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They were the best of fads, they were the worst of fads—all at the same time. The faddish objects or our childhood were sometimes loved and sometimes hated but they were hard to ignore. Here are a list of the 50 best/worst from the 1960s to today: 1. Beanie Babies What made it the best: You and your friends loved collecting them. What made it the worst: Old ladies loved collecting them too. 2. Bratz Dolls What made it the best: 559 different dolls to choose from. What made it the worst: They all looked like strippers. 3. Cabbage Patch...

Oprah Winfrey embellished her poor upbringing and made up stories about sexual abuse to boost her ratings, her relatives say in Kitty Kelley’s new biography. Although Winfrey claims she never had any new dresses or dolls, and had to adopt two cockroaches as pets growing up in rural Mississippi, her cousin contends she was actually relatively “spoiled” as a little girl. “Where Oprah got that nonsense about growing up in filth and roaches I have no idea,” Katherine Carr Esters said. “I’ve confronted her and asked, ‘why do you tell such lies?’ Oprah told me ‘that’s what people want to...

On February 9th, 2010, I received the following email from "Northeast Elizabeth": On your site's "Education" page, you post a photograph identified as "Barry, 3rd Grade, 1969" which is identical to this one appearing in the Honolulu Star Bulletin in December, 2009 (in an article revealing that Obama spent at least part of third grade in Hawaii and not solely Jakarta as widely reported). Did you add it to your site after that date, or was it there before? I ask because in the article, Obama's former classmate Scott Inoue indicates that he didn't receive the photo back from Obama...

"The Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show is a sportsman's paradise, but one where trouble is brewing. There were lots of kids here with their families, walking the nearly 300,000 square feet of the State Farm Show Complex. They were checking out the newest fishing lures, gun blinds and camouflage clothing. But many of the outfitters who set up booths at the show and sell mountain-lion stalks in New Mexico, bear hunts in Maine and African safaris are worried that they're in a dying business. Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show State Farm Show Complex Through Feb. 14 "Most kids wouldn't know...

No matter what our kids and the new generation think about us, WE ARE AWESOME !!! OUR LIFE IS LIVING PROOF !!!     To Those of    Us Born   1925 - 1970  :   At the end of this email is a quote of the month by Jay Leno.. If you don't read anything else, please     read what he said.   Very well stated, Mr.. Leno. ~~~~~~~~~ TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED THE 1930s, '40s, '50s, '60s and '70s!!   First, we survived being born to mothers who may have smoked and/or drank while they were...

I wrote this in 1997. While the world in which many of us spent our early years has been largely turned upside down and the aches and pains of growing older become more frequent and noticeable with each passing year, the root message of the birth we arbitrarily celebrate each December 25th is timeless. It is even more vital for fallen sinners who call themselves “Christians” -- especially THIS one -- to embrace that message. Please pray with me that – with God’s help – we can return America to her roots so that our grandchildren will have the peace...

The insanity crept up on us slowly; we just wanted what was best for our kids. We bought macrobiotic cupcakes and hypoallergenic socks, hired tutors to correct a 5-year-old's "pencil-holding deficiency," hooked up broadband connections in the treehouse but took down the swing set after the second skinned knee. We hovered over every school, playground and practice field — "helicopter parents," teachers christened us, a phenomenon that spread to parents of all ages, races and regions. Stores began marketing stove-knob covers and "Kinderkords" (also known as leashes; they allow "three full feet of freedom for both you and your child")...

Parent alert: the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those ”Baby Einstein” videos that did not make children into geniuses. They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect. “We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds,” said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years. Baby Einstein,...

Saturday, October 17, 2009 Presented by The teenage-ification of manhood Robert Fulford,  National Post  Parents often complain that kids grow up too fast these days. But many adults, it seems, aren't growing up at all. In an ongoing series, the National Post comment pages have been probing this annoying phenomenon. In today's final instalment, Robert Fulford explains the social construct we now call "the teenager."---The word "teenagers" appeared in the late 1940s, signalling the arrival of a new tribe of young people, the replacements for what were once called adolescents. These self-important newcomers were not just adults-in-training, as young people...

San Antonio, TX - San Antonio Living Show - Entertainment Stories -- Homeless 'American Girl' doll part of new collection

September 13, 2009 Why Can’t She Walk to School? By JAN HOFFMAN TO get to school, the child leaves home by herself, proudly walking down the boulevard in a suburb of a small city in upstate New York. The crossing guard helps her at the intersection. She lives only a block and a half from school. Yet she walks by older children waiting with parents for buses to the same school. She is 7, a second-grader, and her mother, Katie, hears the raised-eyebrow remarks: ‘Are you sure you want to be doing this?’ Katie said friends ask. ‘She’s just so...

a study conducted by the Violent Crimes Institute reports that between 1999 and 2006, there were nearly 1,000,000 sex crimes committed in the United States by illegal aliens. So why does the crime of child molestation seem to be so prevalent among illegal aliens from Mexico?…The answer may lie within the age-old Mexican culture of "machismo," as well as within the actual laws of that country. The crime of rape or child molestation is incredibly under-reported in Mexico, because there is so much shame placed upon the victim as well as the difficulty in proving the case. The crime of...

I finally had to sit down with my 11-year-old daughter for “the talk.” Despite my best efforts to preserve her innocence and protect her from growing up too quickly, I simply had to tell her some important facts of life. No, we didn’t have a talk about how babies are born. This talk was about America’s assault on girlhood. The time finally came for me to explain to my daughter the relationship between media and marketing and money, and why some people think nothing of exploiting girls if it increases their ratings, sells advertising and beefs up the bottom line....

It’s a spectacular day at Harmony Playground in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, with children swinging and running through sprinklers. An “icy man” with his pushcart of fruit ices stands near the jungle gym, as parents look toward the gated entrance. A second ices vendor enters, also setting up shop inside the playground’s cast-iron fence. Vicki Sell, mother of 3-year-old Katherine, tenses when the vendor starts ringing his little bell, over and over, hoping her daughter doesn’t have the typical Pavlovian response. Ever since Katherine had an inconsolable meltdown about not being able to have a treat, Ms. Sell has been trying...

The house was as big as a large barn, although in shape it in no way resembled a barn, being of some plain unadorned vague architectural style that has no name. It had been built in 1910, by the local banker, and had obviously been designed more for social entertaining, and not for the usual domestic sort of life. This was my childhood home alongside the Platte River of Nebraska, from the time I was a year old, until we moved away into the heart of Nebraska, the Sandhills, when I was ten years old. The house was perhaps the...

Bike helmets? SPF? Veggie meals? No way, if you grew up in '50s, '60s, '70s When Phyllis Murphy's mother was pregnant, back in the 1950s, her doctor advised her to take up smoking for relaxation. A few years later, that same mom smeared her toddler's skin with a concoction of baby oil and iodine for a deep, rich tan. Now, safely in adulthood in Vancouver, B.C., Murphy fondly recalls childhood as a time of leaping from rooftops and accumulating “more scars than Joan Rivers.” And Tim Palla, a 46-year-old pastor, spent his childhood just north of Pittsburgh where he got...

Free, imaginative play is crucial for normal social, emotional and cognitive development. It makes us better adjusted, smarter and less stressed. Childhood play is crucial for social, emotional and cognitive ­development. Imaginative and rambunctious “free play,” as opposed to games or structured activities, is the most essential type. Kids and animals that do not play when they are young may grow into anxious, socially maladjusted adults. On August 1, 1966, the day psychiatrist Stuart Brown started his assistant professorship at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, 25-year-old Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas Tower...

excerpt: Social scientists have long questioned the origin of President Obama’s most deeply-held economic philosophy. Is it, they wondered, rooted in the mixed up mélange of cultures in which he was raised? Did it spring, as others suggested, from some genetic link to his father’s exotic homeland? Or does it arise, as some have proposed, from the spiritual awakening of his college years? Now the truth can been discovered and can finally be revealed.

Dr Justin Barrett, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford's Centre for Anthropology and Mind, claims that young people have a predisposition to believe in a supreme being because they assume that everything in the world was created with a purpose. He says that young children have faith even when they have not been taught about it by family or at school, and argues that even those raised alone on a desert island would come to believe in God. "The preponderance of scientific evidence for the past 10 years or so has shown that a lot more seems to...

Sliding down memory lane (This classic Dave Barry column was originally published April 13, 2003.) Recently, my little brother Phil (he's only 50) gave me a box that wound up with him some years ago, when our mom died and a bunch of family flotsam drifted down one generation. The box contains slides. For you young digital readers, I should explain that slides are transparencies made from photographs. They used to be very popular. When you wanted to look at big, bright images of your vacation, you'd get out your slides, spend a few seconds thinking about what a pain...