It seems to be every second day that we hear a negative story about children and video games and often parents are blamed for allowing their kids access to violent games without any idea what they contain. It is fabulous then when we hear a story about parents who show that they are both imaginative and switched on to the content their child might encounter in a game they want to play.

When Evan Spencer, a then twelve year old, asked his father if he could play the popular war game Call Of Duty 4, he expected a straight out yes or no but he got much more than he bargained for. His father, Hugh, examined the game and came up with a unique parenting tactic. His child would be allowed to play the game with his friends if he both learned the Geneva convention rules and applied them while he was playing.

The Southern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains is a land where time passes slowly. A place where one can sense the  weight of its melancholic history that hovers over the time-worn peaks and settles the verdant valleys below.

This is God's country. A country where the values of the past still govern the countenance of its inhabitants and social change is slow to take root.
 
So I was surprised to learn that over 60 years ago, deep in the “blue hills”, a single piece of progressive literature emerged challenging the social establishment of mid-20th century America.

Through a 1944 novel entitled  “Strange Fruit”, Lillian Eugenia Smith fanned the flames of controversy through a bi-racial love story that served as a subtle, yet powerful indictment of the day's social order, an order rooted in racial inequality and injustice.

The other day my 5th grade son came home and announced, “We need to have a family meeting!” This took me by surprise, because up until this point we have never had a family meeting, unless you count the time my husband assembled everyone in the kitchen to coerce a confession out of whomever got the bright idea to use the good knives to whittle a duck call out of a pumice stone (no one came clean – kids are tough nuts to crack).

“Why do we need to have a family meeting?” I asked.

“Because in a democracy everyone should have fair and equal representation,” he countered with the aplomb of a politician who had no idea what he was talking about.

The Superhero at Home

As I walked down the hall of my son’s elementary school the other day, I noticed hand-made posters on the walls of pretend newspapers called “The Me News.”  The posters were supposed to be the front page of a mythical daily paper that told all about the kid who created it; for example, the child’s birthday, favorite sport, and what he or she wants to be when they grow up.