No doubt about it, television rots kids' minds.
But it's not children's programming doing the corroding. It's "Inside Edition" and "Hard Copy" and "Rescue 911" and cable TV with its dozens of stations, on which a person can push a button and watch, at any time of day, someone being beaten, tortured, raped or murdered.
Read MoreFor years, I would tuck her in every night and sing a little song I made up: "Stay little. Stay little. Little, little stay. Little stay. Little stay little." Even before she understood, I sang these words to her.
But long after there was any need to tuck her in, when she was quite capable of getting into bed herself, I continued with the ritual and the song. It was dumb, I know, but it was a tradition and it was all ours.
Read MoreOK, all you professional communicators out there - television anchors and personalities, reporters, columnists, entertainers, satirists, humorists, big shots and little shots alike - raise your right hand and repeat after me:
"I will lay off Chelsea Clinton for the next four years. I will not say or write or even intimate anything negative about her. I will not undermine her, ridicule her or go for a laugh at her expense, either in print or on film.
"I will treat her as if she were my 12-year-old daughter, tenderly, aware that 12 is a tough age to be and that 13 isn't much better, and 14 and 15 are no prizes either, and even an unintentional comment, even a pair of seemingly harmless words such as `frizzy hair' can make a young girl sob and inflict a wound that hurts for a lifetime."
Read MoreShe was just a baby, maybe a year old, sitting in the back seat of a car traveling along Route 128 a week ago. I never saw her before and I'll probably never see her again. I know nothing about her - not her name or where she lives, or where she was going, or whom she was with, though I assume the woman driving was her mother.
I only glanced at her as I was speeding past. But the glimpse made me smile and pause and reflect. It makes me smile still, days later, because she was so full of naked wonder that it was like walking along a street in the cold past a store whose door opens briefly and blankets you with warmth.
Read MoreMy friend Anne's daughter died of cystic fibrosis eight-and-a-half years ago. Amy was 11, in the sixth grade, and my daughter Lauren's best friend. We knew Amy was going to die, everyone knew, but we knew it intellectually the way we know that someday we'll grow old, and someday babies not even born yet will have gray hair. We didn't believe it, couldn't imagine it. Someday was theory. Amy's death was an eternity away…
Read MoreI met them the first time when they walked into my mother-in-law's house with their parents on New Year's Day four years ago.
"My brother's daughter, Jeannie, is coming with her family to visit all the way from New York. Won't you stop by and visit, too?" my mother-in-law phoned to ask.
I bet I groaned about having to visit someone I hardly knew. I bet I complained about all the things I had to do: take down the tree, vacuum up the pine needles, get my life in order, ready the slate for the new year.
I know I went to my mother-in-law's intending to stay just a little while. But that was before I met Jessica, Tabitha and Xena.
Read MoreUsually I read these things and take them for what they are: a warning that once I would have memorized, but that now I just peruse. I don't have little kids anymore. I don't need to worry about toy safety.
But the story was about Fisher Price's Little People and though it has been years since I picked up the cow and put him back in his barn, and arranged the plastic children in their swings, I finished the article because of all the toys my children had, Fisher Price Little People were my favorite. Even the words on a printed page evoke nostalgia.
Read MoreIn pictures they're smiling. Check out the magazines. Notice the ads. Look at the pretty girl with the good-looking guy - no worry on her face, only a smile.
On TV it's the same, and in movies. Smiles, smiles everywhere. Everyone is grinning. Everyone is cheerful. Everyone is having a good time. This is what we are supposed to be doing - smiling, connecting, enjoying life.
Read MoreI never thought I would love her. I never dreamed I could even like her. I answered the phone and heard her voice, unrecognizable after 32 years. When she identified herself and asked me to come and see her, I said yes, out of duty and curiosity and perhaps even old-fashioned respect.
That's what I told myself. That's what I wanted to believe. But I went for more selfish reasons than these. I went to see if she were as mean I remembered; to show her she was wrong; to once and for all open the door on a moment that has colored my life, then slam it shut and lock it forever.
Read MoreI phoned her the other day to ask how her pregnancy is coming along. "I'll be glad when it's over," she said in a weary voice. "I'm a nervous wreck…
Read MoreYou don't expect to return to a place 35 years later and find it better than you remembered. Children create castles of cardboard, make creatures of sand, watch clouds and see parades floating by. Children are naturally fanciful.
Adults glance at a cloud-laden sky and think: Rain.
Read MoreIt's the story I hear most often. I will be listening to someone tell me about a day spent at the beach 30 years ago, a glorious day. Everything was perfect until.
And suddenly I will be listening to a different story, a story stained with bewilderment and betrayal and tears. I will be talking to a woman whose husband drinks - he didn't always drink, he used to be a nice guy. You should have known him when.
Read MoreYou sit and listen to kids talk today and it about breaks your heart because they're not kids anymore. They know too much. They've lived too much. They're only 6 or 8 or 12 or 14 and they have adult worries. Their parents are divorced or their mother's an alcoholic or their father's abusive or has a girlfriend or is never home or is always home because he lost his job two years ago and hasn't worked since.
They spend their days in front of TV watching people cheat and lie - on the news, on soap operas, on sitcoms.
Read MoreThe last day of school - summer has begun. No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks.
I wish this were my last day of school. I wish I were 9 or 10 or 11 and had the whole summer off. I want to be bored and hot and suck on ice cubes and read comic books and complain that I have nothing to do.
Read MoreThere is not even an attempt to keep them quiet. They swarm into Concord's Alcott School auditorium, at 10 o'clock on a Friday morning, all of them happy because they're missing something - arithmetic or social studies or science; most of them chatting, a few of them shouting. The din is festive, chirpy, happy, full of kids' sounds.
Read More"Life in the Ghetto" is a non-fiction children's book, written and illustrated by 13-year-old Anika D. Thomas. You read it and you think it's horror fiction. It can't be true. You don't want it to be true.
On the front cover against a background of coloring-book red bricks, is a child's drawing of a girl's face. The girl in the drawing is crying.
On the back cover is a photograph of the author standing in front of her red-brick home. The windows behind her are boarded up. Trash litters the ground. But the steps to her apartment are clean.
Anika is smiling in the picture, but it is fake, a smile-for-the-camera pose. Her arms are folded and her eyes avoid the camera's lens.
Read MoreThey wanted me to write about them.
I said no because I generally don't. Really, where's the story, I thought?
I go into schools now and then and talk about how I got started as a writer. I tell a couple dozen kids that if you do something long enough, if you try hard enough, you eventually get better at it.
Read Moret must be a byproduct of age. It must develop like a taste for lobster or pate, or like gray hair, slowly, but inevitably. How else to explain it? When I was young I used to hate working in a garden; now I'm old and I love it. Why?
When I was a child, you couldn't lure me outdoors. My mother tried. She bought me a package of bachelor button seeds and a planter at the five-and-ten and brought in from outdoors a pail full of loam and said, "Here, now you can grow your own garden." She must have believed that once I saw life spring forth from seeds I had personally buried in dirt I would be awed and treasure all life that emerged from the ground. But it didn't work that way. I didn't have any interest in the seeds…
Read MoreThere's this little girl, just 13 months old. Her birthday was Valentine's Day, her father tells the woman next to him. She is toddling around the doctor's waiting room totally unconcerned that everyone else is sitting. She races to the TV, stares at it for a minute, then turns away. She picks up a book she finds on a chair, looks at it, then puts it down. She approaches a stranger, meets the stranger's eyes, grins, then runs back to her father who hasn't for a second taken his eyes off her.
She is a tiny thing, a baby, still bald, the blond fuzz on her head barely visible. She wears pink pants and a teal green sweater and a grin that shows off her teeth. Her mother is in the doctor's office because within weeks she will be having another baby. But it's clear the father is totally enthralled with this one.
Read MoreThe saddest story in the news last Friday had nothing to do with crime or politics or the economy. It had to do with the way we live our lives, and the way we treat our children. It was a heartbreaker, yet relegated to the back pages, as if it meant nothing at all.
Sesame Street announced that it was putting its new episode about divorce on hold because the preschool children who had previewed it had become upset and had found it too painful to watch. The Snuffleupaguses were splitting up and the kids didn't like it a bit.
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