In This Weather, Even the Melons Are in Peril

HOPE, Ark. — Hot weather is usually great for watermelons, but this is getting ridiculous.

On Saturday, temperatures in the area hit 95.

Accepting That Good Parents May Plant Bad Seeds

“I don’t know what I’ve done wrong,” the patient told me.

She was an intelligent and articulate woman in her early 40s who came to see me for depression and anxiety. In discussing the stresses she faced, it was clear that her teenage son had been front and center for many years.

When he was growing up, she explained, he fought frequently with other children, had few close friends, and had a reputation for being mean. She always hoped he would change, but now that he was almost 17, she had a sinking feeling.

I asked her what she meant by mean. “I hate to admit it, but he is unkind and unsympathetic to people,” she said, as I recall. He was rude and defiant at home, and often verbally abusive to family members.

Along the way, she had him evaluated by many child psychiatrists, with several extensive neuropsychological tests. The results were always the same: he tested in the intellectually superior range, with no evidence of any learning disability or mental illness. Naturally, she wondered if she and her husband were somehow remiss as parents.

Here, it seems, they did not fare as well as their son under psychiatric scrutiny. One therapist noted that they were not entirely consistent around their son, especially when it came to discipline; she was generally more permissive than her husband. Another therapist suggested that the father was not around enough and hinted that he was not a strong role model for his son.

But there was one small problem with these explanations: this supposedly suboptimal couple had managed to raise two other well-adjusted and perfectly nice boys. How could they have pulled that off if they were such bad parents?

To be sure, they had a fundamentally different relationship with their difficult child. My patient would be the first to admit that she was often angry with him, something she rarely experienced with his brothers.

But that left open a fundamental question: If the young man did not suffer from any demonstrable psychiatric disorder, just what was his problem?

My answer may sound heretical, coming from a psychiatrist. After all, our bent is to see misbehavior as psychopathology that needs treatment; there is no such thing as a bad person, just a sick one.

But maybe this young man was just not a nice person.

For years, mental health professionals were trained to see children as mere products of their environment who were intrinsically good until influenced otherwise; where there is chronic bad behavior, there must be a bad parent behind it.

But while I do not mean to let bad parents off the hook — sadly, there are all too many of them, from malignant to merely apathetic — the fact remains that perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children.

When I say “toxic,” I don’t mean psychopathic — those children who blossom into petty criminals, killers and everything in between. Much has been written about psychopaths in the scientific literature, including their frequent histories of childhood abuse, their early penchant for violating rules and their cruelty toward peers and animals. There are even some interesting studies suggesting that such antisocial behavior can be modified with parental coaching.

But there is little, if anything, in peer-reviewed journals about the paradox of good parents with toxic children.

Another patient told me about his son, now 35, who despite his many advantages was short-tempered and rude to his parents — refusing to return their phone calls and e-mail, even when his mother was gravely ill.

“We have racked our brains trying to figure why our son treats us this way,” he told me. “We don’t know what we did to deserve this.”

Apparently very little, as far as I could tell.

We marvel at the resilient child who survives the most toxic parents and home environment and goes on to a life of success. Yet the converse — the notion that some children might be the bad seeds of more or less decent parents — is hard to take.

It goes against the grain not just because it seems like such a grim and pessimistic judgment, but because it violates a prevailing social belief that people have a nearly limitless potential for change and self-improvement. After all, we are the culture of Baby Einstein, the video product that promised — and spectacularly failed — to make geniuses of all our infants.

Not everyone is going to turn out to be brilliant — any more than everyone will turn out nice and loving. And that is not necessarily because of parental failure or an impoverished environment. It is because everyday character traits, like all human behavior, have hard-wired and genetic components that cannot be molded entirely by the best environment, let alone the best psychotherapists.

“The central pitch of any child psychiatrist now is that the illness is often in the child and that the family responses may aggravate the scene but not wholly create it,” said my colleague Dr. Theodore Shapiro, a child psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical College. “The era of ‘there are no bad children, only bad parents’ is gone.”

I recall one patient who told me that she had given up trying to have a relationship with her 24-year-old daughter, whose relentless criticism she could no longer bear. “I still love and miss her,” she said sadly. “But I really don’t like her.”

For better or worse, parents have limited power to influence their children. That is why they should not be so fast to take all the blame — or credit — for everything that their children become.

Dr. Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan.

President Obama in Kabul

President Obama’s visit to Afghanistan on Sunday was a long overdue, and desperately needed, attempt to persuade President Hamid Karzai to clean up his act.

American officials have repeatedly warned Mr. Karzai that unless he truly commits to eradicating corruption (including among his own family members), improving governance and institutionalizing the rule of law, there is no chance of defeating the Taliban. Mr. Karzai has repeatedly shrugged off those warnings.

We hope that hearing it directly from the American president will finally make the difference. There is certainly no more time to waste.

Mr. Karzai has a long history of telling the international community what it wants to hear — while he and his aides continue to do whatever they choose.

The most outrageous example was the brazen attempt by Mr. Karzai’s loyalists to steal last year’s presidential election. After Washington — belatedly — cried foul, Mr. Karzai seemed inclined to mend his ways. His inaugural speech in November resonated with high-minded purpose, with promises to end the “culture of impunity.” But as Gen. James Jones, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, said en route to Kabul, the administration wanted Mr. Karzai to “understand that in his second term, there are certain things that have not been paid attention to, almost since Day 1.”

Mr. Karzai has strengthened the government’s anticorruption commission, and his attorney general is pressing forward on some cases involving former government figures. Still, corruption remains rife, including in Kandahar, where American and NATO forces are about to begin a major operation to rout the Taliban.

Mr. Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is the main power broker in Kandahar and reportedly has strong ties to the opium trade. If he is truly committed to rooting out corruption, President Karzai can start by pushing his brother to step aside as leader of the Kandahar provincial council.

He must also cut ties with many other corrupt officials and warlords and ensure that war criminals and human rights abusers are held accountable. His recent decision to sign a law giving amnesty to some of the worst offenders is especially worrying.

The United States and others rightly cried foul — the administration even canceled Mr. Karzai’s planned White House visit — after the Afghan president issued a decree that would allow him to appoint all of the members of the election watchdog commission that exposed the fraud in last year’s election. Mr. Karzai should reverse that decree and return to the previous and far more credible formula under which the United Nations chose three of the five members.

Mr. Obama made the right decision to send another 30,000 troops to help drive the Taliban out of important strongholds. But there is no way to hold those cities and towns without an effective Afghan government (at both the federal and local level) to take over. And after eight years of fighting, more than 1,000 American lives lost and more than $200 billion from American taxpayers spent, Mr. Karzai’s failure to build a credible, honest and even minimally effective government remains the Taliban’s No. 1 recruiting tool.

Mr. Karzai’s failure to devote maximum effort to fix his government is self-destructive. So is his recent cozying up to Iran’s repressive government — a clear effort to spite his American critics. We hope Mr. Obama told Mr. Karzai all of that in no uncertain terms. He will have to keep telling Mr. Karzai in the months ahead.

Source: New York Times

Pope Offers Apology, Not Penalty, for Sex Abuse Scandal

Faced with a church sexual abuse scandal spreading across Europe, Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday apologized directly to victims and their families in Ireland, expressing “shame and remorse” for what he called “sinful and criminal” acts committed by clergy.

But the pope did not require that church leaders be disciplined for past mistakes as some victims were hoping; nor did he clarify what critics see as contradictory Vatican rules they fear allow abuse to continue unpunished.

“You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry,” the pope said in a long-awaited, eight-page pastoral letter to Irish Catholics. “Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated.”

The strong letter was written in language at once passionate, personal and sweeping. And the pope did take the relatively rare step of ordering a special apostolic delegation to be sent to unspecified dioceses in Ireland to investigate. But even that action raised questions among critics who wondered what the investigators might unearth beyond what was found in two wide-ranging and scathing Irish government reports released last year. One of those reports said the church and the police in Ireland had systematically colluded in covering up decades of sexual abuse by priests in Dublin.

The pope has apologized before for sexual abuse scandals, most notably when meeting with victims in the United States.

The letter was especially anticipated after weeks of damaging reports that brought the scandals close not only to the leader of Ireland’s church, but to the pope himself.

The most recent revelation came last week when a psychiatrist who treated a priest decades ago in an archdiocese run by the future pope in Germany said he repeatedly warned that the accused priest should never work with children again. The priest was reassigned to pastoral work, but another church leader had taken responsibility for that decision.

The pope did not address that case in his letter, nor did he call for Cardinal Sean Brady, the leader of the Irish church, to resign. Cardinal Brady said last week that he would step down if the pope asked, after revelations that he took part in an investigation in 1975 in which two children were forced to sign secrecy oaths.

The letter also remained tightly focused on Ireland to the dismay of many victims’ groups around the world even as the crisis has widened among Catholics in Austria, the Netherlands and Germany.

In the letter, Benedict criticized bishops for “grave errors of judgment and failures of leadership.”

“There is still no full acknowledgment of the systematic institutional cover-up which is not restricted only to Ireland,” said Colm O’Gorman, the co-founder of a victims’ group called One in Four and the leader of Amnesty International in Ireland.

“I find that deceitful because we know that this is a global and systemic problem in the global church,” said Mr. O’Gorman, who said he was sexually abused by a priest as a teenager in Ireland in the early ‘80s. “It’s all about protecting the institution and, above all, its wealth,” he added.

For many Catholics, the letter offered a critical test of whether the pope can stem a widening crisis that has shaken the credibility and authority of the Roman Catholic Church in other parts of the world. Even as Benedict urged local clergy to cooperate with civil justice authorities, it has also put to the test a Vatican culture of protecting its own even in the face of crimes against civil and canon law.

Indeed, while many Irish Catholics were hoping for concrete measures and actions in the wake of the government reports, instead, Benedict offered a prescription for how to renew their faith, urging bishops to go on a spiritual retreat and dioceses to set aside special chapels where Catholics could pray for “healing and renewal.”

Terrence McKiernan, founder and president of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks Church records on abuse cases, said the pope’s letter revealed “the same Vatican reflexes.”

“There’s a strong tendency to approach this as a problem of faith, when it is a problem of church management and a lack of accountability,” Mr. McKiernan said.

The pope laid blame firmly with local Catholic leaders. “I can only share in the dismay and the sense of betrayal that so many of you have experienced on learning of these sinful and criminal acts and the way church authorities in Ireland dealt with them,” he said.

In a news conference on Saturday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said that the document was intended as a pastoral letter, not a document outlining “administrative or juridical measures.”

Indeed, Benedict spoke directly to the pain of victims. “Many of you found that, when you were courageous enough to speak of what happened to you, no one would listen,” the pope wrote.

“It is understandable that you find it hard to forgive or be reconciled with the Church,” he wrote.

Fonte: New York Times

How the 'new feminism' went wrong

From pole-dancing lessons to baking cupcakes, modern woman thinks she can do it all. Germaine Greer's free-thinking female eunuch has been replaced by the desperately self-inventing 'Madonna', argues Charlotte Raven, who looks back in shame at the moment in the 1990s when her generation turned its back on feminism.

Madonna on tour in 1990 Photograph: SANDY HILL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Thanks to a string of celebrity sex stories, the world according to the tabloids has recently been – even more than usual – a sorry place for feminism. But among the countless snaps – of bikini-clad betrayed wives, distressed mistresses and pneumatic "hostesses" – perhaps the most disturbing was that of Katie Price's two-year-old daughter, Princess, in heavy makeup, complete with false eyelashes. Millions have seen it. The "debate" about it has been staged on all media platforms: on one TV talk show, a woman said she couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Her daughter was a "girly girl", like Princess. She "adored" dressing up and posing in front of cameras. It would be wrong to stop her, wouldn't it?

Katie Price's currency is as high today as when she published her million-selling autobiography in 2004. She has generated much outrage in the last few years, but it is nothing compared with her influence. Her narcissism no longer seems so aberrant. Women's belief in specialness and a concomitant sense of entitlement has inflated in line with Price's most famous assets.

How has it come to this? Feminists blame the sexists, Martin Amis et al, which is easy but unfair. In reality, we can't blame anyone but ourselves. While Price has been working tirelessly at getting her message across, the thinking women – the writers and journalists – who should have been putting the counter case have been indulging in a variety of "guilty pleasures" – from ogling young men (Germaine Greer in The Boy) to drooling over frocks (Linda Grant in The Thoughtful Dresser). Feminists have become increasingly frivolous, and as such are no match for Price, who is serious about her mission to win over all women to "Team Narcissist".

Two new exposés of the dehumanising effect of the Price worldview feel like too little too late. The fantasy world described in Natasha Walter's Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, where appearances are everything, has already come to pass. Today's young women are right to think they will be judged on how they seem, rather than who they are. In this context, Kat Banyard's promise to tell "the truth about women and men" in her new book The Equality Illusion is the promise of a horse-drawn plough in the machine age. The truth is no longer enough; she needs a promotional gimmick.

In a recent study of 1,000 British girls (admittedly by a mobile entertainment company), quoted in Walter's book, 60% said glamour modelling was their preferred career. A quarter said they would consider becoming lap dancers. By all measures, the value map has shifted in Price's favour.

Fonte: Guardian.co.uk