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Tag: kids

Danziger: It’s A Wise Child

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

New Ranking: Which Country Is Best For Kids? (Not The U.S.)

New Ranking: Which Country Is Best For Kids? (Not The U.S.)

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Norway is the best place in the world to be a kid and Niger is the worst, according to a new report by the international children’s rights organization Save the Children.

For 700 million or more kids around the world, childhood ends too soon. This is the premise that prompted a new report called the End of Childhood Index, which ranks 172 countries based on whether or not childhood has ended early for the children living there. Inadvertently, the report maps out the best and worst places to be a kid in today’s world.

Save the Children created the 44-page report using eight primary indicators:

  • Malnutrition that stunts growth
  • Under-5 mortality
  • Out-of-school children
  • Child labor
  • Early marriage
  • Adolescent births
  • Displacement by conflict
  • Child homicide

 The report dissects each of these erosions of childhood and how they each specifically impact the health and wellbeing of children. It details the ways in which millions of childhood deaths could be prevented; notes that one in 80 children is displaced due to conflict in today’s world; and describes how adolescent marriages, pregnancies and births have devastating consequences on girls’ physical and mental health.

The report’s intro reminds readers it’s “no accident” that certain children in a given nation or region eat, thrive and live into adulthood while others starve, suffer and die.

“Lost childhoods are a result of choices that exclude particular groups of children by design or neglect. Millions of children have their childhoods cut short because of who they are and where they live. There have been major gains for children in the last 25 years, but recent progress in fighting extreme poverty has often not reached those children who need it most—because of geography, gender, ethnicity, disability or because they are victims of conflict.”

The report provides the following breakdown of the ways in which hundreds of millions of children lose out on childhood globally.

You may think the U.S. ranks in the top five on the list; but think again. We’re not even in the top 20. The United States come in at 36, right below Bosnia and Herzegovina, and just barely squeezing into second-to-last place in the category for countries with, “Few children missing out on childhood.”

The U.S. is a world leader in childhood poverty, as AlterNet has reported. At least 13 million U.S. kids live in food-insecure households, meaning they do not have access to nutritious foods on a regular basis, according to the latest statistics. While the U.S. has relatively strict child labor laws, the amount of oversight of labor in general has declined in recent decades, and as the Atlantic reported in a 2014 article, the U.S. may have many more child workers than presumed.

Here is a list of the top and bottom 10 countries according to the End of Childhood Index:

Read the full report and view the full End of Childhood Index at SavetheChildren.org.

April M. Short is a yoga teacher and writer who previously worked as AlterNet’s drugs and health editor. She currently works part-time for AlterNet, and freelances for a number of publications nationwide.

This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

Trump Speaks, Children Listen

Trump Speaks, Children Listen

Earlier this summer, I was walking through the Miami airport with my 8-year-old grandson when I looked around and noticed I suddenly wasn’t.

I whipped around and spotted him standing a few feet away, his eyes glued to the cable show blasting on a monitor overhead. Twice I called his name. Twice he didn’t hear me.

I walked over and looked up to see a familiar CNN clip of Donald Trump’s interview with Jake Tapper. Trump was ranting against U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, who was born and raised in Indiana.

“Now, this judge is of Mexican heritage,” Trump said. “I’m building a wall, OK? I’m building a wall. I am going to do very well with the Hispanics, the Mexicans. … Look, he’s proud of his heritage. I’m building a wall. … I think I’m going to do very well with Hispanics, but we’re building a wall. He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico.”

I placed my hand on my grandson’s shoulder to urge him along. He resisted. “Why is he saying that?” he said, his face furrowed with worry.

My grandson is one-fourth Latino — his maternal grandfather is Puerto Rican — and he lives in a community where most of the people are black. Many in his town speak one language at home, and English when they are with people like him. These people are his neighbors and classmates. Many of them are his friends.

Until we walked through that airport, my grandson had not heard much from Donald Trump. His parents limit his television viewing, which had insulated him from the hateful rhetoric of Trump’s campaign.

As we walked to our gate I acknowledged that it was upsetting to hear such language from a presidential candidate. He was full of questions we all should be asking:

Why did people vote for him?

Do people clap when he says those things?

What happens if he becomes president?

What happens to his friends, he means.

I think of that discussion with my grandson a lot these days because of the increasingly incendiary rhetoric coming out of Donald Trump’s mouth. I worry for children like him who are old enough to recognize hateful language, but too young to know what to make of it.

Many children have adults in their lives who know to intervene and explain why hate, at any age, against innocent people is wrong. What about all those children who do not have those adults to guide them?

We know from history that our worst impulses can catch fire when a prominent person chooses to ignite them. This is as true for adults as it is children. If you are an American claiming to be a Christian and yet looking for permission to hate all Muslims and immigrants, mock women and terrorize people of color, Donald Trump is your sign from God.

As of this week, add violence against the president to Trump’s list of permissions granted.

Speaking at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, Trump said, about Hillary Clinton, “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks.” After some in the crowd booed, Trump added, “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”

After the election is over. After the voting is done. What else could he mean except to suggest that gun zealots could turn to violence?

The Trump campaign and his dwindling number of supporters tried to cast the outrage as a deliberate attempt to misinterpret the candidate.

Senator Chris Murphy would have none of that. He represents Connecticut, where 20 children and six adults were slaughtered in Newtown.

“Don’t treat this as a political misstep,” he said via Twitter. “It’s an assassination threat, seriously upping the possibility of a national tragedy & crisis.”

How many children are seeing that clip of Trump urging gun owners to take the law into their own hands? How many of them are wondering what the consequences might be?

The better question, perhaps: How do we talk our children out of the same fear gnawing at our own grown-up hearts?

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

How To Talk To Your Children About Donald Trump

How To Talk To Your Children About Donald Trump

A time will come this year, and possibly in the years that follow, when parents of young children have to sit their offspring down and answer a difficult question: What’s a Donald Trump?

Having “the talk” about the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee won’t be easy, but it’s necessary. You want your kids to hear about him from you, not from other kids at school or, worse yet, from the omnipresent and omniperfidious man himself.

Why does the orange man want to build a wall? I thought bragging was bad manners? How come he keeps calling people stupid? That’s not nice!

If you’re a Trump supporter, the talk will be considerably easier, consisting largely of: “HE’S THE MAN WHO’S GONNA MAKE US ALL RICH AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN AND SEND SHILLARY CLINTON TO PRISON!!” After which you pat the child on his or her bright-red Trump 2016 hat and get back to blogging about how many people the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has murdered with her laser eyes.

But if you’re wary of Trump and his rhetoric, you have to gently explain to your child why the man who’s constantly on the television is saying what he’s saying.

To that end, writer, comedian and actor Michael Ian Black has given all Trump-concerned parents a useful tool: “A Child’s First Book of Trump.”

Illustrated by Marc Rosenthal in a style I’d describe as Seussically dystopian, this parody of a children’s book does a lovely and hilarious job of distilling Trump to his bare essence: narcissism.

Black writes: “It’s true! A Trump needs all of our noise to exist. Without chaos it shrinks to a sad, orange disc.”

And, of course: “Don’t respond to its brags, its taunts or its jeers; ignoring a Trump is a Trump’s biggest fear.”

Black said the idea for the book came to him, as ideas come to all great writers, on a trip to the bathroom. He passed through the children’s books section of a Barnes & Noble en route to the restroom and saw a chapter book about Hillary Clinton aimed at inspiring young girls.

“It sort of made me laugh because I was wondering, what possible inspirational book could you write about Trump?” Black said. “I sat down to write one, but the one I wrote was terrible. I wanted it to be funny, but it was kind of caustic and shrill. So I said let me go back and create something a little funnier and gentler and sillier.”

And that led to the rhyming, whimsical “A Child’s First Book of Trump,” with the central character looking a bit like Dr. Seuss’s Lorax with a swoop of hair covering his eyes.

As the book — which comes out July 5 — started getting publicity, I noticed Black getting blowback from a certain swath of Trump supporters. They’re rabid anti-Semites, and Black’s book was discussed on one website under the headline: “Sickening Jew Michael Ian Black Makes Anti-Trump Children’s Book for Stupid Goyim.”

This reaction all but demonstrates why it’s important to talk to kids about the Trump phenomenon. The virulent racism and xenophobia he has stirred up does not exist in a vacuum, and children are almost bound to hear about it or get some sense of what’s happening.

Black believes, and I agree, that people, children or otherwise, should know about the unsavory elements that have rallied behind Trump.

“Online, I had never experienced anti-Semitism before Trump became a candidate for the presidency,” Black said. “But suddenly, I and other people like me, meaning Jews, are experiencing that on a daily basis. I don’t know what that says.”

He continued: “My feeling is if you want to support Trump, fine, but understand who you’re in bed with. These are the people you’re throwing in your lot with. If these are the people who support the candidate you support, at least take a moment and ask yourself why, and make all decisions accordingly.”

And for those who bristle at Trump’s bluster, consider having a chat with your kids.

Whether it’s anti-Semitic internet memes or third-hand interpretations of Trump’s divisive rhetoric, your child is bound to be exposed.

Better they get an explanation of the inexplicable from a parent.

Or as Black writes in the book, “What is this strange beast you keep hearing about? Together, I think we can figure it out….”

(Rex Huppke is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune and a noted hypocrisy enthusiast. You can email him at rhuppke@tribune.com or follow him on Twitter at @RexHuppke.)

(c)2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump jokes about how difficult he says it is for him to listen to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s voice, as he holds a rally with supporters in Fresno, California, U.S. May 27, 2016.  REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst.