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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."
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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

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There’s so much bad news around that it’s nice to hear some good news for a change: Child abuse declined nationally in 2008 compared to 2007, according to a report by an agency that monitors crimes against children (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to these shows). This particularly interests those of us who monitor UFO contacts, because one poll done by a psychologist postulated that 10% of them had experienced child abuse, something that may have “cracked the cosmic egg,” enabling them to see the Visitors.
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There are all kinds of happy families. Research has shown that quality of life for older people, both their mental and physical health, depends heavily on how well they get along with their adult children. And researchers have found that these relationships are much LESS happy in the US!

In order to identify the social policies that might influence these relationships, sociologist Merril Silverstein looked at 6 developed countries with a range of welfare regimes and various family cultures: England, Germany, Israel, Norway, Spain and the US. The team found that while affection and conflict exist simultaneously in all these countries, but there are significant differences in how the generations interact with each other.
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