September 2009
12 posts
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Overreacting to...
Talk about overreacting! I’m sure that by now most people have heard about the plight of the Demaree family who took a memory stick containing 144 family photos to Wal-Mart to get them developed. Included in the huge batch of photos were 11 shots taken of the Demaree children during bathtime. I have a hunch what these photos were like, because similar photos are strewn throughout my kids’ photo...
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Giving Kids...
Yesterday I did a book signing at the Ronald McDonald House in New York. It’s a wonderful place, and I had a wonderful time. As a cancer survivor, I was reminded of an experience I had many years ago, immediately following the final surgery that has allowed me to be cancer-free for over 35 years. Part of my recovery program included doing volunteer work at the City of Hope in Southern California....
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Painful...
A few days ago I went in for my annual mammogram. For anyone who has not had this procedure, it would be difficult to understand how painful it can be. However this wasn’t true for the seven women who shared the waiting room with me. Everyone was engrossed in the soap opera playing out on the TV monitor when a piercing scream emanated from behind the closed door. All of a sudden, the TV drama...
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Sophisticated...
I’ve always liked Walter Cronkite. That’s why I was one of the first people in line to purchase his autobiography shortly after he passed away. It’s a great book and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in reading about politics from an evenhanded perspective. There was just one quote that made me wince—even though I am certain that it was not intended to be controversial. In fact, it...
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Things Not...
My sister is a librarian and has impeccable taste when it comes to evaluating anything with a storyline. So while I was laid up with recent foot surgery, I decided to follow through with her recommendation that I watch the TV show Mad Men. For an entire weekend, I hunkered down on my living room couch and powered through back-to-back episodes from rented DVDs. Having been a young adult during the...
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: An Open Letter to...
Recently the success of a camp that my son conducted in Hawaii prompted him to decide that he was going to remain in Hawaii with his family for several months. The decision came from out of nowhere and had a serious impact on prior commitments that my son had made before moving to Hawaii. One commitment involves my granddaughters being in a family wedding that has been in the making for well over...
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Using Emergency...
I absolutely cringed when I heard a spokesperson for the September 12th healthcare demonstration in Washington D.C. answer a question from a CNN news commentator. The commentator asked, “I realize that you are pleased with the healthcare that you are able to purchase for yourself, but what do you say to the millions of people who cannot afford healthcare?” The spokesperson answered, “The...
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Dealing With a...
In my last blog, I told you about Dr. Harvey Karp’s highly effective, five-step approach to calming a crying infant. A mother of a toddler who read that blog asked me, “That approach might work with an infant, but what if you are cooped up in a plane with a hysterical toddler?” While Dr. Karp could most likely address that question, I have a bit of advice that might work as well. It begins with...
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: The Challenge of...
Last weekend, I flew from New York to San Francisco for my nephew’s wedding. It was a long flight and the plane was loaded to the gills. A young family of four was seated across the aisle from where I was sitting. The oldest child was a toddler, and the youngest child was an infant. The moment the plane lifted off, the infant began to cry and didn’t stop until the mother fled the plane with the...
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: President Obama’s...
There were a lot of things to appreciate about President Obama’s speech this week to schoolchildren. But as I watched it on TV, one particular section of the speech jumped out at me. It went something like this: You can’t let your failures define you. Instead, you need to let them teach you things that you need to learn. The President reinforced his statement with several stories of very...
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Are Addictions a...
The other day, I overheard a mother tell her young son that a teenage panhandler they had just passed on the sidewalk was “a drug addict.” When the boy asked her what that meant, she answered, “He’s a bad person.” I’m not certain how or when addictions became a moral issue. But I am certain that the two subjects do not belong in the same category. To me, addictions relate to pragmatic issues...
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Keeping an Open...
When I was in college, it was my privilege to take philosophy from Paul Delp, a very wise professor who affirmed to me the value of approaching every subject with an open mind. Before then, I had been taught that it was virtuous for a person to buy into a system of beliefs and “have the backbone to stick to those beliefs, no matter what.” My amazing professor reasoned that systems of belief...