Home

On:

More and more US schools have their own police forces. Pupils are being arrested for throwing paper planes and failing to pick up crumbs from the cafeteria floor. The state has taken over discipline from the classroom teacher and is now criminalizing normal childhood behavior–or is it?

In Austin, Texas, 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes was arrested for spraying perfume on her neck in class after the other kids were taunting her and saying she smelled bad. In the Guardian Weekly, Chris McGreal quotes Sarah as saying, "They were saying a lot of rude things to me. Just picking on me. So I sprayed myself with perfume. Then the teacher called the police."
read more

On:

Just like humans, birds that are abused when they’re young are more likely to become abusers themselves later on.

Adult Nazca boobies, seabirds that live on the Galapagos Islands, often attack their neighbors’ young. These bullied nestlings then turn into bullies themselves when they become adults, meaning the cycle continues. Researchers even believe that this cycle may have the same cause in both birds and humans, since stress hormones surge after bird abuse.
read more

On:

Bullying: Although it’s often mistakenly considered a normal part of growing up, bullying is a serious problem that affects millions of children and adolescents. Almost 30% of US teens–more than 5.7 million–are estimated to be involved in bullying as either a bully, a target of bullying, or both.read more

On:

Do kids who grow up without dads have three strikes against them? It has long been assumed that an absent father and a single-parent household (with the parent usually being the mother) deprives children of the skills they need to be socially and academically successful. But that isn’t necessarily so. In a new study, researchers found that conjugal multiplicity, in which women have multiple partners, was in fact a strategic adaptation to the conditions of poverty that in fact provides developmental advantages for poor children in rural Jamaica.read more