Teen kicked out of class for cheating on homework, father sues. Photo via sxc photo.

Recently, a high school student in Redwood City, California was caught cheating on a homework assignment in one of his sophomore classes. The behavior lead to a disciplinary action his father believes could cost him his future. Along with three other students the unidentified teen was demoted and placed in a lower level English class after it was determined that he and four other students shared their homework and copied off each other.

Now the teen’s father is suing the Sequoia Union High School District, claiming the school district violated his son’s due process. Furthermore, the father contends that the move will severely encumber his son’s ability to get into an Ivy League School. Without the honors course, his son will be unable to obtain his International Baccalaureate, something most highly competitive colleges hold in the highest regard.

The lawsuit has caused many in the community of Redwood City to become angry and resentful. According to the Oakland Tribune, the father has been sent hate-mail and been villanized on local radio programs. Many see his lawsuit as a reason why kids lack any kind of accountability or responsibility and why the values of our country are becoming, what they claim to be, corrupt. They also think it’s a waste of valuable resources as the school district has to pour money into defending the lawsuit.

One parent wrote the Mercury News and said this of her experience as the mother of a son who cheated, “His wonderful teacher called me a couple of days later to discuss the situation, clearly very uncomfortable and painful for him. My reply was a very genuine, ‘THANK YOU.”

She went onto say that her son is forced to tell every college to which he applies, that he cheated in school and was denied participation in that class the next semester.

Many parents echoed those sentiments, saying that kids need to learn these valuable lessons and having a father sue for not bowing down to the needs of his son was trading ethics for entitlement. They see it as a vile and indulgent.

Many schools in California have enacted a zero policy for cheating. If a student is caught cheating, they automatically fail the entire class and are forced to disclose their cheating. It gives a whole new meaning to, “this will go on your permanent record”. While some states are following suit, some school districts in Canada are saying the zero cheating policy may be too harsh and have chosen to dial back their punishments.

While cheating is a big problem, I can’t help but feel for these kids who are pushed by unrealistic expectations from their parents and the pressure of having to attend the best schools possible.

For one stupid mistake as a kid, I don’t see how it’s fair to have your whole life (well, your whole educational future) completely transformed and possibly ruined. I understand the spirit of having a zero tolerance for cheating, who in their right mind would condone cheating, right? But surely there must be another way to punish the student without having to tell colleges that you have cheated. Kids are dumb and they do dumb things.

I mean, who in their life hasn’t cheated on something?

Who hasn’t done something they regret in high school.

I don’t know what the answer is. Perhaps a tiered punishment system whereby the first offense is community/district service for three months or something. I just think that taking a kid out of a class for cheating is a little drastic and failing him/her for the entire semester takes away any motivation for that kid to try for the rest of the term. There just has to be a better way.

Do you agree?

The latest round of the current stay-at-home-mom vs. working mother debate has been refueled. The latest mom choice scrutiny can be attributed to Hilary Rosen, a Democratic political analyst at CNN. Last week, Rosen said that Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann Romney, has “never worked a day in her life.”

The comment left pundits on the right side of the aisle reeling and some on the left side a little embarrassed. Fox News has been beating the drum of the under-appreciated and persecuted stay-at-home-moms as a way to sway the public towards their ideological divide, claiming the comment was hurtful, insulting and elitist.

Ann Romney, who raised five children, battled cancer and Multiple Sclerosis, came out in the spirit of her husband’s rival by following the mantra that one never lets a serious crisis go to waste, responded via Twitter, “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work.”

Rosen later apologized, but the political firestorm ensued.

To me, the debate is silly. Dare I say I agree with Bill Maher on the subject and agree that the outrage is completely manufactured.

I have done both. I stayed home with my kids through their infancies, but longed to go back to work. For me, I didn’t particularly enjoy staying home with my kids. For me, it was rife with enslavement and drudgery. I could only stack blocks for so many hours before I wanted to put a skewer in my ear and out the other end. I found it boring, tedious and under-stimulating.

It’s not to say that I didn’t love witnessing their first steps and feeding them and holding them. But something was missing from my soul as I wasted away in solitude, watching Caillou and pacing with a crying baby, trying to find what it is that he wanted. I felt like my brain was slowly withering.

There are pluses and minuses to both choices, although some choices are more forced than others, influenced by a family’s dynamic, education level, career choice and financial situation.

To me, staying home with children is mostly considered a privilege. And if you love it and you’re good at it, then a family can reap the rewards and benefits from having a parent around 24/7. And make no mistake, it is hard work. As stay at home moms like to point out, they never get a break.

After I went back to work, I used to joke that I went to work to rest.

But working outside the home presents another unique set of challenges and physical exertion that neither side has a monopoly on. Surprisingly, I find that many stay-at-home-moms suffer from self confidence issues and need working moms to validate their choice when it shouldn’t be that way. A homemaker doesn’t need any outside validation. Anybody who doesn’t think that staying home with young children is back-breaking work needs to get their head examined, but on the other side of the debate, anybody who doesn’t think that a working mom has her work cut out for her and works equally as hard, also needs to get their head examined.

When you work outside the home, not only are you dealing with pressures from bosses and companies to make things happen, but your motherhood responsibility doesn’t simply go away. Your responsibilities double. Not only do you have to get up at the butt crack of dawn,  put on makeup and uncomfortable clothing, but you have to put out fires in the workplace all day and come home to a host of house management responsibilities — cooking, cleaning, helping with homework, going to sports games and parent/teacher conferences. If you have a helpful husband, as I do, this makes it much easier, but it’s still overly demanding.

Staying at home has a lot of fringe benefits. You can wear what you want, set your own schedule and go to the Zoo on Tuesday if you want and you don’t need an advanced degree to do it! I don’t say that as a criticism, but some women don’t want to go to college and decide they want to be CEO of their households instead. I’d compare it more like a work at home job. Most people would see that as a rare opportunity, while others feel more productive in a structured office environment.

I guess the difficulty level is largely based on your unique situation and your support structure.

So, do I feel sorry for Ann Romney who likely had a lot of help during her homemaker years? I would imagine, hired help. No, I don’t.

Do I feel sorry for the working mom who has quality child-care and a supportive husband? Not so much.

Do I feel sorry for the single mom who has to work full time and take care of kids? Yes. Sorry moms, if it’s a contest, she wins.

What if you were faced with having to choose who you would save? Photo via Arjun Kartha.

In 2005, Ayelet Waldman, wife of fellow author Michael Chabon, wrote an essay that went viral and received scathing vitriol when the mother of four declared that she felt her relationship with her husband was more than the relationship with her own children, adding that she felt she could move on after the death of her child, but would be completely devastated over the loss of her husband.

“He, and I, are the core of what he cherishes . . . the children are satellites, beloved but tangential,” Waldman wrote.

It was the main topic of conversation between chatty parents at the playground after Waldman appeared on Oprah to defend her stance that her husband came first, her children, second.

It reminded me of that old psychological question, “If your family was in a life raft, and you could only save one, who would you choose?”

It’s a really disturbing question to ask. Makes you want to put your fingers in your ear and sing, “La, la, la, la, la, la, la.” It sends shivers up your spine. For me, dying together in a plane crash would be better than having to choose the value order of my family’s lives.

Recently, a father got in hot water after his kids were left in the car alone.  Gage Eason left his 6-month-old son and 18-month-old daughter in their minivan while he went into a gun store to browse some firearms. Someone saw the kids and called police , who then called the man’s wife. The wife, Hailie Eason, 21, is also  pregnant with the couple’s third child on top of having to deal with a douche bag of a husband.

The father admits he screwed up. He claims he simply made a bone-headed mistake and lost track of time, saying, “I love my kids and there’s nothing more important than my kids. People make mistakes every day.”

Meanwhile, the children were taken from the couple. CPS came to the house and took custody of the kids.

So Ms. Eason said this about her husband, “Yeah, I’m mad at him. Why wouldn’t I be? My kids have been ripped from me.”

As I read the story, I wondered how the wife could allow her children to go into foster care, essentially choosing her husband over her children.

(And because I have my child services degree from Dog: The Bounty Hunter, I know that if you kick the person out of your home who has access to the children CPS is trying to protect, you can keep your children. So, Hailie Eason could have told her husband to sleep on his friends couch until this all got worked out and kept her children with her, but she didn’t.)

Thankfully, I’m not married to someone who would leave young children in the car for an hour. Maybe 3 minutes, but not an hour.

But if he did get busted by police in those rare 3 minutes and they threatened to take our kids away, his ass would be on some Facebook acquaintance’s couch before I could say, “Fix this!”

Seriously, what is with these women?

Chocolate milk the newest casualty of the war on obesity.

Never before in modern history has the food police wielded so much power and control over what we eat, how we eat and when we eat. It’s bad enough that childrens nutrition issues have plagued the ‘mommy wars’ over the last few decades, foisting superiority and self righteousness upon those poor peasants who buy peas, both fresh and frozen, based on what’s more readily available and economical rather than what their neighbors are gonna think.

Out of all the noble causes out there, First Lady Michell Obama has chosen government meddling in the institution which government can exchange freedom of choice with sanctioned government meal allotments. In effort to fight childhood obesity, Ms. Obama has stepped up and made her position very clear — Parents, you are not smart enough, savvy enough or sophisticated enough to make food choices for your kids, so let the government step in and save you from yourself.

School lunches around the country have been given the ultimatum. Comply with new government rules on nutrition (or as Ms. Obama and the USDA call their “wellness policy”) or be sentenced to death. Okay, not sentenced to death, that’s comical hyperbole to make a point, but be punished by way of fines or federal funding withholdings.

A few months back, a story of a preschool girl in North Carolina surfaced whose lunch was taken away by a government agent doing a quality check at a school, was confiscated because she had dared to bring a turkey sandwich, apple juice, a banana and chips in her lunch. The story  made national headlines. The meal was replaced by a government sanctioned meal of chicken nuggets and a slew of cafeteria vegetables and fruits. The 4-year-old reportedly ate a few of the soggy nuggets and called it a day. Who could blame her?

Now it appears the next item on the chopping block is…chocolate milk. Actually, all flavored milk, including strawberry milk. Schools are banning flavored milk all over the country. Why? Because an 8 oz. carton of flavored milk contains about 4 teaspoons of added sugar. The result? Hysteria!

Problem is, of most schools who have nixed flavored milk, milk consumption has dropped as much as 70%. If students don’t drink milk, they fail to meet the USDA vitamin D requirements. (Guess they didn’t see that coming.) So now many schools are circling back around and once again offering low fat versions of flavored milk after milk sales and dairy consumption went flat, while other schools still insist on trying out the ban, because we all know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, right?

Meanwhile, school principals report all over the country that much of the newly regulated school lunches are being thrown in the garbage, creating waste and leaving children once again, undernourished. If kids aren’t eating the stuff and they go home and eat a bunch of cupcakes because they’re starving and that’s the only thing in the house, how are they better off?

Furthermore, aren’t people at least slightly concerned over the governments interference over how we manage our children’s well being? Don’t you find the whole thing slightly reminiscent of the 1951 propaganda film, Good Eating Habits?

I’m not sure why we don’t just focus on food that tastes good prepared by real chefs. Keep the chocolate milk and improve the quality of the food. Giving children the option of soggy nuggets or tofu hotdogs is not the answer. Giving them a respectable choice of well thought out, freshly prepared, made from scratch food items seems like the more logical approach. But who am I? I’m just a parent.

Enough with the corny mom-isms already! Photo via freedigitalphotos.net

Okay, so not the world’s most original post — since I’ve never written a post like it before, preferring instead to bitch about it to my husband whose typical response is, “Oh, I know!” I’m goin’ for it.

So, here it is. The top seven most annoying phrases that silly moms say which I can only hope die a slow, agonizing and painful death…

1) “We’re pregnant!”

This is so obnoxious and stupid. I actually feel sorry for any man willing to emasculate himself to such a point where he lets this slide.

2) “Baby bump”

The ONLY reason it works in Hollywood is because it’s full of shallow, mindless, incurious bitches. It’s almost like a marketing term to describe something that really isn’t all that esthetically pleasing in order to sell it as something that is. Lest I be called a pregnancy curmudgeon, I do think some pregnant women look cute, but it’s a rarity. Most just look pregnant.

3) “Create a memory”

Ack. I hate this phrase. Memories are something that happens to you, it’s not something that can be planned. Memories are incidents recorded by way of accidents. Trying to ‘create a memory’ is unnatural, blasphemous and meaningless. It’s only significant if a memory just happens without a script or expectations.

4) “Special bonding time”

As if bonding were something that comes on an iPhone app. Remember when things were simple and “special bonding time” simply meant you spent some time with your kids? It was just something that you did, not something you wrote on the calendar. Now it has to come with perfume oils, rose petals and mood lighting and a wall post on Facebook so all of your “friends” can reinforce your status that you engaged in “special bonding time” (before they secretly call you an annoying bitch behind your back).

5) “Tiger Mom”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The mother dictator bit. BORING! Over-achievers have always had kids and their kids have always been one bullet shy of going postal in Silicon Valley. This is rehashed news and something that every parent thinks they need to emulate on a lesser, more manageable level as they make a competitive sport out of appointments, music lessons, sports, academics and spelling bees. We need a ‘Koala Mom’. (Now that would be newsworthy.) Koalas sleep approximately 22 – 23 hours a day.

6) “Spirited child”

Just another PC word in a PC world. Spirited children are high strung, hyper, impulsive and typically all around bratty. When did bratty become the light bending around an object? Kids are freaky little 8-balls of energy. They’ll grow out of it. Nothing new here.

7) “Num nums”

Okay, by far the most God-awful, skin crawling, eye rolling, nails-on-a-chalkboard, hemorrhoid inducing, ear drum exploding description of a nipple and areola that momtards have ever spoken!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (And not that I’m comparing the (#7 word) to sex, but it reminds of moms that call their vaginas ‘muffin cracks of love’ or their partner’s penis, their ‘giggle stick’.)

It’s REALLY DUMB. Please stop using these mom-isms. As Sister Mary Elephant would say, “Shhhhuuuut UP!……Thank. You.”

Do you have any annoying mom-isms you’d like to add? I’m sure I’ve forgotten a gaggle or a slew.