" Fifty years ago, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or Mormon Church, began a foster care program for American Indian children. Between twenty and fifty thousand children, mostly Navajo, participated in what was called the Indian Student Placement Program....Through Placement, children had the opportunity to grow up in families – white Mormon families – while attending day schools in Utah and across the West. Placement also had a theological motivation. Championed in the ‘50s by an LDS Church leader named Spencer W. Kimball, Placement grew from a sense of commitment to the Indians – then regarded as descendants of the original people of the Book of Mormon. Listen to the amazing story, full of first hand accounts from both sides
here
posted by BrodieShadeTree
on Dec 21, 2004 -
18 comments
Is there a link between today's headline:
Baghdad Car Bombs Kill 34 Children Receiving Sweets (from American troops) and this Wall Street Journal
front page article from September 22th?
"Capt. Ayers took lessons from his fellow captains. In April, Capt. Jesse Beaudin convinced a friend from the U.S. to send backpacks, notebooks and pencils for schoolchildren. Kids mobbed troops for the goods whenever they went out on patrol. "The kids provided security. No one attacked us when we were surrounded by children," Capt. Beaudin says. After hearing about this tactic at the dining hall, Capt. Ayers's men also wrote home requesting school supplies." Non-subscribers can read the WSJ article
here
posted by miguelbar
on Sep 30, 2004 -
15 comments
Operation Shoe Fly • From Afghanistan, Sgt Hook writes, "So my esteemed friends of the blogosphere...I announce the beginning of Operation Shoe Fly in an effort to shoe the children with no shoes on their feet. If you can collect the shoes, used or new, boys' and girls' (age 14 and under), and send them to me, my crewdogs and I will fly them out to the Afghani kids who so desperately need them."
posted by dhoyt
on Jun 16, 2004 -
38 comments
A crackdown in Texas. America - land of the free. And to guarantee that freedom, everyone has to be constantly watchful. Like the photo store clerk from
Eckerd who dutifully reported a Peruvian-born couple's lewd shots of their infants to the Richardson (Dallas/Texas suburbs) police. The photos showed the parents' two infants bathing naked, lying together in bed with their mother (again naked) and the 1-year-old Rodrigo suckling his mother's (naked) breast. So the couple was arrested -- the maximum prison sentence for the crime in question being 20 years -- and the children taken away. (verbatim
k5)
posted by The Jesse Helms
on Apr 20, 2003 -
77 comments
Operation Teenage Angst Fest. Is all the war talk getting you down? Make like your younger self and wallow in some self-obsessed teen angst. You might even want to dig our your old journals and
submit. Keep in mind the cardinal
rule, though: it has to suck.
posted by maud
on Mar 29, 2003 -
7 comments
Abigail and Brittany Hensel are in the 6th grade and continue to defy the odds. After the initial struggle with the personal pronoun (her? their?), one is left with both curiosity and sympathy. The greater issue is how to assimilate the truly miraculous.
posted by kablam
on Nov 11, 2002 -
22 comments
Another child-bakes-in-car story, but this one is especially heartbreaking: single mother trying to keep her temp job has no child care for her developmentally disabled daughter and leaves her in the car out of desperation. Every summer there's a rash of these cases, with
some eliciting more hatred and disgust than others. What gives -- the general decline of parenting/morals/personal responsibility, or should we get serious about child care in the land of "family values"? (Thanks to Jim Romenesko.)
posted by serafinapekkala
on Oct 3, 2002 -
41 comments
Sand Art: it's everyone's favorite preschool art activity, now on your PC! Go sand art! Still, with this version you can't get into sand throwing fights with your friends...
posted by unreason
on Sep 21, 2002 -
5 comments
Well, they've been found. The remains of Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis, the highly-publicized first victims of the "summer of child kidnappings," have been found at the [former] home of the FBI's main "subject of interest."
Damn, damn, damn.
posted by wdpeck
on Aug 25, 2002 -
102 comments
Gifted elementary kids in California could go straight to college. Students of any age, even kindergarten, could demand to take the state's high school proficiency examination under legislation approved recently by the Assembly.
Passage of the test -- which measures reading, writing and arithmetic skills -- would qualify young students to enter community colleges as if they had obtained their high school diplomas.
Academically, these kids may be ready for college, but are they mature enough to handle being surrounded by students six to ten years their senior?
posted by DakotaPaul
on Jun 20, 2002 -
42 comments
Nickelodeon is airing a special tonight on families that have same-sex parents. The concern of some is that this show: "proves that this network has been co-opted by homosexual activists who are targeting children. Sodomy is not a family value. Nickelodeon has now lost the trust of parents."
My issue with it is that it appears that they are not publicizing the fact that they are showing this to the parents to allow them to decide if their children should watch it or not... I couldn't find anything on their website, except the
listing in the schedule for "Nick News Special Edition" (MORE INSIDE)
posted by darian
on Jun 18, 2002 -
67 comments
Did any other Metafilter parents (or other grown-up fans of children's television) catch
Joe's introduction on Blue's Clues tonight? I've always made an effort to watch whatever my son's watching, so I'm a little sad to see Steve go, but my four-year-old approves of the new host. I am very happy to see that Steve Burns has already moved on to
new, exciting things (including an upcoming album that features several members of the
Flaming Lips). The whole ordeal reminds me too much of the last time a
beloved host was
replaced.
posted by Eamon
on Apr 29, 2002 -
22 comments
Enter ... The Tickler! A page documenting all the villians that Spider-Man faced on that classic Tv Show
The Electric Company. Among them "The Mouse: A happy-go-lucky man until an errant associate at McDonald's forgets to put cheese on a specially-ordered Big Mac.He dons a mouse costume and becomes a glutton for cheese."
posted by Shadowkeeper
on Apr 19, 2002 -
13 comments
Harmful to Minors In the introduction to her
book she writes that " 'Harmful to Minors' launches from two negatives: Sex is not ipso facto harmful to minors; and America's drive to protect kids from sex is protecting them from nothing. Instead, often it is harming them." Is she right, some think she is just evil.
posted by onegoodmove
on Apr 4, 2002 -
24 comments
During my day's aimless surfing I was feeling a mite wistful, and it did my heart a load of good to stumble on the internet home of
Funny Face mugs. I also found the
Mr. Men and Little Miss Club. Both of these bits of pop culture were objects of devotion to me as a tyke. Looking at the sweet simplicity of the products today, it amazes me how easy it was to invest plastic mugs and simple line drawings with meaning and personality. I wish there was a place for them in today's
Kiddie Kulture which seems to be about filling in all the blanks before the kids get to use there imaginations.
posted by jonmc
on Feb 24, 2002 -
7 comments
A 9-year-old girl has been arrested on sex charges, perhaps the youngest suspect ever to face such charges in Manchester, local police say. [...] The alleged incident occurred in the fall, when the girl and three other children a 3-year-old boy and two girls, 4 and 5 were playing in a bedroom, [Police Sgt. John] Maston said. The girl is charged with initiating sex between the younger children and then with her, Maston said. (From
Boston.com, via
Billy Wildhack.)
I admit I don't have all the facts, but it seems like this little girl's life about to be ruined because a game of Doctor went out of hand.
posted by RylandDotNet
on Jan 12, 2002 -
46 comments
Widow of Sept. 11 Hero Gives Birth. "Lisa Beamer, the widow of the man who cried, 'Let's roll!' as passengers aboard one of the doomed Sept. 11 flights prepared to confront their hijackers, has given birth to a healthy girl." How bittersweet; a part of him lives on, but I'm sure there is sadness because the husband couldn't be there for the birth.
Also, the Beamers have started a
memorial foundation for children who lost parents in the 9/11 attacks.
posted by jennak
on Jan 11, 2002 -
9 comments
The charges of "lewd conduct against a child under 14" against Paula Poundstone have been DROPPED. She pleaded no contest to a couple other charges related to the fact that she had been driving drunk with her kids in the car. I'm posting this because child molestation charges ruin careers and entire lives. Since we covered the initial charges here quite a bit, it's only fair to note her apparent innocence just as prominently, especially during a time like this when any non-attack news is being largely ignored. (Indeed, this story itself is nearly two days old.)
posted by aaron
on Sep 13, 2001 -
15 comments
Tickle Me Elmo The Truth About Sesame Street
"I have never understood how any White parent with an OUNCE of dignity or pride could expose their children to the trash of Sesame Street, regardless of how "wonderful" everyone in the " mainstream" world says it is. It's bad enough that we, as adults, are continually subjected to the garbage pouring out of the jew toob."
posted by riley370
on Jun 15, 2001 -
50 comments
No child slaves on board. Of course not. Because if I'm the captain of that ship, or the customer, or the supplier, and every newspaper, TV station and website around the world has been headlining the report of my boat and its embarassing cargo for a week, while I'm still at sea, it's time for some creativity, isn't it? I could have them pick up by another vessel in mid sea. Or, like my forbears in the trade, I could chain them all to something heavy, and toss them overboard. The remaining passengers will know that silence is golden, now, and for years to come. Whatever my decision, I can't complain I didn't have time enough to consider, prepare or execute. The flipside of the information age?
posted by coyroy
on Apr 17, 2001 -
1 comment
Who do you root for when everyone's a villain? It turns out that
everyone involved in the "
Internet Twins" fiasco is scum. Sure as hell the biological mother is (she gave the babies up
twice and now wants them back; I wouldn't trust her to care for my cat); the
woman from the UK is, and now the
man in the US is. A plague on all their houses.
Now the biological father,
Aaron Wecker, has begun proceedings to gain custody of the babies. I hope he isn't as despicable as everyone else involved. Let's hope this circus doesn't follow the girls around for the rest of their lives. If there's any sort of lesson in this, I wish someone would tell me what it is.
posted by Steven Den Beste
on Mar 2, 2001 -
4 comments
Kids are smarter than ever before, AOL chat transcripts notwithstanding. It seems to me that the fact that IQ tests measure culture acquisition as much as anything else may explain a lot of this, but I wonder if there may not be something to the "visual literacy" idea: are we (as a species) building a new type of perception, or honing old cognitive tools into something which might as well be new? And, if so, where might it lead us?
posted by rushmc
on Jan 16, 2001 -
11 comments
