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Quite simply, growing up with gay parents was very difficult, and not because of prejudice from neighbors. People in our community didn’t really know what was going on in the house. To most outside observers, I was a well-raised, high-achieving child, finishing high school with straight A’s. Inside, however, I was confused. When your home life is so drastically different from everyone around you, in a fundamental way striking at basic physical relations, you grow up weird. I have no mental health disorders or biological conditions. I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to...

Walking home this morning, I saw a frizzy-haired mother with a lefty vibe and Savonarola expression. Her young son ran in front of her, chasing pigeons. I listened, awestruck, as she admonished him thusly: "In your next life, I hope you come back as a pigeon, so you know what that feels like." Confused, the boy said, "What?" She repeated her wisdom in sterner tones. I'm dazzled by her genius at packing several soul-crushing blows into one sentence: 1) You're going to be reincarnated as punishment 2) Your mother eagerly awaits your eternal punishment 3) Walk robotically by my side...

Author Richard Louv believes that America’s children are now suffering from a syndrome he identifies as “nature-deficit disorder.” In his recent book, Last Child in the Woods, Louv suggests that the current generation of American children knows the Discovery Channel better than their own backyards–and that this loss of contact with nature leads to impoverished lives and stunted imagination. Louv begins by recounting an anecdote involving his son, Matthew. When the boy was about ten years of age, he asked his father: “Dad, how come it was more fun when you were a kid?” The boy was honestly reflecting on...

School buses serve as a setting for as much as 10% of all bullying incidents in the country, according to the data collected by the U.S. Department of Education. The reality, however, could be much worse, since as many as two-thirds of all bullying incidents that take place in the U.S. schools are never reported. A recent article on Slate.com explained that limited space and lack of adequate supervision make school bus bullying notoriously hard to control and reduce. Jeremy Stahl, writing at Slate.com, said that he polled his colleagues about their own and their kids’ experiences and many recalled...

Barack Obama's mother was secretly in contact with his estranged father during his entire childhood without the future president's knowledge, a new book claims. Ann Dunham gave Barack Obama Sr regular updates about his life during the 1960s and 70s and even sent him school reports. It was not until the 1980s that Mr Obama became aware of the contact between the two - but he still did not forgive his father for being an absent dad. The claims are made in a new book by Mr Obama's half sister Auma in which she reveals that their father was routinely...

A Texas family has created a 'bucket list' for their infant daughter after learning she suffers from a fatal genetic disorder, myFOXhouston reported. Mike and Laura Canahuati, from Bellaire, Tex, are on a mission to teach the world about their daughter Avery's fatal genetic disease. You've likely never heard of Spinal Muscular Atrophy, but 7.5 million Americans carry the gene that causes it.

I was just pondering why Obama acts so differently with different countries and was wondering if he was a Shia Muslim in Indonesia. He attacked Lybia at the drop of a hat and killed Osama without a tear, but won't act on Syria or Iran, both Shia countries. If Indonesia is mainly Shia, that would explain alot. If he was raised Suni, well, back to the drawing board. Does anybody know?

New Playgrounds Are Safe—and That's Why Nobody Uses Them The problem with safety guidelines is that they make most playgrounds so uninteresting as to contribute to reduced physical activity. Playgrounds don't look like they used to. Steep metal slides and wooden towers have given way to slow, plastic slides and carefully penned-in climbing contraptions. And forget about seesaws -- they're a thing of the past. When kids are bored by unimaginative (read: safe) playground equipment, they're less active as a result, and with childhood obesity at epidemic proportions, that's a danger, too. An interesting new investigation looks into this phenomenon....

Christmas had come and gone, and the toy aisles were emptied of Lego Star Wars sets, and Lego Harry Potter sets, and Lego superhero sets. This is when Lego decided to roll out its newest line: Lego Friends, aimed squarely at girls. Lego Friends figures are strikingly different. They don’t look anything like the traditional Lego minifigure. Lego Friends have big eyes, button noses and pink lips. They wear skirts. They have names like Mia, Andrea and Olivia. They come with pink and purple bricks, in sets that can be built into a pet hospital, or a bakery, or...

Bobby Montoya is a 7-year-old boy from Denver. Unlike a lot of young boys, Bobby has no desire to join the Boy Scouts. Instead, he wants to be a Girl Scout. We first saw Montoya's story over at 9news.com. The NBC affiliate reports that when the boy's mother, Felisha Archuleta, tried to sign her son up for Girl Scouts, a troop leader told her no. -SNIP-

Last week TLC's "Toddlers and Tiaras" reality show enraged the world with a shocking performance by a 4-year-old sporting fake C-cup boobs and acting like a 20-something. . . . 3-year-old Paisley struts across the stage dressed as Julia Roberts in the opening scene of the movie "Pretty Woman." In thigh-high black patent leather boots and a tight blue mini skirt,

They've lived together for 42 years and share a bedroom, but the people who produce "Sesame Street" made it clear on Thursday: Bert and Ernie are not gay. Nor are they heterosexual. They just are. "Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves. "Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics, they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation," Sesame Workshop said in a statement posted on Facebook. ...

Just two months ago, she accused her mother of horrific abuse in an emotional outpouring on American TV. Her late mother, Susan Barrantes, regularly beat her, the Duchess of York alleged during her reality show Finding Sarah. 'When she used to hit me because I didn't sit on my potty or wouldn't eat, a little vein would come up on the centre of my head near my red hair,' she said, adding that her mother called it the 'sign of the devil' and would shout, 'I'm going to beat that devil out!'

Seesaws: A Vanishing Part of America By Bob Dorigo Jones Can you remember the last time you saw a seesaw? I’m talking about an old fashioned teeter-totter – the kind without springs. If you are under the age of thirty, it’s very possible that you’ve never seen one. Although they were once a staple of playgrounds around the country, the lawsuit explosion in America prompted school officials and park superintendents to start removing them in the 1970s and 1980s. Philip Howard, a prominent attorney and the author of the bestselling book, The Death of Common Sense, wrote this about...

20-year-old Jessica Mokdad is dead. Her stepfather Rahim Alfetlawi shot Jessica in the head while she was at her grandmother's Michigan home. Alfetlawi was upset that Jessica was not living by strict Muslim customs, according to a report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and so he killed her this past Saturday. Meanwhile, in an upcoming Vanity Fair article, singer Katy Perry complains of not having a "childhood" because she was raised in a Christian home. Perry is riding the top of the music charts and making tons of money singing songs like "Teenage Dream" and "Hot N Cold," having escaped...

THE desperate parents of a NINE STONE three-year-old have told how they can't make the giant toddler diet because they are scared of him. Lu Hao, from China, is dangerously overweight, and at 9st 6lb is FIVE TIMES as heavy as other boys his age. He is getting so big his family are frightened of him — and have given up trying to stop the youngster from gorging on huge plates of ribs and rice. His parents claim he throws vicious tantrums if he doesn't get third or fourth helpings of dinner.

I was ensconced upon the commode awaiting developments, while idly looking around the bathroom. We had an old-style freestanding steel bathtub, then, its porcelain badly cracked. Two water lines, together with the heavier drainpipe, ran down from it and into cutouts in the floorboards. The hole for the hot water pipe was covered with a cheap, pot-metal dress ring about the thickness of a soap bubble, meant to hide the ragged edges of the linoleum. It failed sadly. The whereabouts of the other dress ring was never properly explained, but we always held out that it was communists what done...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A Valley couple took a childhood memory and turned it into a retirement project. Now, they have a Radio Flyer car to drive around town in. http://www.ktuu.com/news/ktuu-radio-flyer-car-092910,0,1784245.story?wpisrc=nl_wonk

In his most formative years, the boy who became President of the United States was, in other words, subjected to humiliating, demeaning membership in a lower caste and cognizant both of the seemingly undeserved privileges of children born to high-caste expatriates and the grinding poverty of ordinary Indonesians among whom his family lived. That a deep anger and sense of unfairness would develop in such a situation seems more than likely, laying the groundwork for resentment of American power and wealth, and an embrace of anti-colonialist ideologies which undergirded a quest for political revenge, later in life. It was not...

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...