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10 tricks to getting your toddler to speak early Time-proven techniques that helps your toddler to speak and understand language as early as possible.
Most toddlers start speaking in sentences between the ages of 24 and 30 months. By the time a toddler is three years old, she should be understanding the majority of what adults are saying. Of course, toddlers develop at different rates, and there’s no right or wrong age to start speaking and understanding. But if you’re eager to encourage your toddler to learn to speak and understand language as early as possible, here are ten great techniques you can use to speed up the process. Keep talking The best way to encourage your little one to learn to speak is to talk to them yourself. You may feel silly at…
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No, autism isn’t a gift—for parents, it’s literal hell The media will have you believe autism is just about being a really smart guy with little to no social skills. It's a lie.
The entertainment industry, allied with know-nothings on social media who will say or retweet anything for a jolt of virtue-dopamine, is advancing a meme best summarized as “autism is a gift.” According to the meme, Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory being a good representative, autism is just about being a really smart guy with little to no social skills. This couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m dad to an almost five year old son who is diagnosed moderate-severe autistic, and I have the scratches, bite marks, and scars, to prove it. Depending on the spectrum/scale/whatever you use, he would be on ASD 2.5 or something similar. He goes…
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Trying to get pregnant? Tell your loser boyfriend to stop smoking pot Men in their childbearing years (aged up to about 45) should think twice before lighting up while trying to conceive.
What do tobacco smoke, pesticides, flame retardants, obesity, and marijuana have in common? The ability to alter the DNA of men’s sperm. As legal access to cannabis expands across North America, more scientists are turning their attention to the drug’s active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). New research from Duke Health suggests men in their childbearing years (aged up to about 45) should think twice before lighting up while trying to conceive. Experiments in rats and a study with 24 men found that THC targets genes in two major cellular pathways, and alters DNA methylation, a process essential to normal development. Whether genetic changes can be reversed or may be passed on…
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It’s time to pay our best women to have children Here's how it would work.
One of the most obvious solutions to our declining birth rate across the West is to simply pay women to have children. Cash for kids. My main problem with this scheme is that it is also glaringly obvious we don’t want all women to have children, and we certainly are not going to pay cash money for all women to have children. We want the best women to have children, and we should be prepared to pay for that. But who gets to decide which women are the best, and what happens to the women who don’t make the grade? Let’s deal with the first issue: who decides which are the…
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I let my daughter wear a Disney princess dress every day, and you should too All the Disney princesses, from Snow White to Elsa, allows Penny to discover who she wants to be and is still becoming.
I’m not sure how it happened, but I had the girl obsessed with princesses. If I was lucky, it might be nearly Halloween and I could explain to anyone giving us a sideways glance that she was wearing her Disney store dress in preparation for the holiday, only a month or two away. Or, if I wanted to risk a longer discussion, I let them know that Penny wore her Cinderella gown more often than not. On days it wasn’t Cinderella, it was probably Rapunzel, Snow White, or Aurora (that’s Sleeping Beauty, for those of you fortunate enough not to know). Penny picked her own outfits. As long as she…
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The case against over-involved fatherhood Replace helicopter parenting with a healthy amount of fear and respect.
“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy! I wanna play Dinosaurs!” My three-year-old is requesting my participation in a savage game of bone-rattling horror. With her on my back, I crawl around the bed narrating a brief history of dinosaurs up to the unfortunate collapse of the species following asteroid-driven catastrophe. At that point I fall flat on my belly and my daughter squeals with delight. Her older sister, seven, wants to play, so the next round of the game will take place with both of them on my back. On the third round, whoever was in back will demand to ride up front, which in turn creates a crazed need for the one…
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If your children are fat, you are failing as a mother Being poor, lazy, or tired are invalid excuses for tossing a frozen pizza at your fat, unhappy kid.
Most Americans are overweight and don’t see anything wrong with that. As weights have gone up, so have perceptions of being “ideal”, with the ideals getting fatter and fatter and fatter …. and people reporting themselves to be just dandy fine with the situation. Men’s average ideal weight is up 14 pounds since Gallup first measured it in 1990, and their average actual weight is up 16 pounds. Women’s average ideal weight is up 11 pounds since 1990, and their average actual weight is up 14 pounds. Basically, over the past two decades people have consistently said they wanted to lose about 10 to 15 pounds off their current weight…
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Sorry, girl, you can’t have it ALL But there's a trick if you stop thinking in terms of individuals, and start thinking about family.
Ann Marie Slaughter has written a piece for the Atlantic bemoaning the fact that once you have children, you have to take some responsibility for those children. And that really put a cramp in her professional plans. She WANTS IT ALL, and she has a very clever plan to get it. She will simply change the basic psychology of human beings, so that women can have EVERYTHING they want without having to trade anything for it. Here’s the thing Slaughter is missing: NO ONE GETS TO HAVE IT ALL. It’s ridiculous to even expect such a thing. What does it mean to have it all anyways? For Slaughter, it means…
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Refusing to breastfeed your child makes you a TERRIBLE mother Giving birth doesn't make you a mother. Accepting the responsibilities and obligations of motherhood is what makes you a mother.
Kitty Dimbleby (DUMBleby, more like it) is whining today over at the Daily Mail, that the “Breastapo” doesn’t like the fact that she “chose” not to breastfeed her seven week old daughter, Chloe. She writes, ”I feel unspoken criticism from ‘friends’, health workers and even total strangers — all because I have chosen not to breastfeed my child.” Let’s see. You have chosen to bring a child into the world, which comes with a moral and legal responsibility to do the very best you can to provide for that child. A seven week old baby has very few needs. She needs to be held, to be warm, to be dry…
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Single mother dating is difficult — and it should be Ladies, this is why abortion exists.
Updated to add: The use of the term ‘single mother’ is not exactly accurate. If you are a mother and you are collecting child support, you are not a single mother. You are a single woman. He rejected you. Not the child. First up, let’s clarify our terms. A widow is NOT a single mother. Her husband died! Lumping her in with single mothers is an insult to his memory, to her and to her children. So don’t even think of doing it. Especially war widows. If you ever find yourself referring to a woman whose husband died on a battlefield as a single mother, you should immediately pour Tabasco…