Parenting...

I watched a disturbing episode of Supernanny on ABC last night. I was completely out of gas last night, after returning to work after nearly two weeks off. The commercial advertising the new episode caught my eye because they mentioned the fact that this was the first show that the parents didn't call for help on, the children did; in particular, the two older daughters, ages 17 & 14.

Without going into disgustingly laborious detail, here's a quick breakdown on the important facts of the episode:

• Father worked full-time and mother had her own photography business, for which she was gone all day
  
• Besides the two older daughters, there were three boys, two of which were twins. I don't recall their exact ages, but they couldn't have been over three years old.
• Both parents leave for work while all the kids are in bed
• The two older girls attend an online, charter school
  
• The two older girls were expected to entertain the younger kids, take care of the younger kids and clean the house during the day

These two girls were nothing short of slaves for the parents. I have never seen or heard of a set of parents that were any more selfish and self-centered than these two parents. They knew that there was a problem, but they did nothing to try and fix it until the girls called in Supernanny.

What really hit home were some of the comments that Joe Frost (Supernanny) made to the father concerning his role as role model for his two daughters. This really hit home with regards to the book that I'm about a third of the way through at the moment, Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters. If you have a daughter and haven't read it, I highly recommend it. It's linked to in the right-hand column of this page under 'Books I'm Reading'. Clicking on the book cover will bring you directly to Amazon or you can click here. I'll write more about it when I finish it and get around to transcribing all the underlined passages and scribbles I've made in the margins.

I've been discussing the book in dribs and drabs with my wife. To me, the book seems very anti-feminist and against a lot of the things that would be considered norms in today's society. From my vantage point however, it all just seems to make sense. It's amazing to see the relationship between a father and daughter broken down to see all the little things that go into molding and shaping a young girl into a woman. It has caused me, someone who thought that they were involved nothing but positively in my daughters life, to rethink things that I may say or do that have been identified in the book as being a negative influence on a young girl.

Perhaps this book should wind up on this father's reading list. He may be able to save his relationship with his daughters and his daughters, before it's too late!

v.raicovi.net:quotes

You may have noticed my new quote blog. Check it out. Instead of trying to generate a decent amount of quality content like I do here, I will solely be re-posting the words of others that I like. Enjoy!

http://vrquotes.blogspot.com

Need an RSS feed?

Here's quick fix for those sites that don't have an RSS feed. There were a few sites that I check in on frequently, that don't have a feed for one reason or another. If you've been reading about how I'm hooked on Google Reader(here and here), you know that browsing outside of Reader just doesn't cut it.

Enter Feed43. Feed43 can take an html page and with a little help from you, can create an RSS feed for you. Check it out!

Google Reader vs. Digg...

I've become a pretty heavy user of Google Reader the last few weeks. It's a great tool for people that spend a lot of time on the web and a reading from either an enormous amount of sites or incredibly varied sites. Prior to using Reader, I would visit a dozen or so sites daily, with Digg being the site I used for tagging stories for recall later on. I can honestly say that I have cut my total news reading & browsing time in almost half. Why not more you ask? Well, I've been exploring new things to read a result of living in Google Reader.

As I've been writing more consistently the last few weeks to this site, you may have noticed that I was posting my shared reader stories and my recent Diggs in the right-hand column. As of this morning, I've taken down the Diggs and I'm going to try an experiment this week. I'm going to try using Digg through Google reader. Why? Well, while Digg exposes some great reads, it really is controlled by a select group of 'Diggers', whose submissions always seem to make the front page. I had started to Dabble in the 'Upcoming Stories' section, but there's just too much crap there. What I've now noticed by visiting Google Reader first, is that I've now read most of the news making the front page, before even going to Digg.

Does this mean I'm going to stop visiting Digg? No. The entertainment from the comment system is too good to walk away from right now. One thing that Reader lacks right now is a social aspect, but knowing of Google, it may already be in the works.

I'll report back later on how my experiment goes, but in the meantime, I highly recommend Reader.