to spin the law to her advantage. “She doesn’t want a family; she wants money,” her mother wrote. “And the courts have told her that this is completely acceptable.”

Never have young people had so much power, but most don’t grasp the need for great responsibility. Michele Peterson-Badali, an Ontario Institute for Studies in Education psychologist who specializes in children’s rights, says there’s a gap between young people’s awareness of their rights & their understanding of what it entails: the responsibility to respect the rights of others. “They might think they’re savvy & act like they’re savvy, but they’re not,” she says. “Even at 16 . . . few kids will understand that rights are a bounded entitlement. I can’t do whatever I want. I can’t say things that are hateful. I can’t hurt somebody.” And that’s what throws adults into an uproar: if they’re still the same old irresponsible, mischievous & occasionally nefarious kids, why hand them so much power? “There tends to be a gut reaction on the part of adults to feel threatened by the idea—‘these kids, they have too many rights,’ ” says Peterson-Badali. “I think that’s a misconception.” The trick, she says, is to ensure kids properly appreciate what rights really mean.
 
These days, they’re learning much of what they know from television & YouTube videos. “We’ve interviewed thousands of children, & I haven’t met one who knew their rights,” says Katherine Covell, co-founder of the Cape Breton University Children’s Rights Centre. The centre developed a curriculum that incorporates rights-based case studies & role-play exercises & shopped it around to schools, but Canadian educators weren’t interested. “If you’re going to respect the rights of the child, you have to listen to them & give them opportunities to express their opinions,” Covell says. “A lot of teachers were wary of that.” British schools, meanwhile, embraced the program & saw a drastic transformation over its 10-year implementation: bullying all but disappeared, discipline issues dwindled & children performed better academically. “You can’t just have Rights Week or Rights Day,” Covell explains. “It’s not a quick fix.”

Along with the recent swell in cases involving children’s rights, there have been abuses. Children, exercising their new-found power, can subvert the laws to serve their own malicious, if not criminal, purposes.
 
It was April 2012 when Ontario teacher Susan Dowell learned this the hard way. When the Grade 4 students walked into their music class at a school north of Toronto to find Dowell was the substitute for their regular teacher, they immediately started horsing around & putting her patience to the test. “I’ve been doing this for 15 years. My intuition told me to nip that in the bud,” says Dowell, 52 ... . She sent 4 kids to the office. After the bell, Dowell moved on to cafeteria duty—or, as she describes it, “being thrown into a pack of wolves.” As she watched over the screaming, food-flinging masses, a boy walked by & tossed an uneaten banana into the trash. “You don’t throw perfectly good food out,” she told him. “Take it home or eat it or save it for after school.” He took the banana out of the garbage, peeled it, took one bite & threw it back in.
 
The following week, she was dismissed from another job because students at the previous school complained that she had used excessive force on some & publicly humiliated another. ... Her union told her to wait on word from the Children’s Aid Society, whom the vice-principal had called to sort out the matter. In the meantime, she wasn’t allowed to step on school property or talk to other teachers. “I had no support,” she says. “No one to talk to.” Eventually, she learned that the boy with the banana had told his parents Dowell made him eat from the garbage. She says the parents complained to the vice-principal, who interviewed the troublemakers sent to the office; they said she’d grabbed one of the girls by the neck. According to Dowell, no one asked for her account.
 
It was a month before Children’s Aid cleared Dowell’s case, allowing her to return to work. The events had shaken her, though, & tarnished her reputation. Kids & colleagues treated her differently, she says. The accusing child & parent, however, faced no consequences. Dowell’s union told her that this was the “new normal”—she would have to grin & bear it.
 
She did—for a while. Last year, while on a long-term placement she thought would finally lead to a steady teaching position, Dowell was accused of scratching a student. She was off work for 3 weeks. Again, the case was dropped. To this day, she doesn’t know who complained.

“Kids just have no idea of the ramifications of what they’re saying or the power they have,” she says. There have always been—& there will always be—bratty kids, but today’s parents are raising increasingly entitled children, she says. In her eyes, it’s become an us-versus-them battle, & young people now have the advantage. “When did that switch happen?” she asks. “I would correlate it entirely with when children began to understand that they had rights.”

In 2012, a B.C. student launched an elaborate accusation of sexual assault against her teacher, lifting scenes from a TV show to describe his actions & creating a fake diary as evidence. Most cases are kept quiet, & false accusations aren’t recorded, so no official statistics exist. But a 2010 Nipissing University study about a shortage of male teachers showed 13% of 223 male Ontario teachers surveyed had been falsely suspected of inappropriate behaviour. School boards, says McGill University associate professor Jon Bradley, who has spent years studying false accusations, don’t have basic policies to deal with an allegation, such as consulting all involved parties & explaining to accusers the implications of a false allegation. “It’s innocent until proven guilty. If a teacher is guilty, they can hang from a lamppost,” says Bradley. “But we need procedures.” Even in an era when kids can & do sue adults, they can do just as much damage without any legal action at all.

The Growing Argument against Homework

A great piece. Most adults, I see now, who grew up doing mountains of homework, me included, never grew their love of learning & curiosity. So, as soon as, exams are over, books are donated, recycled, or thrown in the dumpster.

Homework becomes an evil monster of some sort. It bothers not only kids but takes away precious time of their parents, too, who may want to spend that time in educating their kids the world outside of books.

Furthermore, all this homework & learning is not raising an educated populace who rationally think of the consequences of their actions in all spheres of all their life. Evidence is right in this article that parents are fighting the school that why their kid is not getting homework. That kid is in elementary school. The history & current evidence is showing that homework is not really helping anyone learn anything, except frustrating parents & their children, alike.

Parents, who themselves grew with mountains of homework, want their kids to do mountains of homework, too, without rationally thinking, how is it helping their own kids become educated. Their success in life is not dependent on how they did their homework in Grade 1. It depends on what & how they do in university. And even at university levels, homework is becoming more about reading & understanding the material & actively discussing it with their peers, not filling out pages & pages with exercises & diagrams.

Disclaimer: I'm not discussing education reform, because even universities are not great in igniting the love of learning in people. They are experts in molding people in a certain way.
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/parenting/the-growing-argument-against-homework/article23358570/

A New York City elementary school’s decision to ban homework in favour of play has infuriated some parents.

Many people seem to believe that working on assignments after school is an essential part of a child’s success. But if you actually do your homework on homework, evidence suggests its benefits are negligible at best. Given what we know about kids’ sedentary lifestyles, of course we should ditch homework for play.

“The topic of homework has received a lot of attention lately, & the negative effects of homework have been well established,” the school’s principal, Jane Hsu, wrote in a letter that was sent home with students last month, reports DNAinfo.com.

“They include: children’s frustration & exhaustion, lack of time for other activities & family time &, sadly for many, loss of interest in learning.”

Instead of working on essays or math problems at home, students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade are encouraged to read & spend time with their families, the principal said.

The new policy was prompted by the fact that too many children had to sit out recess because they failed to hand in homework assignments.

A committee the school established a year ago to investigate the problem concluded there is “no link between elementary school homework & success in school.”

Ultimately, therefore, it would be better to have kids running around at recess & after dinner playing hockey, or basketball, or tag, or whatever activity it might be.

But some parents are so upset they are threatening to pull their kids from the school.

“I think they should have homework. Some of it is about discipline. I want [my daughter] to have fun, but I also want her to be working towards a goal,” Daniel Tasman, the father of a second-grader at the school, told DNAinfo. He is now looking for another school.

“I was just thinking maybe I’ll keep my daughter here for another year, but this pushed me over the edge,” he said.

Over the past few years, a movement has emerged that is questioning homework. Parents are sick of having to help kids complete mountains of assignments.

“If one thing happens in 2015, it should be a concerted campaign to eradicate this illogical, damaging, ass-paining institution once and for all,” novelist Caitlin Moran wrote in The Times, a British newspaper, earlier this year.

Some politicians are also asking what’s the point.

In 2012, French president François Hollande proposed banning homework for children in primary & middle school.

Last year, an elementary school in Quebec banned homework because it was putting too much pressure on students & their parents.

Homework is not only a pain, its “educational value” is still unclear, particular at younger grades.

One public school in Barrie even noticed that grades went up after homework was banned.

If the ban in New York gets kids playing outdoors, other schools should follow suit.

According to the latest “report card” issued by Active Healthy Kids Canada, only 7% of children ages 5 to 11 meet Canada’s daily physical-activity guidelines.

Those guidelines set an embarrassingly low bar: at least one-hour of moderate to vigorous physical activity a day.

For a little historical context, harken back to an anti-homework argument in the 1920s. Back then, physicians in the US worried that homework might damage children’s health. Doctors believed ... that children needed 6 to 7 hours a day of fresh air & sunshine, as Etta Kralovec, author of The End of Homework, has pointed out.

If we want our kids to grow up to make sound decisions based on evidence, we should set a good example by banning homework in elementary school.

Inside Your Teenager's Scary Brain

Teen years always the most troubling & scary part of our years. Although, this article is a good one, every parent has a different way & experience of bringing up their teen through those difficult years. Some pass with flying colours, while others crash & burn. Every parent has their own story & wisdom to pass on to other parents. What actually works is different for everyone. But then, it never hurts to learn from others, either, or at least keep these thoughts in the back of one's mind.
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Conventional wisdom has long held that our brains are largely developed by puberty. However, research in the past 10-15 years has shown that our brains continue to develop in fundamental ways through the teen years & even into the late 20s & 30s. In fact, Jensen argues in her new book, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents & Young Adults, the teenage years comprise one of the brain’s most critical periods for development—likely every bit as crucial as early childhood. “That 7 years in their life is, in a way, as important as their first 7 years of life,” Jensen says. “It is probably one of the most important 7-year [periods] in their entire life.”

Among the most popular misconceptions about brain development is the idea that the most important changes happen in the first 3 years of life. This “myth of three,” has been the source of intense parental anxiety over the fear that “adults are in a race against time to provide stimulation to their infants before their synapses are lost,” writes Paul Howard-Jones, a professor of neuroscience & education at the University of Bristol in the journal Nature. ... Behind the seemingly invincible teenage boy with the booming voice & adult body is a brain that is still incredibly vulnerable to everything from sports-related concussions to mental illness & addiction. New research is uncovering ways in which the activities that so often typify teenage years, such as experimenting with cigarettes & marijuana & alcohol, can lower a teen’s IQ or increase susceptibility to mental illness later on. Chronic stress stemming from family violence, poverty or bullying has also been linked to changes in the teen brain that can raise the risk of mood disorders or learning disabilities.
 
At the heart of our understanding of brain development are 2 basic concepts: grey matter & white matter. Grey matter consists of neurons, the brain cells that form the building blocks of the brain. White matter, axons, are the connections that form between grey matter, helping to move information from one area of the brain to the next.
 
While grey-matter growth is indeed almost completely finished by the age of 6, white matter—the wiring between brain cells—continues to develop well into the 20s. In fact, says Jensen, that wiring is only about 80% complete by the age of 18.
 
Along with new wiring, the brains of teens & young adults are also undergoing a process called myelination, in which those white-matter connections are being coated in a protective fatty material. Myelin acts as a form of insulation, allowing signals to move faster between brain cells, helping to speed the flow of information in the brain. Since both the wiring to the prefrontal cortex, & the insulation, is incomplete, teens often take longer to access their prefrontal cortexes, meaning they have a harder time making accurate judgments & controlling their impulses. The process of myelination continues into the 30s, giving rise to questions about how old someone must be to be considered to have a fully developed “adult” brain.
 
At the same time that teens’ brains are laying down connections & insulation, puberty has triggered pituitary glands to release hormones that are acting on the limbic system, the brain’s emotional centre. The combination of heightened emotions & an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex explains why teens are often prone to emotional outbursts, says Jensen, & also why they seek out more emotionally charged situations, from sad movies to dangerous driving.
 
Hormones also appear to have a different effect in teens than they do in adults. The hormone THP, which is released by the body in response to stress, has a calming effect in adults, but actually seems to have the opposite effect in teens, increasing stress. It’s one reason why teens are prone to anxiety & post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s also a good reason, Jensen says, why parents & schools should be sensitive to the problem of bullying.
 
Along with new wiring, insulation & hormones, teen brains are highly sensitive to the release of dopamine, which plays on the areas of the brain that govern pleasure & helps explain why teens seem to take so many risks.
 
It’s not that they don’t know any better. In fact, reasoning abilities are largely developed by the age of 15 & studies have shown that teens are as accurate as adults when it comes to understanding if an activity is dangerous. Their brains are just more motivated by the rewards of taking a risk than deterred by its dangers. So even if they know something might be bad—speeding, drinking too much, trying new drugs—they get more pleasure from taking the risks anyway.
 
Central to our understanding of how teens learn is “pruning”—a period when the brain begins to shed some of the grey-matter cells built up in childhood to make room for the growth of white matter. A long period of grey-matter growth in childhood, followed by vigorous pruning in adolescence, has been linked to higher intelligence, Jensen says.
 
It’s for this reason that Jay Giedd, an expert in child & adolescent brain imaging at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, describes the teen years as a special period of “use it or lose it” for the brain. Brain cells grown in childhood that continue to get used in adolescence form new connections, while those that go unused wither away. It’s also another reason why parents should be anxious about what happens during the teen years—adolescence now appears to be a period that can make or break a child’s intelligence.
 
A significant consequence of pruning is that IQ, once thought to be fixed for life after childhood, can in fact change dramatically during the teen years.
 
Learning is a process of repeatedly exposing the brain to something that stimulates the production of dopamine, which strengthens connections in the brain’s reward centre & helps form new memories. Addiction, therefore, is simply a form of “overlearning” by the brain, Jensen says. That process can be controlled by the prefrontal cortex, but since teens are so primed for learning & have less of an ability to access the prefrontal cortex, they’re also more susceptible to addictions.
 
In an era marked by the ideological tug-of-war over how best to raise our teenagers, what’s a parent to do with this new science of the teenage brain? More rules—an approach exemplified by Yale professor Amy Chua’s 2011 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? Or in intervening too much, do parents risk raising teens whose brains never learn how to become an adult—an approach typified by the backlash against “helicopter parenting” & movements like “slow parenting” & “free-range kids.”

In Teenage Brain, Jensen puts herself squarely in the camp of the highly involved parent. She encourages parents to proof-read their teen’s homework, help them make lists to prioritize their assignments, watch them as they do schoolwork to see if they’re getting distracted & to not be afraid to “sound like a broken record” in reminding teens over & over again about the dangers that could befall them.
 
She encourages parents to “be your teen’s frontal lobes” & to “try to think for your teenage sons & daughters until their own brains are ready to take over the job.”

Jensen argues that it’s a parent’s job to protect their teens from their own often short-sighted behaviour, while allowing them enough room for “safe failures.”

In the quagmire of parental advice, it’s no surprise that the counterargument to the neuroscience approach to parenting is robust, & passionate. Psychologist Robert Epstein, author of The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, believes that adolescent rebellion has little to do with brain development & lots to do with how society treats teenagers. He argues scientists have it backward: teens don’t act out because they have immature brains struggling to navigate an adult world, but because they have adult brains railing against a society that treats them like children.
 
Other research is challenging the notion that teens have a less mature & less connected prefrontal cortex & are therefore inherently more impulsive than adults.
 
At Temple University, Steinberg has used a car-racing video game to show that when teens are alone they perform as well as adults on tasks involving a tradeoff of risk & reward. But when other teens are in the room watching, adolescents tend to make far riskier decisions. Adults show no difference if other adults watch them, suggesting that teen risk-taking is likely social.
 
BJ Casey, director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Cornell University, found that teens could be less impulsive if they were offered rewards. The greater the reward, the longer teens took to make a decision, suggesting that parents trying to control a hot-headed teen might want to offer rewards for good decisions rather than punishing bad ones.

“You look at the high school dropout rates & the people that fall off the curve not because of academic reasons, but because of peer pressure or drugs,” Jensen says. “It’s so sad because this is a time where you can actually make up for your innate weaknesses. We could get so much more out of our teenagers—& who they become later in life, in many cases—if we took a different approach to this window of time.”

http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/inside-your-teenagers-scary-brain/

Sex Education, Then & NOT Now

As all Canadians may know already by now that new sex-ed curriculum of Ontario has been revealed & come September 2015, 7-year-olds (Grade 3) will come to know the meaning of same-sex relationships & gradually, within 5 years (age 12), will know what oral sex is.

I deliberately chose this article / opinion because that's the general attitude of people who are supportive of this curriculum. However, what it shows to me:

1. Disregard of people in a "democratic" govt: is this we called "democracy"? Is this the democracy Western leaders incessantly harping about in their speeches all over the world? It may as well be an absolute monarchy because at the end of the day, gov't is acting like, "I am going to throat-gag you with this, & you not only going to love it but will ask more for it."

2. What happened to diversity, Canadian multiculturalism & assimilation of new immigrants? As soon as something bad happens by a few deranged individuals, in the name of a specific religion, the whole group associated with that religion is blamed for not assimilating in the population & living in their own little bubbles (I'm deliberately not putting in any infamous labels here).

Who should be blamed for French ban on burqa in public or as Mr. Harper itching to bring burqa ban in Canada (it's a slippery slope, starting with niqab ban in citizenship oath ceremonies) or Mrs. Kathleen Wynne ignoring all immigrants, a sizable majority of which hails from South Asia, in bringing this curriculum?

Who is considering whom a "second-class" citizen & doing every bit that can be done to help push immigrants away, instead of helping them assimilate, to the point, that that immigrant / "second-class" citizen packs up & leaves Canada for good?

Will a majority of Muslims (I can't talk about other religious groups, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs etc but I do believe they are in the similar situation as Muslims) happily embrace this curriculum & gladly assimilate in the multicultural fabric of Canadian society? I firmly don't think so. This will only alienate those immigrants further, & next thing you know, someone is again pointing fingers at this group for not assimilating.

Assimilation is a two-way street & how can the majority of a group identify with their new country or society when a majority of the residents of that country are always coming up with laws & regulations to encourage those immigrants to disavow their whole belief systems? Is this called "freedom of religion" as such enshrined in the Charter? In fact, it seems more like, "be like me or you are my enemy" or that famous Mr. Bush's quote, "either you are with us or against us."

3. Do I really want my future kid to learn about same-sex relationships at the age of 7? Yes, as a Muslim, I am against homosexuality, & no I don't want my kid to learn about homosexuality. I don't care what people do in the hallowed halls of their bedrooms. People who support it in this country ... well, put it bluntly, are the same people who naively believe that Western countries are the beacon of peace in the world, & religion is the source of all evils in this world & women are only liberated when they take all their clothes off ... what's the point of wearing a bikini in the public, anyway (thanks to this curriculum, even little kids will know what breasts, nipples & female genitalia look like) ... might as well be completely free ... take everything off !!! (this will be explored more in my next blog with the help of Irina Shayk's fabulous choice of dress in the Vanity Fair's after-Oscars party).

Even as a very involved parent (once in the future), how will I be able to "un-teach" homosexuality at home when my kid is learning all about the wonderful world of same-sex relationships from those teachers in the school? As the article suggests, it's better that schools are teaching this than parents. Really? That kid will be even more confused then. Do I believe the story of Lot in the Quran, as told by my parents or do I believe what my teacher told me that my budding love for another human of the same sex is because of my genes? (everything nowadays is genetic; obesity, homosexuality & next will be racism, drug addiction, hatred ... all happen because of our genes ... eventually, we won't need to have a debate on "nature v nurture" because it's all nature's fault).

To further compound the confusion of a little kid, if he/she is enrolled in an Islamic school & he/she is learning about same-sex relationship in Grade 3, but then he/she can't find any of his/her friends / classmates having 2 daddies or mommies (since, homosexuality is strictly forbidden in Islam), then learns about story of Lot from the Quran; that kid is completely confused by now. What is right & what is wrong? Is homosexuality right or natural or is it right what the Quran says & what punishment those people in the Quran got? Do we want this confusion for tender minds of our kids?

4. Another argument is put forward in support of this curriculum that today's kids are learning all about sex through social media & they are learning this at a very young age. My problem with that is why are parents enthusiastically buying smartphones for their kids with such expensive data plans to go along with them. They won't able to sext, at least from their own phones, when they have those dumb phones (yes, they are still available in the market) with parental locks on it.

Furthermore, what happened to parents getting involved with their kids & teaching them about sex & relationships when they themselves see fit, according to their own religion, customs, & beliefs. I will explain the story of Lot & dangers of homosexuality to my kid when I see fit, as per my religion, & not when Mrs. Kathleen Wynne likes to think.

5. Some may say now, well, why don't you move out of Ontario, since this is only being instituted in Ontario. My belief is that this curriculum will spread, if not already, all over Canada like wildfire. Take my word for it. Some of it is already in other provinces' sex-ed curriculum & other provinces who doesn't have this invasive curriculum will enthusiastically adopt it.

Regardless of what the Charter or Constitution espouse, the North American gov'ts enthusiastically adopt anything & everything which remotely sounds Liberal, as long as it helps their agenda; homosexuality is all market-driven (money from marriage licenses, weddings etc), so why not promote it even more, line up govt's pockets behind the clever charade of equality & in the process, look good too in the eyes of voters.

 

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/sex-education-then-and-now/article23160602/