Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, "son might turn out to be a killer" would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:1. Hassle.2. Less time just the two of us. (Try no time just the two of us.)3. Other people. (PTA meetings. Ballet teachers. The kid's insufferable friends and their insufferable parents.)4. Turing into a cow. (I was slight, and preferred to stay that way. My sister-in-law had developed bulging varicose veins in her legs during pregnancy that never retreated, and the prospect of calves branched in blue tree roots mortified me more than I could say. So I didn't say. I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.)5. Unnatural altruism: being forced to make decisions in accordance with what was best for someone else. (I'm a pig.)6. Curtailment of my traveling. (Note curtailment. Not conclusion.)7. Dementing boredom. (I found small children brutally dull. I did, even at the outset, admit this to myself.)8. Worthless social life. (I had never had a decent conversation with a friend's five-year-old in the room.)9. Social demotion. (I was a respected entrepreneur. Once I had a toddler in tow, every man I knew--every woman, too, which is depressing--would take me less seriously.)10. Paying the piper. (Parenthood repays a debt. But who wants to pay a debt she can escape? Apparently, the childless get away with something sneaky. Besides, what good is repaying a debt to the wrong party? Only the most warped mother would feel rewarded for her trouble by the fact that at last her daughter's life is hideous, too.)

God calls his creatures to live under authority. He is our authority and has vested authority in people within the institutions he has established (home, church, state, and business). You must not be embarrassed to be authorities for your children.You exercise authority as God's agent. You may not direct your children for your own agenda or convenience. You must direct your children on God's behalf for their good.Our culture tends toward the extreme poles on a continuum. In the area of authority, we tend either toward a crass kind of John Wayne authoritarianism or toward being a wimp. God calls you by His Word and his example to be authorities who are truly kind. God calls you to exercise authority, not in making your children do what you want, but in being true servants - authorities who lay down your lives. The purpose for your authority in the lives of your children is not to hold them under your power, but to empower them to be self-controlled people living freely under the authority if God. Jesus is an example of this. The One who commands you, the One who possesses all authority, came as a servant. He is a ruler who serves; he is also a servant who rules. He exercises sovereign authority that is kind - authority exercised on behalf of his subjects. In John 13, Jesus, who knew that the Father had put all things under his authority, put on a towel and washed the disciples' feet. As his people submit to his authority, they are empowered to live freely in the freedom of the gospel.As a parent, you must exercise authority. You must require obedience of your children because they are called by God to obey and honor you. You must exercise authority, not as a cruel taskmaster, but as one who truly loves them.

It must be this overarching commitment to what is really an abstraction, to one's children right or wrong, that can be even more fierce than the commitment to them as explicit, difficult people, and that can consequently keep you devoted to them when as individuals they disappoint. On my part it was this broad covenant with children-in-theory that I may have failed to make and to which I was unable to resort when Kevin finally tested my maternal ties to a perfect mathematical limit on Thursday. I didn't vote for parties, but for candidates. My opinions were as ecumenical as my larder, then still chock full of salsa verde from Mexico City, anchovies from Barcelona, lime leaves from Bangkok. I had no problem with abortion but abhorred capital punishment, which I suppose meant that I embraced the sanctity of life only in grown-ups. My environmental habits were capricious; I'd place a brick in our toilet tank, but after submitting to dozens of spit-in-the-air showers with derisory European water pressure, I would bask under a deluge of scalding water for half an hour. My closet wafter with Indian saris, Ghanaian wraparounds, and Vietnamese au dais. My vocabulary was peppered with imports -- gemutlich, scusa, hugge, mzungu. I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and obscenely specific.By the same token, I could not love a child; I would have to love this one. I was connected to the world by a multitude of threads, you by a few sturdy guide ropes. It was the same with patriotism: You loved the idea of the United States so much more powerfully than the country itself, and it was thanks to your embrace of the American aspiration that you could overlook the fact that your fellow Yankee parents were lining up overnight outside FAO Schwartz with thermoses of chowder to buy a limited release of Nintendo. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant little boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity. Although neither of us ever went to church, I came to conclude that you were a naturally religious person.

There are many things the Chinese do differently from Westerners. There’s the question of extra credit, for example. One time, Lulu came home and told me about a math test she’d just taken. She said she thought it had gone extremely well, which is why she didn’t feel the need to do the extra-credit problems.I was speechless for a second, uncomprehending. “Why not?” I asked. “Why didn’t you do them?”“I didn’t want to miss recess.”A fundamental tenet of being Chinese is that you always do all of the extra credit all of the time.“Why?” asked Lulu, when I explained this to her.For me this was like asking why I should breathe.“None of my friends do it,” Lulu added.“That’s not true,” I said. “I’m 100% sure that Amy and Junno did the extra credit.” Amy and Junno were the Asian kids in Lulu’s class. And I was right about them; Lulu admitted it.“But Rashad and Ian did the extra credit too, and they’re not Asian,” she added.“Aha! So many of your friends did do the extra credit! And I didn’t say only Asians do extra credit. Anyone with good parents knows you have to do the extra credit. I’m in shock, Lulu. What will the teacher think of you? You went to recess instead of doing extra credit?” I was almost in tears. “Extra credit is not extra. It’s just credit. It’s what separates the good students from the bad students.""Aww - recess is so fun," Lulu offered as her final sally. But after that, Lulu, like Sophia. always did the extra credit. Sometimes the girls got more points on extra credit than on the test itself - an absurdity that would never happen in China. Extra credit is one reason that Asian kids get such notoriously good grades in the United States.Rote drilling is another. Once Sophia came in second on a multiplication speed test, which her fifth grade teacher administered every Friday. She lost to a Korean boy named Yoon-seok. Over the next week, I made Sophia do twenty practice tests (of 100 problems each) every night, with me clocking her with a stopwatch. After that, she came in first every time. Poor Yoon-seok. He went back to Korea with his family, but probably not because of the speed test.

બાળકો પતંગ જેવા હોય છે. એમને ખૂબ ઉંચે ઉડવું હોય છે, દૂર દૂર સુધીની દુનિયા જોવી હોય છે. મા-બાપની ફરજ છે કે એમની ડોર પોતાના હાથમાં રાખી એમને જમીન સાથે જોડાયેલા રાખવા. પવન અનુકૂળ હોય તો ઢીલ છોડવી, પણ ગોથા ખાવા લાગે તો ડોર થોડી ખેંચી લેવી. કપાવાનો ભય હોય તો થોડે દૂર પણ ખસેડી લેવી કારણ કે કપાયેલી પતંગનું ભવિષ્ય અકળ હોય છે. કોઈ સારા હાથમાં પડે અને ફરી ઉડવા માંડે તો વાંધો નહિ પણ કશે ફસાઈને તૂટી-ફૂટી જાય તો એ નુકસાન કાયમી હશે.

My God,” she says. “I feel like I’ve gone through a car wash.”I laugh, or force myself to, because it’s not something I’d normally laugh at.“What about you?” she says to Scottie. “How did you make out?”“I’m a boy,” Scottie says. “Look at me.”Sand has gotten into the bottom of her suit, creating a huge bulge. She scratches at the bulge. “I’m going to go to work now,” she says. I think she’s impersonating me and that Mrs. Speer is getting an unrealistic, humiliating glimpse.“Scottie,” I say. “Take that out.”“It must be fun to have girls,” Mrs. Speer says.She looks at the ocean, and I see that she’s looking at Alex sunbathing on the floating raft. Sid leans over Alex and puts his mouth to hers. She raises a hand to his head, and for a moment I forget it’s my daughter out there and think of how long it has been since I’ve been kissed or kissed like that.“Or maybe you have your hands full,” Mrs. Speer says.“No, no,” I say. “It’s great,” and it is, I suppose, though I feel like I’ve just acquired them and don’t know yet. “They’ve been together for ages.” I gesture to Alex and Sid. I don’t understand if they’re a couple or if this is how all kids in high school act these days.Mrs. Speer looks at me curiously, as if she’s about to say something, but she doesn’t.“And boys.” I gesture to her little dorks. “They must keep you busy.”“They’re a handful. But they’re at such a fun age. It’s such a joy.”She gazes out at her boys. Her expression does little to convince me that they’re such a joy. I wonder how many times parents have these dull conversations with one another and how much they must hide. They’re so goddamn hyper, I’d do anything to inject them with a horse tranquilizer. They keep insisting that I watch what they can do, but I truly don’t give a fuck. How hard is it to jump off a diving board?My girls are messed up, I want to say. One talks dirty to her own reflection. Did you do that when you were growing up?“Your girls seem great, too,” she says. “How old are they?”“Ten and eighteen. And yours?”“Ten and twelve.”“Oh,” I say. “Great.”“Your younger one sure is funny,” she says. “I mean, not funny. I meant entertaining.”“Oh, yeah. That’s Scottie. She’s a riot.

While I pressed the tissue to my face, Beck said, “Can I tell you something? There are a lot of empty boxes in your head, Sam.”I looked at him, quizzical. Again, it was a strange enough concept to hold my attention.“There are a lot of empty boxes in there, and you can put things in them.” Beck handed me another tissue for the other side of my face.My trust of Beck at that point was not yet complete; I remember thinking that he was making a very bad joke that I wasn’t getting. My voice sounded wary, even to me. “What kinds of things?”“Sad things,” Beck said. “Do you have a lot of sad things in your head?”“No,” I said.Beck sucked in his lower lip and released it slowly. “Well, I do.”This was shocking. I didn’t ask a question, but I tilted toward him.“And these things would make me cry,” Beck continued. “They used to make me cry all day long.”I remembered thinking this was probably a lie. I could not imagine Beck crying. He was a rock. Even then, his fingers braced against the floor, he looked poised, sure, immutable.“You don’t believe me? Ask Ulrik. He had to deal with it,” Beck said. “And so you know what I did with those sad things? I put them in boxes. I put the sad things in the boxes in my head, and I closed them up and I put tape on them and I stacked them up in the corner and threw a blanket over them.”“Brain tape?” I suggested, with a little smirk. I was eight, after all.Beck smiled, a weird private smile that, at the time, I didn’t understand. Now I knew it was relief at eliciting a joke from me, no matter how pitiful the joke was. “Yes, brain tape. And a brain blanket over the top. Now I don’t have to look at those sad things anymore. I could open those boxes sometime, I guess, if I wanted to, but mostly I just leave them sealed up.”“How did you use the brain tape?”“You have to imagine it. Imagine putting those sad things in the boxes and imagine taping it up with the brain tape. And imagine pushing them into the side of your brain, where you won’t trip over them when you’re thinking normally, and then toss a blanket over the top. Do you have sad things, Sam?”I could see the dusty corner of my brain where the boxes sat. They were all wardrobe boxes, because those were the most interesting sort of boxes — tall enough to make houses with — and there were rolls and rolls of brain tape stacked on top. There were razors lying beside them, waiting to cut the boxes and me back open.“Mom,” I whispered.I wasn’t looking at Beck, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw him swallow.“What else?” he asked, barely loud enough for me to hear. “The water,” I said. I closed my eyes. I could see it, right there, and I had to force out the next word. “My …” My fingers were on my scars.Beck reached out a hand toward my shoulder, hesitant. When I didn’t move away, he put an arm around my back and I leaned against his chest, feeling small and eight and broken.“Me,” I said.

While many experts insisted that children seldom lie about sexual abuse, others claimed that young children often failed to distinguish between fact and fiction and might be susceptible to suggestion and pressure on the part of investigators. As more of these allegations arose in custody and divorce cases in which one parent was being accused, the issue of deliberate malice and vindictiveness on the part of the accusing parent became a matter for consideration. Were these parents intentionally coaching their children to lie in order to punish a hated ex-spouse or to gain advantage in a divorce settlement? There were many professionals—lawyers, judges, clinicians, psychiatrists—who became convinced that this was the case. Articles in respectable publications like Time and Newsweek cited statistics indicating that fictitious allegations made by divorcing parents were on the rise, and lawyers were quoted describing sex abuse allegations as the ‘atom bomb of custody disputes.’ There were also parents—predominantly mothers—who found evidence suggesting a good possibility that their children had been sexually molested by ex-spouses. Sometimes a child’s disclosures or physical or psychological symptoms led a mother to seek medical or psychological advice. Often the suggestion that abuse had occurred came not from the mother but from a doctor or a psychologist. Initial shock and disbelief on the part of these mothers was followed with the hope and expectation that the proper authorities, to whom suspicion of abuse was reported, would conduct appropriate investigations and take the steps necessary to protect their children. Rapidly they found that the systems response was very different from what they had expected. As protective mothers in cases against fathers, these women were automatically labeled vindictive, malicious, and paranoid, regardless of evidence to the contrary. Suddenly they found themselves in a Kafkaesque labyrinth of courts and state-run systems, among lawyers, judges, social workers, and experts, where the end result was almost always the same—returning or delivering the child to the alleged molester. Could this really be happening in America? Coverage of high-profile cases in the respected print media tends to reflect the attitudes of a handful of very vocal, self-styled ‘experts.” They have fueled the widespread public perception that false allegations of child sexual abuse are appearing with increased frequency in custody cases. Despite scientific evidence to the contrary, this belief has been adopted by many in the legal profession and by a sizeable segment of the mental health community. The purpose of this book is to challenge these misconceptions. Sex abuse allegations that occur during custody disputes are frequently presumed to be false because they have arisen during or just before a custody case, regardless of the evidence. Because of this presumption on the part of private professionals and public officials, when children who suffer incest become the subjects of custody disputes, often their outcries are not believed and they are not protected. Custody of such children is likely to be given to the very adults accused of molesting them. (page x)

Я подходила к учителям, которыми я восхищалась, и спрашивала, как им удается добиться такого спокойствия и внимания детской аудитории.Один преподаватель, желая ободрить меня, говорил: "Не беспокойтесь, дорогая. Через несколько лет вы освоитесь". Это не утешало меня - я боялась, что если не научусь держать дисциплину в классе, то не продержусь несколько лет. Другой преподаватель, который, по слухам, часто кричал на свой неуправляемый класс, говорил мне: " Эти дети - они как животные! Не ожидайте от них слишком многого, и тогда вы не разочаруетесь". Я знала, что это неправильно, потому что в школе было несколько преподавателей, которые заслужили уважение детей. Эти преподаватели ожидали многого от своих учеников, и они добились результата.Один преподаватель попытался объяснить мне: "Вы должны показать детям, что просто говорите дело". Многообещающая методика, но он не объяснил мне, как её использовать. Другой преподаватель посоветовал: " Покажите им свою веру в то, что они способны на большее". Это тоже прозвучало заманчиво, но, опять-таки, я не знала, как это сделать. Ещё один коллега сказал мне: "Вы должны дать им понять, кто в классе хозяин". Когда же я поинтересовалась как, он ответил: " Просто займите твёрдую позицию". Мне захотелось спросить: "Где занять?