Knowledge: Smart parenting and allowing back-talk

1. In many middle-class families, children have one, two, sometimes three adults at their beck and call. This is a social experiment on a grand scale, and a growing number of adults fear that it isn’t working out so well: according to one poll, commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents think that their children are spoiled. Spoiled Rotten (The New Yorker)

2. Where you try to explain what happened and then, rather than listening to you, the response you get is “that’ll be three more spanks, and for every additional word you say, I’ll add another spank.” That feeling like you’re being smothered. The rage rising inside, threatening to overwhelm you until you begin to feel nauseous. The moment when you realize that what hurts is not so much that they don’t understand as that they don’t want to understand. That you matter that little. Things are different here: “Back Talk” and Healing (Love, Joy, Feminism)

Knowledge: Are kids worth it?

My little sister after getting into the make-up

Here are a few interesting articles about whether to have or not have children. If your mind is made up and you read nothing else, at least take a look at the last link (27 reasons why kids are the worst). It will brighten your day.

1. Does Fatherhood Make You Happy?

Studies reveal that most married couples start out happy and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives, becoming especially disconsolate when their children are in diapers and in adolescence, and returning to their initial levels of happiness only after their children have had the decency to grow up and go away. When the popular press invented a malady called "empty-nest syndrome," it failed to mention that its primary symptom is a marked increase in smiling.
Psychologists have measured how people feel as they go about their daily activities, and have found that people are less happy when they are interacting with their children than when they are eating, exercising, shopping or watching television. Indeed, an act of parenting makes most people about as happy as an act of housework. Economists have modeled the impact of many variables on people's overall happiness and have consistently found that children have only a small impact. A small negative impact  [Full article on Time].

2. Does having kids make you less happy?

However, research that takes into account parents' different circumstances indicates that parents who are able to spend more time taking care of their children "take much less of a happiness hit from having kids," according to economist Betsey Stevenson.

We may be answering the wrong question. The question is not how much happiness children bring or take, but how good is the happiness? We need to return to a precept that social philosophers and religious texts have long extolled: that a good life is not one centered around squeezing as much pleasure out of life as possible [Full article on CNN].

3. A former post on my sister's redecoration of our house

4. 27 Reasons Why Kids Are Actually The Worst