A couple of years ago we signed the girls up for karate lessons. Friends of ours had enrolled their son in Tae Kwon Do classes specifically so he would be able to defend himself against a physical threat which they believed would more than likely present itself at some point in his life. I remember thinking that he’d have to be very unlucky to get attacked, and that they were perhaps being a little paranoid. And yet you hear these stories of young men getting themselves into fights by walking past the wrong nightclub at the wrong time and getting in the way of the wrong guy coming out of the club, and you can understand why they might want their son to be able to fend off that kind of attention. Still, he’s only a kid, surely that was years away?

We signed our two girls up for karate because we would like them to be able to defend themselves against an attack, but mostly because we wanted them to have the confidence that comes from knowing you could defend yourself. I don’t know if it’s an urban myth, but there was a young girl, about 11 years old, who was grabbed from behind by a man who then tried to get her into the back of his car. It happened in broad daylight at the local shopping centre. The girl had been practicing Tae Kwon Do since she was about five years old. Apparently, that’s long enough to learn how to escape a man’s clutches, spin around, and kick him square in the face and render him unconscious. Apparently he started to come round as the police were handcuffing him.

Great story.

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A growing number of parents are selecting their children’s name according to whether their .com domain name is available. The trend is acquiring your child’s name (or names which are under consideration), even before the baby is actually conceived:

Besides leaving the hospital with a birth certificate and a clean bill of health, baby Mila Belle Howells got something she won’t likely use herself for several years: her very own Internet domain name.

Likewise newborn Bennett Pankow joined his four older siblings in getting his own Internet moniker. In fact, before naming his child, Mark Pankow checked to make sure “BennettPankow.com” hadn’t already been claimed.

“One of the criteria was, if we liked the name, the domain had to be available,” Pankow said. It was, and Pankow quickly grabbed Bennett’s online identity.

What is the purpose of snagging your child’s domain name?

We did it for novelty reasons and to make sure nobody used the domain to cyber-bully our children, as has been done to other kids in this age of the internet. Also, in the unlikely event that our boys become a household name, already having their own URL will be handy, indeed.

So, if you haven’t bought your kids name, you might strongly consider it — it’s only $9 a year through a service like Go Daddy (even cheaper if you buy multiple years) — and snag it before someone else does.

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