REPLAY CHAT: Budgeting and finances

Budgeting is a challenge for many in Eastern Iowa, with continued concerns over unemployment, rising costs for basic needs and the demands of modern technology.

Many families are feeling the pinch as well, particularly with the start of the school year and the costs of college education.

Parenting Ain’t Easy hosted a live chat Friday regarding finances and budgeting.

Scott Shook, director of the Horizons Consumer Credit Counseling Service, and Linda Bigley, director of the Iowa State University Extension’s Linn County office, offered advice and tips to families looking to establish or maintain a regular budget, and what to do if you’re in over your head financially.

Replay the live chat below.

Bringing frugality to the family

Anne-Marie Faiola remembers resenting working in her mom’s garden as a teenager while her friends were out having a good time. But if she wanted spending money, she had to work for it. She also recalls grousing about how she had to pick an economical prom dress, while they could get any dress they wanted.

Yet any ill feelings Faiola had about her parents’ lessons in frugality are long gone. These days, when she sees friends burdened with debt and worrying about how to pay their mortgages, Faiola, now 33, is grateful. “It didn’t always feel like that,” said the Bellingham, Wash., website entrepreneur. Yet when the economy went south two years ago and she had money in the bank, Faiola knew whom to thank.

Frugality has taken on a certain shabby chic in the struggling economy, but for some, watching pennies is more than the latest fad. There’s always been a segment of the population that by conviction, or necessity, saved by eating at home, shopping at discount stores and choosing practical cars over the latest luxury models. Those lessons were not lost on the children who grew up in these homes. As adults, even those who have developed some extravagant habits say they have a strong awareness of the value of a dollar, the importance of saving, and the dangers of debt.

“I did have my time of going wild, but I always paid it off,” said Priti Mehta, 28, who works for a nonprofit and is a graduate student in Albuquerque, N.M.

Financial literacy pundits insist children absorb the spending habits of their parents. Yet there’s little research examining whether the children of frugal parents are more or less likely to be careful with money, said Tim Kasser, the chairman of the psychology department at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., and an expert on materialism. “Thrift hasn’t been of major interest to American culture in the last 60 years or so,” he said. “It’s been about trying to get people to be materialistic, not thrifty.”

Kasser said he could see both possibilities. “On the one hand, children learn their values around anything, including money, from their parents.” Yet it’s also clear that children rebel, he said, especially when they don’t have a say in what affects them.

Whether individuals grow up to be thrifty is probably going to be influenced by whether they had a thrifty parent. If parents make saving money fun, give children choices and explain why careful spending is a good way to live, the children will probably get the message, he said.

That’s what Trent Hamm is counting on. The writer and creator of TheSimpleDollar.com grew up in a poor household where any money available was quickly spent. As a young adult, he ran up nearly $50,000 in debt before transforming his ways and becoming an advocate for living a frugal lifestyle.

Today, when he blogs about the financial lessons he’s teaching his three children, particularly his 4-year-old son, some readers question whether he’s putting too much emphasis on cost at an early age.

“A lot of their habits are being defined now,” Hamm, 31, said in his defense. “You’re setting a model as an adult that they can follow.”

Hamm said he explains his choices to his son. They play at the park rather than visit an amusement center that charges admission, for instance. The money saved goes toward vacation. “Even if he doesn’t fully understand that it’s going to be a long time before vacation, he knows that there’s a good reason for saving,” Hamm said.

“I don’t mind if he thinks I’m an idiot from age 15 to age 25,” he said. “As long as he comes out OK on the other end, that’s great.”

What “OK” means as adults varies, of course.

Lauren Weber’s father was so tight with money that he once tried to ration the family’s toilet paper. “Fortunately he couldn’t find a way to monitor that, so it didn’t last very long,” she joked.

Now 39, Weber, who grew up in East Lyme, Conn., said there were times when she rebelled. Yet she found herself growing more like her father over the years. She sheepishly recalls searching the Internet for information about botulism one evening. The reason? She was eating a meal made with questionable canned goods she was reluctant to discard. But the author of “In Cheap We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue,” says she also allows herself to spend money on occasion — like her $350 pair of boots.

“It’s OK to indulge once in a while,” Weber said. “But my once-in-a-while is once a year, maybe twice a year.”

On the other end of the spectrum is Nick Bhardwaj. At 22 he has already amassed far more money than his single mother had while raising him in Sacramento, Calif., thanks to a well-timed business venture that profited from falling real estate prices. “I’m an impulse buyer,” he admitted. “I’m very brand-oriented, top of the line stuff, especially when it comes to clothes.”

“I will always look for the best deal,” he said. “But it’s become secondary to the thought of what I would like the most.”

Because his income supports his habit, Bhardwaj isn’t concerned about his finances right now. Still, he’s concerned about what example he’ll set when he has children of his own.

“I know my spending habits are not something I should be giving to my kid,” he said. “But the ability to afford things that others might not have isn’t a bad thing, in moderation.”

Foreign adoption issues leave some couples in limbo

The photos are poignant, sometimes goofy: little Noah with a purple plastic ring on his head, tearing up at his first haircut or splashing in a baby pool. Then there is the video of a father twirling his son through the air, both giggling uproariously.

The website is called “Becky & Jeremy’s Exciting Adoption Adventure,” created by a Haverford, Pa., couple to capture a once-in-a-lifetime odyssey to bring home a son from Kazakhstan as well as the joys of raising a first child.

But what has happened so far to Becky Compton, Jeremy Meyer, and the 16-month-old they call Noah Aldanysh Compton-Meyer in the mountain-ringed city of Taraz has been anything but routine.

It is there, about 6,350 miles from home, that Meyer, 40, and Compton, 39, have spent most of the last 7 ½ months as Noah learned to walk, ate his first banana — and became a pawn in a battle with Kazakh officials who have blocked what the couple expected to be a routine adoption.

Compton, a psychology professor at Haverford College, remains in Taraz, spending three hours a day with Noah at an orphanage while fighting the Kazakhstan bureaucracy. Her husband, a labor lawyer with a Center City Philadelphia firm, returned four weeks ago to an empty house on Haverford’s campus and the possibility that Noah might never arrive at the freshly painted, toy-filled room that has been waiting for him for nearly a year.

“It was incredibly hard to leave,” Meyer said. “I may never see him again. That’s horrifying.”

Since January, government officials in the region have abruptly rejected adoptions by seven foreign families — another is pending — leaving in limbo the families and the 10 orphans they seek to adopt. The families call them the “Taraz Ten.”

Besides the growing resistance of many countries to giving up their children to foreign adoptions, the much-publicized death in January of tabloid celebrity Casey Johnson may have played a role, adoption advocates speculate. The fast-living heiress had adopted a daughter from the Taraz orphanage where Noah lives.

“Attitudes toward international adoptions are changing, absolutely,” said Leonette Boiarski of the Pearl S. Buck Welcome House, the Perkasie, Pa., adoption agency that arranged the boy’s adoption. “Countries want to be able to take care of their children.”

Meyer and Compton were hopeful when they set out for sparsely populated Kazakhstan on Dec. 16.

They were encouraged by the country’s reputation for treating its orphans well. As recently as 2008, about 380 Kazakhstan orphans had been adopted by Americans. Boiarski said Welcome House began working with the country in January 2007 and had completed three adoptions when Meyer and Compton arrived.

The process was expected to take roughly two months. Typically, the family arrives in Kazakhstan and begins two weeks of bonding with a child, followed by a court hearing within a month or so.

Meyer and Compton were shown three children. The second they met was 9-month-old Aldanysh. Though he was undernourished and barely able to hold up his head, Meyer said, “it was love at first sight.”

“It’s hard to put into words,” Compton said. “I think because he was fairly small, there was a protective instinct. … He also seemed very alert and curious even as a young infant. … I felt a responsiveness.”

They were able to visit the boy, whom they named Noah, for two hours a day. “We brought toys,” Meyer said. “Early on he grabbed things and flung them around.”

The couple also got to bond with several other couples — American, Canadian, and German — waiting to adopt. They filled the rest of the day — “the other 22,” they called those long hours — by trading books or DVDs with the other families or warming noodles on the hot plate in their hotel room. They blogged about their odd experiences, such as buying a donkey for a local family.

The legal process moved forward slowly. Meyer said that through 2009, no international adoptions had been rejected in the Zhambyl region, and that there had been no reason to expect things would be different.

On Jan. 4, Johnson, the pharmaceutical heiress, died of diabetes complications, leaving behind her 3-year-old Kazakh daughter, Ava-Monroe. News reports revealed her drug history as well as her homosexuality, which is cause in Kazakhstan for denying an adoption.

Then in March, a couple from York, Pa., was accused of murdering the 7-year-old boy they had adopted from Russia, and in April, a Tennessee mother pinned a note on her adopted 7-year-old and sent him unattended on a flight back to Russia.

The climate for international adoption seemed to change overnight, even as Noah celebrated his first birthday March 26 and started hitting developmental milestones.

“One day we went to pick him up, and he was standing,” Meyer said with a father’s pride.

But on May 14, the municipal court rejected the adoption, saying the orphanage had not shown Noah to enough local families — there had been two — before making him available to foreigners, as required by law, according to the court record.

To Compton and Meyer, it seemed that they, and worse, Noah, were being penalized for someone else’s error. They said that the law does not state how many local families must first be approached, and that they had been told that two or three was normal.

Several calls to the Kazakh Embassy were not returned.

While adoptions are progressing normally in other parts of the country, no new applications are being taken while Kazakhstan implements the Hague Adoption Convention, an international agreement to safeguard international adoptees, said Welcome House.

A State Department spokesman called the Hague Convention, which prevents the abduction or sale of children and emphasizes local adoptions, “the most important change in international adoption.”

Compton and Meyer, now on their second appeal, said they would fight all the way to the Kazakh Supreme Court if necessary.

That could take months. Compton needs to return to the United States in August for a week when her visa expires, the first time both will be away from the boy for more than a day.

“He’s bonded with us,” Meyer said. “He cries when we leave him. … Honestly, I think he’s going to forget me.”

Home in Haverford, he tries not to walk past the “depressing empty baby room,” with its blue walls, bookshelf filled with stuffed animals and bright new toys, a stack of baby clothes that Noah is fast outgrowing, and a quilted ark handed down from his wife’s late grandmother.

But the couple is resolved not to give up, even if Kazakhstan’s highest court rules against them. Said Compton by phone from Kazakhstan, “We’re committed to him like any parent is committed to his child.”

New fraud scheme targets kids’ Social Security numbers

The latest form of identity theft doesn’t depend on stealing your Social Security number. Now thieves are targeting your kid’s number long before the little one even has a bank account.

Hundreds of online businesses are using computers to find dormant Social Security numbers — usually those assigned to children who don’t use them — then selling those numbers under another name to help people establish phony credit and run up huge debts they will never pay off.

Authorities say the scheme could pose a new threat to the nation’s credit system. Because the numbers exist in a legal gray area, federal investigators have not figured out a way to prosecute the people involved.

“If people are obtaining enough credit by fraud, we’re back to another financial collapse,” said Linda Marshall, an assistant U.S. attorney in Kansas City. “We tend to talk about it as the next wave.”

The sellers get around the law by not referring to Social Security numbers. Instead, just as someone might pay for an escort service instead of a prostitute, they refer to CPNs — for credit profile, credit protection or credit privacy numbers.

Julia Jensen, an FBI agent in Kansas City, discovered the scheme while investigating a mortgage-fraud case. She has given presentations to lenders across the Kansas City area to show them how easy it is to create a false credit score using these numbers.

“The back door is wide open,” she said. “We’re trying to get lenders to understand the risks.”

It’s not clear how widespread the fraud is, mostly because the scheme is difficult to detect and practiced by fly-by-night businesses.

But the deception is emerging as millions of Americans watch their credit scores sink to new lows. Figures from April show that 25.5 percent of consumers — nearly 43.4 million people — now have a credit score of 599 or below, marking them as poor risks for lenders. They will have trouble getting credit cards, auto loans or mortgages under the tighter lending standards banks now use.

The scheme works like this:

Online companies use computers and publicly available information to find random Social Security numbers. The numbers are run through public databases to determine whether anyone is using them to obtain credit. If not, they are offered for sale for a few hundred to several thousand dollars.

Because the numbers often come from young children who have no money of their own, they carry no spending history and offer a chance to open a new, unblemished line of credit. People who buy the numbers can then quickly build their credit rating in a process called “piggybacking,” which involves linking to someone else’s credit file.

Many of the business selling the numbers promise to raise customers’ credit scores to 700 or 800 within six months.

If they default on their payments, and the credit is withdrawn, the same people can simply buy another number and start the process again, causing a steep spiral of debt that could conceivably go on for years before creditors discover the fraud.

Jensen compared the businesses that sell the numbers to drug dealers.

“There’s good stuff and bad stuff,” she said. “Bad stuff is a dead person’s Social Security number. High-quality is buying a number the service has checked to make sure no one else is using it.”

Credit bureaus can quickly identify applications that use numbers taken from dead people by consulting the Social Security Administration’s death index.

Social Security numbers follow a logical pattern that includes a person’s age and where he or she lived when the number was issued. Because the system is somewhat predictable, sellers can make educated guesses and find unused numbers using trial and error.

A “clean” CPN is a number that has been validated as an active Social Security number and is not on file with the credit bureaus. The most likely source of such numbers are children and longtime prison inmates, experts said.

Robert Damosi, an analyst with Javelin Strategy & Research, said the crime can come back to hurt children when they get older and seek credit for the first time, only to discover their Social Security number has been used by someone else.

“Those are the numbers criminals want. They can use them several years without being detected,” Damosi said. “There are not enough services that look at protecting the Social Security numbers or credit history of minors.”

Since the mortgage meltdown of 2008, banks have tightened lending policies, but many credit decisions are still based solely on credit scores provided by FICO Inc. and the three major credit unions: Experian, TransUnion and Equifax.

Federal investigators say many businesses do not realize that a growing number of those credit scores are based on fraudulent information.

“Lenders don’t understand that when they pay money to go through a service, they may be receiving false information,” Jensen said. “They think when they order the information from credit bureaus, it must be true.”

Without special scrutiny, credit profiles created with the scheme are not immediately distinguishable from other newly created, legitimate files.

Investigators say the businesses clearly know they are selling Social Security numbers, but it’s difficult to prove. The sellers use complex disclaimers that disavow illegal activity and warn customers against using their numbers in place of Social Security numbers.

The businesses also instruct customers to provide false information when using the number to apply for credit. Customers are told to use their real name and date of birth, but to avoid listing any addresses or phone numbers they’ve used in the past. They’re also told to avoid any other information that connects the new, clean credit profile with the old, damaged one.

Craig Watts, a spokesman for credit reporting agency FICO Inc., said FICO has tools available for businesses to protect themselves from this type of fraud, but they are not cheap. And many lenders are slow to adopt FICO’s new formulas, which are updated every few years.

Some companies that sell the numbers have lavish, high-tech websites. Others run no-frills ads on sites like Craigslist.

Jim Buckmaster, president and CEO of the San Francisco-based Craigslist, recently told the AP in an e-mail that there were “fewer than 200″ classifieds on his site that used the word “CPN.”

Within an hour of that e-mail exchange, dozens of the ads in cities such as Las Vegas, Los Angeles and New York had been pulled from the site. Many were reposted the next day.

An AP reporter called several of the sites, but got only recordings asking callers to leave a message with contact information.

Experts say the fraud will be difficult to stop because it’s so easily concealed and targets such vulnerable people. Other than checking with the credit bureaus to see if there is a credit file associated with your child’s Social Security number, spokesmen at FICO, the Social Security Administration and the FTC said there are no specific tools for safeguarding the number.

“This is an invisible crime, with invisible victims who don’t have enough support out there to help them,” said Linda Foley of the ID Theft Resource Center in San Diego.

‘Despicable Me’ screening well-attended!

There wasn’t a seat to be had Tuesday night at a special advance screening of “Despicable Me” at the Carmike Wynnsong 12 in Cedar Rapids.

The screening, co-hosted by Parenting Ain’t Easy and other local media partners, was a big draw, as crowds lined up early for a chance to get the best seats in the theater for the 3-D screening.

We hope everyone who attended had a great time! We were hearing plenty of positive comments, and the movie is being well-reviewed by critics, including hitting 94 percent on the Tomatometer at Rotten Tomatoes.

And the minions — let’s just say they’re probably in line for their own movie, or perhaps even a spinoff TV series.

The movie, featuring the voice of Steve Carell (“The Office”), debuts nationwide this Friday, July 9.

Here’s a synopsis of the movie:

In a happy suburban neighborhood surrounded by white picket fences with flowering rose bushes, sits a black house with a dead lawn. Unbeknownst to the neighbors, hidden deep beneath this home is a vast secret hideout. Surrounded by an army of tireless, little yellow minions, we discover Gru (Steve Carell) planning the biggest heist in the history of the world. He is going to steal the moon (yes, the moon!) in Universal’s new 3-D CGI feature, “Despicable Me.”

Gru delights in all things wicked. Armed with his arsenal of shrink rays, freeze rays and battle-ready vehicles for land and air, he vanquishes all who stand in his way. Until the day he encounters the immense will of three little orphaned girls who look at him and see something that no one else has ever seen: A potential Dad.

One of the world’s greatest super-villains has just met his greatest challenge: three little girls named Margo, Edith and Agnes.

For more information on the movie and to view trailers, visit www.despicable.me

And here’s a review of the movie, right after Tuesday night’s screening.

Having children changes families’ church habits

Before Chris and Becky Hubbs’ three girls were born, the Hiawatha couple was  very active members of Noelridge Park Church, 1147 Clifton St. NE, in Cedar Rapids.

The two helped out when needed, served on committees and in ministry and Chris served as a deacon and music ministry leader.

Once the girls, now ages 5, 4 and 1, arrived, juggling the many church activities with family time became difficult.

“Honestly, it was a struggle figuring out the priorities,” said Chris Hubbs, 33. “I got the feedback from my wife and with my own internal voices telling me I needed to spend more time with my family doing family things, that there was just too much church stuff going on.”

While the Hubbs’ particular situation may be different from most, growing families have long had an affect on the dynamics of church involvement, according to a recent study by the Barna Group, a research organization that follows trends in religion.

About half of parents surveyed in the Barna study said having children changed their involvement in church, according to the research findings, with just 4 percent saying that having children decreased their involvement. About 17 percent said they were able to better reconnect with church once they had children, and another 20 percent said they became more involved in the churches they already attended. One in 20 people, or 5 percent, said having children helped them become active in a church for the first time.

For Kathy Ebeling, the birth of her son Michael 15 years ago was just what she needed to connect with faith. Although her family went to church “every once in a while” when she was growing up, it wasn’t a major part of their lives, she said.

When Michael was born Kathy and her husband wanted to find a church to provide a faith foundation for him while he was growing up.

“I know nothing about the Bible and I don’t want him to be the same way,” said Ebeling, 51, of Marion. “With today’s youth, I think the more involved they are in the church the better of they’re going to be.”

Although her husband Robert doesn’t attend with them, Ebeling and her son attend First United Methodist Church in Marion regularly. When Michael was a small child Ebeling helped with the Sunday school classes so she could be with him.

Now that he’s a teenager, she tries to go to Summer Games — a Methodist camp for high-school-aged kids in Grinnell — with him and works in the nurse’s office.

The changing dynamic can make it hard for church leaders to know their congregation, said the Rev. Tom Steele, pastor of Iowa City Church of Christ, 4643 American Legion Rd. SE, in Iowa City.

Steele, 38, said church leaders are always searching for ways to make services and ministries relevant to everyone, not just a chosen few.

“We’re always tweaking and changing,” he said. “It’s amazing, you always have to be innovative in the church anymore.”

More than 2 million cribs recalled: Is yours on the list?

More than 2 million cribs from Evenflo, Delta Enterprise Corp. and five other companies have been recalled amid concerns that babies can suffocate, become trapped or fall from the cribs.

Most of the cribs were drop-sides, which have a side rail that moves up and down so parents can lift children from them more easily. That movable side, however, can malfunction or detach from the crib, creating a dangerous gap where babies’ heads can become trapped, leading to suffocation or strangulation.

The other companies involved in the recall were Child Craft, Jardine Enterprises, LaJobi, Million Dollar Baby and Simmons Juvenile Products.

No deaths were linked to the recalled cribs, but there were more than 250 reports of drop-sides detaching or failing and at least 16 entrapments of infants. In one case, a child was found unconscious and later hospitalized.

In the announcement from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, all seven companies recalled drop-side cribs. Delta and Child Craft also acknowledged problems with fixed-side cribs.

Drop-sides have increasingly come under scrutiny, with several warnings from the CPSC in the last year that the cribs can be deadly. CPSC Chairman Inez Tenenbaum has pledged to ban their manufacture and sale by year’s end.

“This new recall announcement is part of a larger effort by CPSC to clean up the marketplace from many of these unsafe cribs,” said Tenenbaum. “Most of these recalled cribs have dangerous drop-sides, while the Delta crib can pose a danger to babies if the mattress support is installed incorrectly.”

CPSC urged parents to stop using the cribs and contact the manufacturers for repair kits to immobilize the drop-side or information to make the cribs more secure.

The recalls involved about:

750,000 Jenny Lind drop-side cribs distributed by Evenflo Inc.

747,000 Delta drop-side cribs. Delta is also urging parents to check all fixed and drop-side cribs that use wooden stabilizer bars to support the mattress. The company says the bars can be installed upside down, causing the mattress platform to collapse. CPSC spokesman Scott Wolfson said Delta “was not cooperative with providing the full number of units involved in the mattress support assembly problem.”

306,000 Bonavita, Babi Italia and ISSI drop-side cribs manufactured by LaJobi Inc.

130,000 Jardine drop-side cribs imported by Toys R Us.

156,000 Million Dollar Baby drop-side cribs.

50,000 Simmons drop-side cribs.

40,000 to 50,000 Child Craft brand stationary-side cribs and an unknown number of Child Craft brand drop-sides. Child Craft ceased operations last summer and sold its name to Foundations Worldwide Inc., which did not manufacture or sell any of the recalled cribs but will offer rebates for some of them.

With the most recent announcement, 9 million drop-side cribs have been recalled in the past five years. Drop-sides have been blamed in the deaths of at least 32 infants and toddlers since 2000. The cribs are suspected in another 14 infant fatalities during that time.

Congress is also concerned about the cribs. Legislation has been introduced by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., to outlaw the sale and manufacture of drop-sides. A similar bill has been introduced in the House by Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley, also of New York.

Drop-side cribs have been around for decades, but consumer advocates say they are not as sturdy as those of the past. Older cribs had metal rods that guided the drop-side up and down. Many newer cribs have plastic tracking guides for the drop-side that critics say are more prone to breaking.

The Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association, which represents over 90 percent of the crib industry, urges parents not to use cribs with loose or missing parts. It also says consumers should not use a crib that is older than 10 years because it may not comply with current standards.

To see if your crib is on the recall list, check the Consumer Product Safety Commission site.

Stress — or something more?

Ever wondered why you seem to be losing patience with your kids, or other parts of your life?

Turns out it may not be excessive stress, or something you can just “get over.” I’ve discovered this in an all-too-personal way.

I debated for a while whether I should bring this up on a public blog, but the importance of spreading the word have outweighed my personal self-consciousness.

Turns out I have an anxiety disorder, and the drug I’ve been prescribed is helping in more ways than I could have imagined.

For the last few months, my condition was controlling my life, in both emotional and physiological ways. I couldn’t get through a day without feeling heart palpitations, dizziness, shortness of breath or numbness in my arms and hands. Frankly, I often felt I was on the verge of a heart attack, or might lose consciousness at any moment. I’d been getting about four hours of sleep a night, and I was finding it difficult to concentrate at work or on other complex tasks.

And, of course, my kids and my wife have often felt the brunt of my impatience. It’s not fair to them, and I was tired of inflicting my condition on them.

Basically, I felt I was barely functioning, and I was growing weary of that feeling. So I visited my doctor and spilled my guts, and she sorted it out for me. She also told me that of the non-medical conditions she sees in her office, anxiety-related disorders are by far the most common.

I had no idea.

I’ll have much more to say about this in future posts, but I believe I now know what’s been wrong with me for so long. And while a simple pill can’t cure my ill, it’s a start.

I’m ready now to move ahead. It’s a great feeling.

2-year-old smoking: Do we harm our kids just as badly?

From MomLogic.com: The video of the 2-year-old Indonesian toddler puffing away on a cigarette like a grown man as his parents and other adults stood idly by has taken the blogosphere by storm.

Ardi Riza reportedly has a 40-cigarettes-a-day smoking habit, and his dad doesn’t see a problem with it. “He looks healthy to me,” his father told a reporter who recently visited his home in the fishing village of Musi Banyuasin, in Indonesia’s South Sumatra province.

The boy’s mother expressed a bit more concern. “He’s totally addicted,” she said. “If he doesn’t get cigarettes, he gets angry and screams and batters his head against the wall. He tells me he feels dizzy and sick.”

This situation is a shocking example of child endangerment and parental ignorance, and it is easy to take a stance of disbelief and condemnation. But it is unfortunate that our culture is quick to point fingers at one horrific display of extreme neglect and addiction, rather than examine the way our own children are subjected to comparable harm every day.

Read more: http://www.momlogic.com/2010/05/smoking_toddler_is_not_okay.php#ixzz0pFkipFr6

And get more of the story at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1281538/Smoking-year-old-Ardi-Rizal-40-cigarettes-day.html

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Facebook me

So I’m on Facebook (Melissa Erbes, if you’re interested in having a new friend).

My kids are appalled. They’ve been on it for years (and evidently so has my cat and recently deceased beagle—seriously—feel free to friend Boots Van Cuddlesworth the cat or Sylvia the beagle) and now that I’m on it, it’s not cool anymore. I mean, that’s our job, right? To make everything uncool for our kids? I tell them I’m going to friend them. They tell me they’ll deny my request. But I at least try, and they accept. Sweet.

Now, I respect their privacy. I’m not one of those moms who needs to know her kids’ passwords and read every email they send (okay, I may have sneaked a peek a time or two when they had theirs open) and we have had multiple talks about appropriate behavior online—no friending pervs or people they don’t know, no bully-type comments, no posting phone numbers or addresses, etc. Now and again I’ll read their posts to see what’s going on in their worlds (sometimes I am amazed to read that they are at all these fabulous places doing all kinds of fun stuff when they’re really sitting on the couch right next to me…) My oldest has even been daft enough to get herself busted by posting her middle of the night escape plans to meet up with a friend. She unfriended me after she was grounded for a month after this experience, but luckily enough, she has found it in her heart to refriend me.

A number of their friends have friended me now too, which is kind of cool, or weird—not entirely sure on that one. I received a request from one of their guy friends and thought, hey, why not. The next day at school, the boy went up to Taryn and told her that her sister was hot. He thought I was her sister. She was mortified. I l-o-v-e-d it. Recently, Taryn’s boyfriend’s mom friended her. She thought that was cool, him, not so much.

My parents are also on Facebook, and have friended us all. My dad and stepmom share an account, and he feels the need to post a profound response to everything we say (thanks for the love dad). He doesn’t get it. Doesn’t understand why people post random things about what they’re doing, one liners about how I’m in the mood for a rice krispy treat and wasabi, or something like that. This isn’t a place to be incredibly deep….plus, there’s a word count limit here folks. Personally, I like those random details of my friends’ lives. I’ll read about your weekend, I’ll “like” your TGIF’s, look at your vacation pictures, read about your hatred of Monday’s and desperate need for coffee. I draw the line at requests to join your Mafia, your Farmville, or take quizzes on what animal best represents you. Sorry, I have my limits.

So while my girls may hate me now and again when they don’t get their way, or tell me how much I am ruining their lives (by, like, walking alongside them at the mall—how horrible of me!) at least I know we’ll always truly be friends—well, at least on Facebook anyways.

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