When this happens, not only do I feel sorrow for my child, but I also feel discouraged and inadequate. And yet, I know that this experience is almost a universal one among parents.

Perhaps it's a hyper-sensitive child who whines and cries over the smallest vexations. Perhaps it's a strong-willed child who fights you tooth and nail whenever you tell him to do something.

Perhaps it's that hormonal middle schooler, who has suddenly become moody, disrespectful, and ultra-critical. Or perhaps it's a child whose health issues makes her irritable and crabby.

Whatever the situation, although you know deep-down that you love this child, there are times when it can be a real challenge to be patient and loving. So what can we do?

Don't take it personally

First, let's not take our children's behavior personally. Often it will seem like a child's angry or scornful behavior is directed right at you. But the reality is that since you're the mom, your child knows you love him unconditionally.

Therefore he has no inhibitions when it comes to expressing his feelings around you. This does not mean your child should be allowed to treat you with disrespect.

We need to be consistent about commanding and demanding respect from our children. Otherwise they will treat us like rugs — things to be trodden upon without care.

However, it is good to remember that, in most cases, it is the moms who bear the brunt of their children's bad behavior. It's not just you. It's a part of motherhood.

Without losing sensitivity to the feelings of others, we need to grow thick skins, an objectivity that will protect us from the thorns our children fling at us. Continue reading

• Mary Cooney is a home-schooling mother of five who lives in Maryland.

The woman, from Limerick, has initiated proceedings against Bishop Casey, who is now 88, suffering from Alzheimer's disease and living in nursing home in County Clare.

A summons has been issued on both Bishop Casey, and the Bishop of Limerick, Dr Brendan Leahy, in his representative capacity as the current head of the diocese.

Bishop Casey was based in Limerick from 1955 to 1960, when he served at St John's Cathedral as a curate.

Records show that Bishop Leahy, on behalf of the diocese, has entered an appearance in the case but has not yet filed a defence.

In all, four plaintiffs have launched proceedings involving Limerick diocese.

In a separate instance, in 1992, the news broke that Bishop Casey, who was Bishop of Kerry, had fathered a child and that the child's mother was the bishop's third cousin, Annie Murphy.

Their affair started in 1973 and the child was born in 1974, but the bishop denied he was the father until 1992.

Bishop Casey was subsequently driven from office and was refused permission to say Mass.

He spent a long time in enforced exile in South America and later in Britain.

He later made belated efforts to patch up the relationship with his son, Peter Murphy.

In 2013, Peter Murphy broke his long silence over his father and his relationship with him.

Three years ago it was reported that Annie Murphy was living in California.

Sources

• Irish Times
• Irish Central
• Irish Central
• Image: BBC

From the ‘rise' of newest ‘female' Kardashian link we have been inundated with gender ideology and things are becoming dangerous.

As a result I have had to have conversations students in both my Religious Studies classes and Biology about gender, sex and the bits in between.

Lovingly making corrections to the ideas that have been pushed on them and now seem like normal ideas.

Corrections about Gender
Firstly, if a scientist was to unearth the remains of Jenner in 100,000 years he will be categorised as male. There is a reality that sex is binary, it is not fluid. 99.8% of the population is born either male or female, their chromosomal arrangement determines if they are male or female.

People might then say, well sex might be binary but gender is fluid, it is a construct made up of our feelings. This idea is one that is of concern especially when applied to children.

There are more and more stories of apparently wonderful parents who support their four, five, six year old in wanting to be the opposite sex. A parent deciding that their child, from the age of four will be called Daniel and not Danielle is a worry and I believe the beginnings of child abuse.

Secondly, there is a reason that individuals younger than 18 don't have voting rights, it is based on the lack of maturity, awareness and experience to make good, solid, informed decisions. Yet somehow we have parents who listen to their three year olds say I want to be a boy and think this is a good decision.

At the age of four there are many children whose basis of decision around nutrition is colour, they are the ones who won't eat anything unless it is yellow. Or shape, for the next three months parents spend time cutting food into triangles in order to get their child to eat.

Or that they want to be a fire truck when they grow up. What parents learn is that while they may need to give into an idea temporarily for a greater good, they don't make permanent life changes based on their child's current fad and start the plan to turn them into a big red engine. Continue reading

• Jane Bourke is a Catholic Secondary School teacher who specialises in Science and Religion. This article is from Restless Press.

Fr Tomas Kijowski left the Salesians in Poland in June after he admitted he had a girlfriend and he had fathered a child.

But Polish media only found out about this recently.

A Salesian spokesman said: "It is true that Fr Tomasz Kijowski left the religious community in June, although he is still formally a member.

"The process of expelling him is currently underway. The reason for this situation is that he has fathered a child."

Others who have left the Polish Church recently include Dominican Jacek Krzysztofowicz, who, in his valedictory sermon spoke about finding "true love".

Fr Kijowski met his 22-year-old partner at a planning meeting for the World Youth Day, which will be held in Krakow next July, Italian news agency Ansa reported.

Pope Francis is due to attend Poland's World Youth Day, which will bring together thousands of young Catholics from around the world.

World Youth Day organisers expect the event will attract more than 2 million people.

Earlier this year, Fr Kijowski predicted World Youth Day would also have an "activating effect" on young people in Poland.

"The young have been leaving the Church here — we need some shock, some impulse, to halt and reverse this trend," Fr Kijowski told KAI, Poland's Catholic information agency, in March.

"I wouldn't want to suggest we're working out some vision for a Christian Poland, but we want to initiate certain processes which will continue after the World Youth Day, instead of ending when the Pope flies out."

Sources

• Religion News Service
• Christian Today
• ANSA
• CNS
• Image: Christian Today

Because I had some time before we were supposed to start services, I wandered around the 300 or so folks who shivered in the cold and gathered in the space around the altar (Mass was obligatory—Casa Romero was run by a generous, but iron-fisted Spanish nun).

On the outer edges of the group, I came upon a young, thin girl surrounded by five or six older men. We spoke for a bit; she told me that she was heading out that night with these men, looking to cross through the Wild Horse Desert, a desolate place just north of Brownsville, in an effort to avoid the Border Patrol.

The men, hands stuffed into their pockets, scuffed the ground. They would not meet my eyes, and ignored my handshake.

I found the nun and told her that I was worried about the girl. The nun said to me, "You should be. Please take her to the rectory with you tonight. She is not safe here."

The girl agreed to come and spend Christmas Eve with our religious community that night. She was sixteen years old, and she was from El Salvador. Her arms were covered with scars, about which she would only say, "They burned me with cigarettes."

I gave her my room, for that night, and I took to the couch in the living room. The next morning, as I passed by my bedroom, I saw her kneeling on the floor, her scarred arms held straight out from her sides, her eyes closed, and her head upturned toward the heavens. She was back-lit by the sunlight streaming through the window.

It was Christmas Day, and I felt that God had sent me an angel disguised as skinny, scarred teenaged girl.

She stayed with our community for about two weeks, until some good immigration attorneys managed to get her a special travel permission, and then, into a center that worked with the victims of torture (The Center for Victims of Torture). Continue reading

• Source: Views From Alongside a Border (author's name not noted)
• See also: Gilberto Ramos hoped for a better life, but died alone in a desert
• Image: Fronteras

For more than 50 years now, we in the United States have been gradually reducing children's opportunities to play, and the same is true in many other countries. In his book Children at Play: An American History (2007), Howard Chudacoff refers to the first half of the 20th century as the ‘golden age' of children's free play. By about 1900, the need for child labour had declined, so children had a good deal of free time. But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began chipping away at that freedom by increasing the time that children had to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing children's freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children began to replace ‘pickup' games; adult-directed classes out of school began to replace hobbies; and parents' fears led them, ever more, to forbid children from going out to play with other kids, away from home, unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for these changes but the effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children's opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways.

Over the same decades that children's play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing. It's not just that we're seeing disorders that we overlooked before. Clinical questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for example, have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of schoolchildren in the US ever since the 1950s. Analyses of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. Over the same period, the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled, and that for children under age 15 has quadrupled.

The decline in opportunity to play has also been accompanied by a decline in empathy and a rise in narcissism, both of which have been assessed since the late 1970s with standard questionnaires given to normative samples of college students. Empathy refers to the ability and tendency to see from another person's point of view and experience what that person experiences. Narcissism refers to inflated self-regard, coupled with a lack of concern for others and an inability to connect emotionally with others. A decline of empathy and a rise in narcissism are exactly what we would expect to see in children who have little opportunity to play socially. Children can't learn these social skills and values in school, because school is an authoritarian, not a democratic setting. School fosters competition, not co-operation; and children there are not free to quit when others fail to respect their needs and wishes.

In my book, Free to Learn (2013), I document these changes, and argue that the rise in mental disorders among children is largely the result of the decline in children's freedom. If we love our children and want them to thrive, we must allow them more time and opportunity to play, not less. Yet policymakers and powerful philanthropists are continuing to push us in the opposite direction — toward more schooling, more testing, more adult direction of children, and less opportunity for free play. Continue reading

Sources

• Aeon
• Image: Mother&Child

"The crucial issues that result in child poverty need to be discussed by New Zealand's political leaders and the wider community as a matter of priority," says Archbishop David Moxon of the Anglican Church.

"Our children are our nation's precious taonga," says Archbishop John Dew of the Catholic Church. "We as adults have a collective responsibility always to strive to do our best for our children. We owe it to our children to give them a voice in this discussion and the decisions that will follow."

Churches contribute to responses to child wellbeing through their own programmes, says Presbyterian Moderator Peter Cheyne. "Both formally through Church social service agencies which are among the largest in the country, and informally through activities of parishes and groups, we in the Churches are responding to the needs of vulnerable members of our communities. We look forward to contributing our grassroots experience to a debate which should concern all New Zealanders."

Assemblies of God leader Iliafi Esera said "Our advisors will be participating in any consultative process afforded by the Commissioner for Children's paper. I am shocked by the health indicators surrounding our Pasifika children. We are thankful for the Commissioner and his initiative in providing opportunity for discussion and debate."

Source

• Presbyterian news service
• Image: Policy Projects

"If you really want to get to know someone, you don't ask what's between their legs," Storm's father, David Stocker said.

The couple, Kathy Witterick and David Stocker, have decided to raise their 4 month old child "genderless" to protect its right to choose its own sex.

Widely criticised for imposing their ideology on what is an essentially natural social process, they say they want to spare the child the pressures of social norms.

In an e-mail to the Associated Press news agency, Witterick, a stay-at-home mother, said a four-month-old infant was still learning to recognise him or herself, and said it was inappropriate to impose a gender identity on the child.

Witterick and Stocker have also been criticised for the way they're allowing their two sons Jazz, five, and Kio, two to choose their own clothing and hairstyles, even if it means wearing girls' clothes.

The boys are "almost exclusively assumed to be girls," Mr Stocker told the Toronto Star.

Not even the grandparents know Storm's gender and the Toronto Star reports they have grown weary of explaining the situation, but are supportive

The couple told friends their refusal to answer such questions was "a tribute to freedom in place of limitation" and a "stand-up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime".

"What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It's obnoxious."

Sources

• NZ Herald
• Toronto Star
• BBC