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An Illinois appellate court dismissed a case that two grown children have pursued against their mother for two years. The lawsuit accused Kimberly Garrity of bad mothering for a long list of complaints, including making the daughter come home at midnight, threatening the son at age 7 over buckling his seatbelt, and failing to buy toys on occasion.
Among the exhibits filed in the case is a birthday card Garrity sent her son, who in his lawsuit sought damages because the card was “inappropriate” and failed to include cash or a check. He also alleged she failed to send a card for years or, while he was in college, care packages.
On the front of the American Greetings card is a picture of tomatoes spread across a table that are indistinguishable except for one in the middle with craft-store googly eyes attached.
“Son I got you this Birthday card because it’s just like you … different from all the rest!” the card reads. On the inside Garrity wrote “Have a great day! Love & Hugs, Mom xoxoxo.”
Children have the right to sue parents for emotional distress, but courts will only pursue a case if the parent’s behavior is “extreme or outrageous.” The Illinois court found that none of the mother’s behavior fit that description. Link -via Fark
(Unrelated image credit: Flickr user EikeR)
Just in time for Mothers Day, StoryCorps has a new animation. No More Questions! features feisty 87-year-old Kay Wang. This should inspire you to enjoy your mother as much as you can if you still have her. Link -thanks, Krisi Packer!
If Evolution Really Works – $9.95
Are you looking for the perfect Mother’s Day gift for your favorite multitasking Mom? Well, look no further! You need the If Evolution Really Works… T-shirt from the NeatoShop. This T-shirt is all but guaranteed to give your hard working Mom a well deserved laugh.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Funny T-shirts and Mother’s Day Gift!
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Understand Your Mother Instantly Breath Spray – $4.95
Mother’s Day is right around the corner! Do you wish you could know exactly what your Mother wanted without having to call or talk to her? Of course you do! That’s why you need the Understand Your Mother Instantly Breath Spray from the NeatoShop!
This little novelty item won’t fix your relationship, but hey it’s the thought that counts! Plus at least it will leave your breath smelling minty fresh.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more hilarious Personal Care items.
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And the Facebook Users With Most Friends Award goes to … your mom. No, really, moms age 40 and older have more Facebook friends than most:
The research, based on an analysis of 2,000 Facebook users found that mothers were able to capitalise on their wide range of contacts, including friends of their children and even their parents, to collect thousands of friends.
Tammi Williams, who conducted the study, said: "One reason is because, when you get to 45 or 50 you have not only your friends, but your children’s friends, acquaintances from school and others.
"Children and teenagers tend to stick to their own age group."
The survey found that the biggest group of Facebook users is the ‘Feel-Gooders’ – people who enjoy the community spirit of Facebook and seeing what their friends are doing.
You’ve probably seen or heard how Chinese kids that get straight A’s in school, play the piano like a pro, and start prepping for med school in kindergarten. But how do they get to be so ambitious … so driven?
Well, it’s because Chinese kids have Chinese mothers. Amy Chua explains why Chinese moms are superior in scorched earth, no holds barred, extreme child-rearing techniques:
Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic
success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be "the best" students, that "academic achievement reflects successful parenting," and that if children did not excel at school then there was "a problem" and parents "were not doing their job." Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams. [...]The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage.)
Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, "You’re lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you." By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they’re not disappointed about how their kids turned out.
Amy – a professor at Yale Law School and author of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
See if you agree: Link (Photo: Erin Patrice O’brien/WSJ)
What could be the cause? Studies point to a startling potential culprit: mothers (or more specifically, what they do while pregnant).
A number of studies point to a connection between early development in the womb and male reproductive problems in later life, especially low sperm counts. For example, men whose pregnant mothers were exposed to high levels of toxic dioxins as a result of the 1976 industrial accident in Seveso, Italy have been found to have lower-than-average sperm counts. But men exposed to dioxins in adulthood showed no such effect. Another study found women who ate large amounts of beef during pregnancy, a diet rich in potentially damaging chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), had sons with relatively low sperm counts. But eating beef as an adult man shows no similar impact.
Meanwhile, studies of migrants between Sweden and Finland, showed that a man’s lifetime risk of testicular cancer tends to follow the country he was born in rather than the country where he was brought up. It was his mother’s environment when she was pregnant with him, rather than his own as a boy or as an adolescent, that seems to have largely determined a man’s risk of testicular cancer.
One of the strongest pieces of evidence in support of this idea comes from studies of people who smoke. A man who smokes typically reduces his sperm count by a modest 15 per cent or so, which is probably reversible if he quits. However, a man whose mother smoked during pregnancy has a fairly dramatic decrease in sperm counts of up to 40 per cent – which also tends to be irreversible.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by sshuggi.
To, ahem, celebrate (that’s the word!) Mother’s Day, Urlesque has a compilation of videos of mothers pranking their children.
Why? Because there’s nothing that says "I Love You" like a fake chest knife wound and scary Halloween mask. Thanks for the psychologically scarring us for life, moms! Link
Twelve-year-old Joshua Littman, who has Asperger’s syndrome, interviewed his mother, Sarah. StoryCorps turned it into their first animated video. This will get you into the mood for Mothers Day. -via Buzzfeed
Update: Here’s the original NPR story from 2006. Link
New at the NeatoShop: magical breath sprays that will let you understand your mother instantly, help you communicate effectively with your father, accept the fact that you’re aging and even (gasp) understand modern art instantly. That is all. Carry on.
Well, they wanted it. That’s the reason Jo-Jo Marsh gave for tattooing her own children (one as young as ten years old) with a home-made tattoo gun (with a guitar string as a needle, no less):
"We were making it look like it was a cross," said Jo-Jo Marsh, "so the kids could have something they could say it was."
Jo-Jo Marsh shows Eyewitness News the tattoo on her son’s hand. The mark is a cross-like symbol left by a home-made tattoo gun with a guitar string as a needle.
"We didn’t even break the skin barely," said Marsh, "they are very tiny, just through a few layers, on the top, they will fade away, that’s how minuscule this is."
Marsh and her husband, Jacob Bartels, face child cruelty charges after detectives found the same mark on six of the couple’s seven children. One of the children is just 10 years-old. [...]
Marsh defends her actions saying the kids were begging for tattoos like hers.
She told [WRCB TV] multiple times during our interview that she changed the needle each time.
Marsh believes as the children’s guardian, she should have the right to tattoo them if she chooses. "Shouldn’t I have say so over what goes on in my child’s life," said Marsh, "I have custody of my child, I’m not going to hurt my child."
Child abuse or simply a mom with a cutting edge sense of style? Link
Katie would make one great math mom!
Math Mom: If I’ve Told You N Times, I’ve Told You N+1 Times
I can practically hear my mother’s voice saying "if I told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times." Well, for this shirt, we’ve boiled the adage down to its mathematical terms.
Now buy the shirt, stand up straight and go clean your room! Link
More math and geektastic science T-shirts from the newly spruced up Neatorama Online Store (work in progress, mmkay?):
- Integral of 1/Cabin = Log Cabin
- Geometry is For Squares
- Math Puns are the First Sine of Madness
- I Love Math (in Queen’s English)
Miss Cellania has great posts (as usual) on her blog about Mother’s Day. This particular one really brightened up my day – it’s about a Q&A session with elementary school children about mothers:
Who’s the boss at your house?
1. Mom doesn’t want to be boss, but she has to because dad’s such a goof ball.
2. Mom. You can tell by room inspection. She sees the stuff under the bed.
3. I guess Mom is, but only because she has a lot more to do than dad.What does your Mom do in her spare time?
1. Mothers don’t do spare time.
2. To hear her tell it, she pays bills all day long.What would it take to make your Mom perfect?
1. On the inside she’s already perfect. Outside, I think some kind of plastic surgery.
2. Diet. You know, her hair. I’d diet, maybe blue.
Happy Mother’s Day, everybody!
Get ready for Mothers Day by getting to know how animal mothers take care of their babies.
From the jungles to the oceans, from the rainforests to the frozen poles, mothers in the wild can bear some similar resemblances to mothers in the city. They bring us into the world, nurture us, love us, teach us the skills we need to survive and protect us from harm, until we are ready to go off on our own. And with Mother’s Day just around the corner, what better way to celebrate motherhood than by looking at how the motherly instinct runs through the wild.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by smellslikepurple.
Even ancient folks expressed their appreciation for mothers -maybe not enough, but mothers have been celebrated for a long time.
While some complain that Mother’s Day is a Hallmark holiday, celebrations of motherhood can in fact be traced back to ancient times. Ancient Greeks celebrated Rhea, the mother of the gods, while ancient Romans had a holiday to celebrate Cybele, a mother goddess. The tradition of celebrating mothers in springtime can be traced back to the celebrations of the goddess Brigid, which occurred at the first milk of the ewes. This brief history traces the way embarking on motherhood moved from being women’s sole purpose, to an assumption, to a duty to produce heirs, and finally, to a decision for the woman
herself.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by smellslikepurple.
Psst, moms! Want to know the secret of having your husbands pick up some of the workload at home? Here’s the secret:
New research into the idea of "maternal gatekeeping" shows how attitudes and actions by the mother may promote or impede father involvement.
"For women who insist they have the gold standard around parenting and housework, men just tend to walk away," says Joshua Coleman, a clinical psychologist in San Francisco and Oakland. "They feel their own ideas about how the house should look or … how the children should be raised aren’t given equal share."
Kenney presented research she co-wrote at a meeting of the Population Association of America over the weekend. The study of 1,023 couples from 20 large cities in the USA found mothers were protective of their caregiving and educational engagement with the child but were less so for playtime activities that "were not considered threats to the mother’s caregiving identity," the paper says.
"Maybe he’s not more involved because mom is holding him back," Kenney says.
When Pooja Chopra was an infant, her father ordered her mother Neera to kill her. Instead, Neera left her home and husband with her two daughters and never looked back. The baby girl, who might have never seen her first birthday, won the Miss India World pageant last month.
“When my mum walked out on my dad, she said to him, ‘One day this girl will make me proud’. All my life I’ve wanted my mum to be proud of the decision that she chose me,” Pooja said last week.
Neera has been thrust into the limelight by her daughter’s success. She has been dubbed Mother India and has already been approached by one Bollywood director who wants to film her story.
Pooja Chopra’s father remarried and never supported his first two daughters. Chopra has become a symbol of the campaign to end the preference for boys over girls in India. Link -via Arbroath
