Chapter 5

Parenting is definitely one of the most stressful times in a persons life. You want to be perfect, and you would probably overload yourself with a lot of parenting books. I believe that the parenting books would help a lot during the trial and error process of parenting by helping to minimize the mistakes that a first-time parent would have by gaining all the insight from other parents. There are so many different types of parenting styles, but I know that any one style will not be perfect, because each child is different and needs a mix of styles. I thought that it was interesting how crying 15-30 min a day might be the babies exercise as recommended by one of the styles. This sounds right, because it will involve a lot of movement from the child to cry and when a baby isn't able to crawl yet, this is one of there more physical activities of the day. I love how the author shows how people are scared of a very unlikely terrorist attack, cause its out of our control compared to something that is, like heart attacks based on what we eat. This has a lot of truth in it, the dread factor makes sense as well. We should be worrying about domestic issues, not fight a nonexistent enemy and occupy foreign nations for a financial profit. "Fear is a potent short term play," sums up what Bush used as an excuse to start the Afghanistan and Iraq wars as a drastic action used in his short term thought to satisfy the fear that American citizens had after the horrible event of 9/11. Then the author goes into the idea that good neighborhoods don’t matter? I don’t agree with that, I think peers have a lot of influence on a persons life choices while they're growing up and in a vulnerable stage in life. The author based this on his research that showed how adopted kids are associated with low test scores, suggesting that it matters more how smart the biological parents are compared to the adopted ones. I don't believe that these are solid findings, I think that good parents can lead a kid towards the right direction, but peers of the child can also steer him/her away from the right path. Then spanking was discussed and his research showed that kids who get spanked “doesn’t matter” but who's going to admit spanking there kids to a government worker, so that theory is worthless. I think that spanking a kid is necessary in a kids life during the right situations, because you have to let the kid understand what punishment is when they make the wrong decision, this has been true for humans ever since we were created. I remember growing up and seeing how kids whose parents didn't spank them, were a lot more careless and a lot more spoiled while growing up, because they couldn't fully grasp what consequences were. A person can learn what consequences are if there are not spanked, but it will take them a lot longer. I thought that it was interesting that kids don’t start school in Finland till age 7, but they have one of the best test scores. But this also has to do with there culture, I don't think that this could work in American society for example. Kids learn Finnish from American tv shows with Finnish subtitles was an interesting fact as well.