Not such great expectations

Connie Matthiessen, Associate Editor

Worry is part of being a parent and it makes evolutionary sense. If cavemen and women didn't worry about predators gobbling up their infants, for example, they might let their children wander far from the safety of the family cave. If modern parents didn't worry about car accidents, they might not teach their children to buckle up.

Most of our parental worries turn out to be blessedly unfounded — the worry that our child will develop a serious illness, or connect with a pedophile on the internet, or get pregnant in high school. While worrying may not prevent these outcomes (and too much worry is sure to drive both our kids and ourselves crazy) a certain amount of parental concern helps keep us vigilant and involved.

Now that my kids are older, there's a worry I hear with increasing frequency: every parent I talk to wonders how they're going to pay for college. Even friends who are solidly middle class are concerned — not to mention those who are struggling financially.

Skyrocketing college costs and student debt

Unfortunately, this parental worry has a firm basis in reality, according to several recent articles in The New York Times. One article points out that growing numbers of kids are going deeply into debt to pay for college — total student debt has passed the $1 trillion mark — and economists fear the scope of the student debt crisis could rival the mortgage and credit crises. Many students enroll in high-priced colleges that are a stretch financially, but there have also been steady increases in tuition at state colleges and universities, putting these traditionally lower-cost institutions beyond the reach of families who've seen wages stagnate in recent years. A report by the nonprofit Education Trust, for example, found that for low income families, paying for a college education for a single child eats up 72 percent of annual income; for middle class families, college costs amount to 27 percent of annual income.

The second Times article chronicles the increase in overall college costs in recent years. Many colleges have engaged in an "arms race" of spending on new buildings and upgraded facilities to attract students. Eye-popping administrative costs are also an issue, as the article makes clear: Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee received a compensation package of $2 million this year, for example, and has reportedly billed the college for more than $550,000 in travel costs over the last two years. Meanwhile, tuition at Ohio State has gone up nearly 60 percent since 2002. The report offers some good news as well: some economists believe that college tuition costs have reached a tipping point, and that continued increases could affect enrollment. A growing number of college administrators, including the well compensated Dr. Gee, are beginning to look for other sources of funds — besides tuition hikes — to cover costs.

Good news on college costs?

There are also signs of relief from Washington. In recent speeches, for example, President Obama has talked about capping tuition hikes and college loan interest rates.

In the meantime, American parents will continue to worry about paying for college — but that could be a good thing, if it leads to positive change. And while the grown-ups fret, the kids are doing their part to shed light on the problem: across the country this graduation season, graduates are showing up at commencement ceremonies wearing inflatable balls and chains to protest the daunting cost of attending college.

Afterall, if something doesn't change our kids are the ones who are going to shoulder the worry — and the cost — when we're gone: according to a survey cited recently in the Huffington Post, college graduates today are likely to still owe more than $20,000 in loan debt by the time they're 45.

Jamie Oliver's recipe for fixing school lunches: getting us all to join the food revolution

By Leslie Crawford

Where were the naked chefs when I was growing up?

There was sure no Jamie Oliver reminding grown-ups that to raise healthy kids, we need to feed them healthy food – that if made well, beans and rice made from scratch trumps a deep-fried Twinkie any day.

School lunch before the food revolution

There was certainly no Food Revolution going on in Teller Elementary's cafeteria decades ago when, faced with an untouched and flaccid ort (noun: a scrap or morsel of food left at a meal) slathered in a brown, gelatinous sauce, I launched my own "I'm-not-going-to-eat-this-slop" insurrection. After lunch, taking a page from Oliver Twist's daring move, I marched to the principal's office to ask for, not more food, but please sir, edible food.

The principal, to his credit, didn't go all Charles Dickens on me and toss me into the streets.  Instead, he invited me to join a Denver Public School lunch committee made up of students who, over the course of a week, were brought into a private room during lunch and asked to try different new dishes. I remember taste testing several burritos, which meant choosing between simply bad and repulsive. In the end, my efforts – and even the laudable ones of the school district – to make food more palatable were futile ones. The food never improved while I was there. But then, change can take a long, long time.

Children's health and the obesity epidemic

Now it's 2012 and Jamie Oliver is leading a desperately needed revolution. Certainly, on his "Food Revolution" TV show, he's been preaching to the masses about the pleasure of eating good food that's also good for you and the perils of our fat-salt-and-sugar-heavy diet. (Because of the obesity epidemic, the current generation of children may have shorter life expectancies than their parents.)  

The first ever Food Revolution Day is this Saturday, May 19. Oliver's call to farms is meant to wake up educators, and parents, to the fact that it's our duty to nourish kids' bodies as much as it is to feed their minds (and that by nourishing their bodies, we are also helping their brains). You can get a feast of ideas on how to be part of this Food Revolution on his site, including perhaps my favorite Tip #3, which recommends: "If you can, eat lunch at your school and find out for yourself what is on the lunch tray and what other food and drink is available during the day." 

Have you ever eaten one of the lunches they serve at your child's school? Unless the school is one of the lucky few that has risen above the proverbial Salisbury steak, that might be enough to get you to join the revolution, too.

 

A big win in the battle against childhood obesity?

By Jessica Kelmon, Associate Editor

First, the sad news about America's childhood obesity epidemic: “Poor kids get fat for different reasons than rich kids, and they suffer from it more.”

That's the disheartening message from an LA Observed article by author Greg Critser, who’s written a handful of books about health and science. Critser argues that the biggest influence on children’s diet-related illnesses – diabetes, heart disease, hypertension – is not what they eat now, but their mother’s nutrition and health during pregnancy. In utero nutrition affects an infant’s ability to efficiently process sugars for life, Critser says. Childhood obesity begins before birth.

Equally dispiriting, it’s not that poor families lack access to healthy food. The less recognized but very acute issue is that their sources of income (everything from wages to food stamps and other forms of aid) can be so irregular. “Episodic income … ,” writes Critser “leads to an eat-as-much-as-you-can-now mentality that goes a long way to explaining why poor people are fat.” Suffering financial ups and downs makes families more likely to stretch their food dollars by buying more filling, starchy, and unhealthy foods putting kids' health, yet again, at risk.

Finally, there's soda, which Critser writes, “may also be the single most destructive element in the human diet.” From an evolutionary standpoint, he explains, we’re not equipped to process liquid calories other than breast milk. (Though this WebMD piece seems to negate his evidence, at least in part.)

I’ve written before that schools might be the wrong place to wage the war against childhood obesity, but Critser’s arguments and a promising new study have me rethinking my position. If Critser’s right about episodic income, then schools can be a more stable source of regular, nutritious meals. Soda and sugary drink bans at schools are at least a start.  

On this note, the encouraging news: a new study written up in a Washington Post blog today shows healthy school nutrition rules are making a positive difference. The study shows that California’s strict school nutrition standards (with fat content restrictions and calorie limits for school foods and yes, soda bans) are having the desired effect: Californian teens are eating an average of 158 fewer calories per day than teens in other states.

“Researchers have previously estimated that, if children ate just 64 fewer calories each day, the obesity rate would fall 10 percent lower than where it stood in the mid-2000s,” writes WaPo blogger Sarah Kliff. So the 158 calorie reduction is significant – because unlike most school junk-food bans where kids end up eating the same bad foods but don’t get it from the school cafeteria or vending machine, the California state restrictions seem to be working.

If this positive trend continues, would you support California’s school nutrition standards being implemented nationwide?

The best Mother's Day gift ever

Connie Matthiessen, Associate Editor

I love Mother's Day, but I didn't always love it. When my kids were little, Mother's Day meant cold scrambled eggs in bed and a battered bouquet of flowers. Of course, I enjoyed the hugs and the cards covered with hearts and blobs of gluey glitter, but the rituals felt a little forced, not something we'd come up with on our own, I was always glad to see the day end.

Now that my kids are older, we've developed a ritual I actually enjoy. On Mother's Day, my kids do what I want — which usually means we spend the day at an art museum or on a hike together.

If you have teenagers, you know that these are not a teen’s preferred activities. I can occasionally persuade my kids to go hiking or to a museum on other days of the year, but they often have too much homework, or a soccer game, or plans with friends, and there's lots of negotiating and griping involved. On Mother's Day, by unspoken agreement, there are no excuses and no whining — and we always have a blast.

Telling stories

Mother's Day gives us an excuse to put our busy lives on hold to connect with each other. That's why the interviews in Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps are so powerful, because when people go into the StoryCorps recording booth to tell their stories, they open up about the key connections in their lives.

StoryCorps is a national oral history project started in 2003. The first StoryCorps recording booth was in Grand Central Station. Since then, they've popped up all around the country and more than fifty thousand people have participated.  People go with a friend or a relative to the StoryCorps booth and a facilitator guides them through the interview process. All of the interviews are preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

Mom, one of several StoryCorps compilations, is an eclectic collection of interviews about mothers and motherhood. A few samples:

"I feel a certain longing." Kristi Hager says of her mother, who died shortly before the interview. "It's a very animal type of longing. My enduring image is her sitting with the other mothers in the neighborhood while she watched us swimming in the pond. I just have this image of her sitting with her knees in front of her and her arms resting on her knees and her back was so tan. Right now I just think of that warm back, and I just want to put my cheek next to it. It's just visceral. Her presence there on the shore was so reassuring."

Jackie Miller tells her son Scott: "…I've seen you become such a bold, brave individual. That's something I always wanted for myself. And when I'm looking at my life now, I think, Go for it, Jackie. Go of for it! So I guess you learn from your kids."

Later, Scott tells his mother how nervous he was when he came out to her a few years earlier. She responds, "By that time, I knew — it wasn't even a question in my mind. Just as you were this wonderful little kid with all the curiosity, you were gay — that was as much a part of you as any of the other things..." 

Eclipses and Necco Wafers

In another interview, Danielle Hall remembers her mother, who died of cancer. "There was going to be a lunar eclipse, so we turned off the lights, and we put our feet up on the windowsill," she recalls. "We were trying to look at the eclipse, but neither of us had our glasses, so we couldn't really see anything. The lights were off, and we were just totally giddy. Mom got out a roll of Neccos and handed them to me, and I was sniffing each one in the dark, trying to sniff the colors that she liked to eat. It wasn't the big conversations with Mom that matter, it was just being able to spend time together and be ourselves."

In the StoryCorps interviews, relationships are stripped to their essence, the highlights are crystalized in a few telling paragraphs, and we're reminded about the brevity and the weight of a single life — and the centrality of human connections. It's important to remember — not just on Mother's Day.

Let’s hear it for Mr. Dad: The rise (and struggle) of America's stay-at-home fathers

By Leslie Crawford, Senior Editor

Yes, by all means we will give them their much-deserved due, bouquets, and brunch next Sunday. But a week before we pay honor to Mom, take a moment to consider the growing band of full-time caretakers who are doing what SAHMs do – and like so many SAHMs – get no small amount of grief for it. 

In Salon.com's "Rise of the Dad Wars," Mary Elizabeth Williams takes a sharp, smart look at America's stay-at-home-dads (SAHDs) – in 2010, there were 154,000 of them – and finds that if they are every bit as involved and loving as their female counterparts, they duly get every bit as much criticism as stay-at-home moms (SAHMs) for 'not working.’

Stay-at-home moms aren't the only ones staying home

Indeed, while mothers of all stripes – be it working full-time at an office or working part-time from home or working as a full-time SAHM – criticize other moms, increasingly there's another face, this one with stubble, in the mom war crowd. You've seen them at the playground, and not just during the weekend. You've seen them picking up the kids at school – not only on a rare day when mom can't make it, but every day of the school week.

"A father, even a father who doesn’t go into an office, is not a babysitter," writes Williams. "He is not Mr. Mom. He is Mr. Dad."

Mr. Dad is doing the same job that's part pure joy and part relentless grind that is raising kids full-time. Getting the "What is he doing here?" raised eyebrows at the park is par for the SAHD course. Writes Williams, "... the growing numbers of men who challenge traditional gender roles on the domestic front haven’t yet wiped out a different share of deeply rooted biases."

All the same, Williams continues, while Mr. Dad may be regularly exluded from the after-drop-off mom coffee klatch, he gets the satisfaction of being so involved in raising his children. Daniel, a father of five who pens the blog Post Post Modern Day Dad “says that he hopes his kids will someday 'look back on their childhoods and appreciate that I was able to be part of their lives so much more.’”

A societal shift of more involved fathers

We've witnessed a society shift of mindset as fathers are deeply involved in their children’s lives – and want to be even more so. In a recent survey of working fathers, more than half said that if they could make it financially possible they’d consider being a stay-at-home-dad. It’s not only the SAHDs who are making such a big impact in their kids’ lives. Quality of time spent, not simply quantity, makes all the difference. A soon-to-be-published study in the journal Development and Psychology found that Dads can play a key role in helping daughters avoid risky sex.

We should be welcoming and applauding all involved parents – mother, father, whoever – because we know how important parent involvement is in a child’s life. So the next time you see a dad waiting with the other parents for the kids to come streaming and screaming out of school when the 3:00 bell rings, say “Hello” just as you would for any parent who, day after day, is in it for the long haul.

Would you borrow money for private school?

By Jessica Kelmon, Associate Editor

Last month I wrote about the student loan crisis contributing to a higher education bubble. While college and graduate school loans have been making headlines, there’s a much less talked about trend in student loans: parents borrowing money to send their kids to private school - starting in preschool.

In her Washington Post column titled “Kindergarten Loans” last week, Michelle Singletary cites a Smartmoney.com article about the rising rates of families – some with six-figure incomes – borrowing money to cover tuition way before college. The trend is disturbing because families are sacrificing financial stability to ensure a quality education (which, ideally, would be free if they felt their children’s needs could be met at public school), but not surprising, given that many families are still recovering (and hurting) from the recession but unwilling to sacrifice their children’s education and future. So perhaps families decide to borrow for a year or two – or four – just till things get a little easier. Sounds reasonable enough.

But there’s another risk to consider, as the New York Times reported this week: once you’ve committed to private school, you’re on the hook for tuition – even if your financial circumstances change. As Jenny Anderson reported, at least five tony private schools in Manhattan have sued families for tuition even if, for example, the parents withdrew their kids before school started, or have been an active part of the school’s community for years, or if the school could still fill that child’s spot.

Since 2008, I’ve read no end of blogs, comments, and community posts about borrowing to make ends meet – some sentiments that stood out spoke of the preschool years being particularly expensive, pay cuts being temporary, and college being a necessity (not a luxury) – and many made compelling arguments for borrowing shrewdly in the name of education. I, too, have borrowed in the name of education, and full disclosure: despite the fact that I find the trend disturbing, I think a stimulating, social, and positive early learning environment in preschool is valuable for kids and if need be, I’ll borrow to pay for preschool, too.

My question for you, GreatSchools parents who value education, is this: Would you borrow for private school?

Shut up and eat?

Connie Matthiessen, Associate Editor

Most nights, my kids and I sit down for dinner together. Over the years I've tried various schemes to organize our dinner conversations. I do it to ground us a little, because we're all arriving at the table from our separate galaxies — school, work, soccer practice, art class, after-school job, homework — and dinner is our chance to connect. But they're teenagers: they're busy, there's homework to do, and if I'm not careful, we all touch down at the table briefly, scarf down a little food, and take flight again. If the conversation is good, though, we all linger a little longer, savoring our meal and our time together.

So I was interested in a recent New York Times article describing how different families approach dinnertime conversation. Members of the Kennedy clan, for example, were expected to come to the table prepared to discuss current events, and, as a child, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was, too. (Emanuel describes these dinner debates with his parents and brothers as "gladiatorial.")

Amy Chua, the ever-ambitious "Tiger Mother," introduced moral dilemmas for discussion at mealtimes, so the conversation wouldn't descend into idle chit chat. "I felt like, let’s not just gossip about stupid stuff,” Ms. Chua told the Times. “I wanted them to be more cultured and have deeper thoughts."

Dinner at the White House

It turns out even the President has to use extraordinary measures to get his tweens talking: at family dinners at the White House, everyone takes turns discussing a high point and a low point of his or her day.

I've tried this and other conversation starters — and sometimes they work, but often they don't. Like so many aspects of parenting, I've found that the unscripted moments turn out the best. Like the night the kids wanted me to read aloud from Treasure Island, and we left the table only to migrate to more comfortable chairs in the living room. Or the time my daughter was talking about a school assignment on atheism, which somehow evolved into a discussion about religion, the Holocaust, and the big bang theory. Or the dinners we've spent playing "Would you rather…?" as in, "Would you rather be attacked by a shark or a lion?" or, "Would you rather eat a slug or a spider?" or, "Would you rather go to school all summer or go to school every weekend and have half the year off?" — which has no particular intellectual or cultural merit but on occasion has kept us at the table long after the food was gone.

Remember to listen

When it comes to dinner conversation, I don't think planning ahead is a bad idea, but be prepared to scrap your plans at a moment's notice if the discussion heads off in a different direction — or stalls altogether. Some nights your kids will talk about what they learned in science class or about slavery before the Civil War, and other nights they're going to be silly, telling jokes and even — gasp — gossiping about stupid stuff. Some nights they may want to just be quiet and eat. As psychologist Sherry Turkle, who calls herself "a partisan for conversation," advises: "…we need to remember — in between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to one another, even to the boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another."

So don’t worry if your mealtime chats aren't always deep or scintillating (read a defense of ordinary dinner conversation), and take comfort in the many social, emotional, and academic benefits of sharing family meals. And let me know what constitutes engaging, stay-at-the-table dinnertime discussions at your house.

 

It's Screen-Free Week 2012: turn off those little screens

By Leslie Crawford, Senior Editor

A young mother and her daughter, she looked to be about eight years old, were sitting together in a popular local deli in Denver. It looked like a mom and child out for a special Saturday "date."

I was sitting close enough to eavesdrop. But what was more revealing is what wasn't said. I didn't hear her mom ask how school was going or what they should do for the rest of the weekend, although she did ask what they should buy when they went to the grocery store after lunch – and then she proceeded to write her shopping list – on her phone. The daughter's face would ebb and flow from expectedly looking at her mother, hoping for some real conversation and contact, to dejectedly looking down at the table when little came.

Choosing screens over children

I see it all the time. Parents at playgrounds, tap tap tapping away on their smart phones as their kids play nearby, or deep in conversation on their mobile as they walk down the street with their child. If this sounds accusatory, it's also confessional: I've chosen my screen over my children way, way too often. Whether at home and whenwe're out,  my kids have asked me a question and frequently I've replied, "Just a second honey…" because I'm scrolling through emails (there are always new emails to check) or hunting for a web address I need to look up now. "Hmmm, I wonder why your kids are so obsessed with screens," my friend Alison said archly when she came to stay with us. Ouch.

The painful truth is when we pay such rapt attention to our screens that are never out of an arm's reach, we are tuning out our children. And as Alison pointed out, it's a bitter payback when our children tune us out with their devices.

Tuning out, and turning off, all the screens

Today is the first day of Screen-free Week (it runs Aril 30 to May6), which used to be called "TV-Turnoff." Those days seem so quaint, when to have a screen-free week all a parent needed to switch off was the family TV. Now we are never free of the things – and it's the little ones in our purses and pockets that are the most insidious. So I'm using this week to kick start my little-screen addiction by putting  my smart phone away when I'm with my children. The emails, the text messages, the voice mails will still be waiting for me. But my children? There's only so long a kid can wait until he learns it's just easier to tune us out, too.

 

 

Surveillance parenting

By Carol Lloyd

Executive Editor

How many times have parents worried that something deeply wrong was going on in their child’s school, but didn’t have the intel to know for sure? Last week’s story of a father who slipped an audio recorder into the pocket of his son, then posted excerpts of the recordings of the classroom on YouTube, has – for better or for worse – given parents everywhere a new strategy for finding out exactly what is happening at their child's school.  

Call it the age of surveillance parenting.

The online saga began when Stuart Chaifetz, a former school board candidate of Cherry Hill District in New Jersey, received reports from his child’s school that his 10-year-old son Akian, who is in a self-contained class for children diagnosed with autism, was acting out in class – hitting teachers and throwing things. Chaifetz said his son had no previous history of violence or misbehavior and so the information was especially troubling. 

His son, who speaks but has difficulty communicating, could not answer questions about the class that has both a special ed teacher and two or three aids.  So on February 17, he “wired” his son and was shocked to hear the results:  adults talking about getting drunk in front of the children, mocking his son, telling his son to “shut his mouth,” and in one instance, calling him a “bastard.” 

He shared the recording with the Cherry Hill District officials, and they soon issued a statement that those involved no longer worked for the district. But Chaifetz believed otherwise – that the teacher identified as Kelly Altenburg - remained employed with another school in the district. So he went public with his recording, demanding the aid and teacher involved come forward with a public apology.

The 17-minute video of a fuming Chaifetz narrating excerpts of the audio recording went viral with 3.7 million views (and counting), hundreds of news reports and an outpouringof support from angry parents with similar stories to tell.  The recording captures pretty horrific moments including one where as Akian whimpers in the background, one of the adults yell: "Go ahead and scream, because guess what? You are going to get nothing until your mouth is shut." 

Is secret audio the new nanny cam?  

How this shaming and naming game will play out is hard to say. Secret audio recordings are certainly not legal in every state. Laws about tape recording others vary radically - with states like California and Michigan not allowing much in the way of citizen surveillance and states like Vermont not even prohibiting hidden cameras! Whatever the law, this case has obviously captured the imaginations of thousands of parents who feel helpless about their child’s schooling. Chaifetz told the Huffington Post that since he posted his video many “desperate” parents contacted him “looking for help on how to wire” their children. 

Surreptitious audio recordings have been used in numerous cases in special ed classrooms and Wendy Fournier, president of the National Autism Association told the Huffington Post that "If a parent has any reason at all to suggest a child is being abused or mistreated, I strongly recommend [it].”  Indeed, an ACLU report a few years back found that students with disabilities are at special risk for being abused by teachers, a fact that no doubt has made many parents of children in special ed programs particularly vigilant.

But if we learned anything from the movie “Bully,” which captured unbelievable acts of bullying by kids (and absurd denials from educators), it's that sometimes a hidden camera or recorder is also useful for typical kids – kids who are too afraid to speak up, or more often, kids whom nobody believes.

We send our children to school every day, trusting they will be safe, that the adults charged with their care will not abuse their power. Until recently, parents had little to go on but the "he said/she said" of teachers and kids. Classroom cams (like the kind they have in some preschools) offer a “brave new world” kind of solution with its own chilling effects, but when faced with this case, I can’t help but wonder, would it be so bad if every school assumes that  “big parent” just may be watching?

 

It starts here, it starts now

By Connie Matthiessen, Associate Editor

A shout out for the Sioux City Journal, which devoted its front page to an anti-bullying op-ed after the suicide of a local teen, 14-year-old Kenneth Weishuhn. 

LGBT youth bullied

As has been true in many recent bullying-related teen suicides, Weishuhn was bullied because of his homosexuality: he became a target after he told friends he was gay. Of course, bullies find all kinds of reasons — and often no reason at all — to torment others, but kids who are gay (or simply perceived to be gay) are bullied in disproportionate numbers.

In fact, 84 percent of LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) students surveyed reported being verbally harassed, 40 percent reported being physically harassed, and 19 percent reported being physically assaulted at school in the past year because of their sexual orientation, according to the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN).  And research published last year in the journal Pediatrics found that lesbian, gay, and bisexual teens are five times more likely to commit suicide than their peers.

In many schools and communities, anti-gay bias continues to run high.Too often, bullies who persecute kids for being gay are expressing intolerance they've picked up from the adults around them.

A hometown newspaper’s call to action

Under the headline, "We must stop bullying. It starts here. It starts now," the Sioux City Journal editors wrote, "We must make it clear in our actions and our words that bullying will not be tolerated." The editorial continues, "Those of us in public life must be ever mindful of the words we choose, especially in the contentious political debates that have defined our modern times. More importantly, we must not be afraid to act.”

"How many times have each of us witnessed an act of bullying and said little or nothing? After all, it wasn't our responsibility. A teacher or an official of some kind should step in. If our kid wasn't involved, we figured, it's none of our business. Try to imagine explaining that rationale to the mother of Kenneth Weishuhn. It is the business of all of us. More specifically, it is our responsibility. Our mandate."

The cartoon accompanying the editorial shows a boy being hectored by bullies, and an arm, labeled "community," reaching out to help him. It's true: if we're going to stamp out bullying, it's going to take the entire community — including the news media, schools,  religious leaders, political leaders, parents, and other students — working together to make bullying unacceptable.

White House wants to end bullying

There are hopeful signs. The new movie, Bully, is helping focus attention on the issue. The White House hosted a screening of Bully last week, and signed two anti-bullying bills.

Yet each week seems to bring another story of a bullying-related suicide. How many more child suicides is it going to take before we put an end to bullying once and for all?