Gina Carroll

Denise Abbott's decision to publicly discipline her daughter on Facebook sets a precedent to be public about their issues. Technically, her 13-year-old Ava set this precedent when she first disrespected her mother online, but Denise followed suit. If the experts who say that modeling proper behavior is the best way to teach children life skills, like discretion and respect, then arguably Abbott's choice of discipline may have inadvertently reinforced her daughter's behavior instead of curbed it. Kind of like spanking a child to punish him for hitting, or screaming at a child for throwing a tantrum.  Read more >

School lunches are the bane of my existence. My middle schooler and I are always in a constant tug of war over whether or not he should buy lunch at school (ick, I say) or make his own at home (yuck, he says). And once I have wrangled him into making his lunch at home, we argue about what is acceptable for packing. Needless to say, I end up with the task of making the lunch because doing the right thing nutritionally for lunch every day is hard.   Read more >

A quick scan of the star-studded 2011 college commencement key-note speaker line-up discloses an interesting trend. Seems like everybody wants to talk about failure. Usually commencement speeches are all positivity and light. They tend to be about how new graduates have the world in their hands; how anything is possible; how they, the freshly educated and trialed-by-fire scholars, must move on to be the new world leaders. So why, in Heaven's name, would so many of the aged and sage graduation key-noters dwell on things gone wrong? How is it that suddenly failure is a good thing?  Read more >

When you have a famous friend, it feels weird and tricky to write about her. You want to tell the world how remarkable she is, but you want to stay away from disclosing your confidences. You don’t want to venture anywhere near that area occupied by tabloid snitches and 5-minutes-of-famers who trade their secrets at the expense of loved ones. No auditioning for reality show material here… just a friend who wants the world to know how much her friend totally rocks.  Read more >

Remember Scared Straight!, the original 1978 documentary directed by Arnold Shapiro and narrated by Peter Falk? This documentary was a groundbreaking television special about a group of young and cocky juvenile law offenders who, as part of a juvenile rehabilitation program, got to come face-to-face with hardened criminals who told them about the harsh realities of prison life … in the most graphic of terms. Inmates in a New Jersey jail, some lifers, didn’t just describe their prison lives for the youngsters. They also screamed at, threatened, berated and belittled them, all in an effort to scare them straight.  Read more >