Whitney’s Protective ‘Baby Girl’

Whitney’s Protective ‘Baby Girl’ - As close friends and family begin to absorb the news of the death of Whitney Houston, many are taking time to reflect on the last few years of a career and life they had a chance to share with the superstar—and its abrupt end.

While Houston had recently stepped away from the spotlight she dominated for so many years, her longtime hairstylist and good friend Ellin LaVar says the star remained firmly focused on two important goals in her life—keeping her marriage to Bobby Brown together (before the divorce), and bonding more with her daughter, Bobbi Kristina, who is now 19.

Close friends and family say she had been so blindly committed to her marriage to the New Edition singer that she left the familiar, comfortable surroundings of her native New Jersey to move to Atlanta, where most of Brown’s extended family lived. The two divorced in 2007.

“Her thought was Bobby had lived in New Jersey for all those years for her and now she would move for him,” says LaVar. “She believed her marriage was for a lifetime and she was going to do what it took to keep it together.”

LaVar, who began her friendship with Houston shortly after the singer’s self-titled debut album was released, in 1985, says that major move for love’s sake would ultimately prove to be a decision Houston deeply regretted.

“We were like sisters for years. We grew up together in this business and I was there for everything in her life. I told her she was pregnant before she knew it because her hair texture changed,” remembers Lavar, who is Bobbi Kristina’s godmother. “But when she moved to Atlanta, so much changed for her. People and employees kept her away from me and her family. The people who looked after her and really cared about her couldn’t get to her anymore.”

LaVar says that during one of their last phone conversations, several months ago, Houston expressed a desire to move back to her hometown so she could be close to her mother, friends, and other family members once again.

“I think she knew she needed our support to get better,” says LaVar. “People don’t care about you in this business and she knew that. I watched her struggle so long with her addiction. We cried together about it many times, and I told her I didn’t understand why this was happening because she was such a good and smart girl. I just wanted to be there for her and not watch this happen from afar.”

Still, friends and family admit they do know in part why Houston so was unable to fight the lure of substance abuse that haunted her for most of her career. Pressure to perform and succeed at all times. “She had so much on her early on,” says LaVar. “She took care of so many people in her family, his family (Bobby), and the people who worked for her. That was a lot to handle and think about. She was so very young when she started and became so big. We learned the movie industry on a major film likeThe Bodyguard. We had no idea what we were doing, and this was a huge deal. But we had to learn it, and we did. She brought so many people along for her ride. That’s a heavy burden on anyone, and it took its toll on her.”

LaVar and others point to the reality show that featured Houston and Brown as a tragic turning point in Houston’s already turmoil-filled life.

Being Bobby Brown ran on the Bravo network for one season, in 2005, and showed a chaotic and mostly dysfunctional relationship between the two singers. It also portrayed Houston as a foul-mouthed, angry, and confrontational woman with countless unhealthy vices, including chain-smoking.

“I remember Bobby Brown calling me and saying, ‘You and Clive [Davis] and everyone has to help me get Whitney to do this show,” says Clarence Avant, who represented Brown for a short period and is also the former head of Motown Records.” He said, ‘They won’t give me the show without her.’ She did it and I saw that show one time and was like, ‘What a mistake.’ It was heartbreaking to watch. I told him, ‘No matter how much they offered for another season, don’t do it.’”

LaVar adds that Being Bobby Brown further proved to what desperate lengths Houston would resort to keep her toxic marriage afloat.

“Whitney was a straight Jersey girl,” she says. “She wasn’t into being on TV and being seen all the time. She was private and liked her business private. Other people told her business—she didn’t. This is a girl who loved to vacuum to calm her nerves and relax. I watched her vacuum all the time. She didn’t want those cameras in her house or to be shown like that. But she went along for Bobby and it cost her, I think. I think she felt that way too because she didn’t like the way she came off at all.”

After the marriage to Brown ended, in 2007, friends say it became just Houston and her “baby girl,” Bobbi Kristina, leaning on each other for support.

Though there was talk of Houston having a 23-year-old adopted son, friends say he is a friend of Bobbi Kristina’s whom Houston had agreed to mentor. He lived in Atlanta with mother and daughter.

“Honestly, Whitney in many ways depended on Bobbi Kristina more than Bobbi Kristina did on her,” says a family member. “That was her friend, confidante, and her protector. No matter what she did or how drunk she got or how much her voice cracked at times, Bobbi Kristina still loved her so much and never gave up on her.”

The 19-year-old also wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps with a singing career, and the two were said to be working on several tracks together in the studio. Houston had been working for the last two years with producer Ne-Yo on a new album as well.

“She was sounding good and we had some good stuff on there,” says Ne-Yo. “Because of her schedule, it was hard to put together quickly, but it was going to happen. People would have been happy with it.”

Many are now worried about Bobbi Kristina’s well-being and mental health after she was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Sunday morning following “an anxiety attack” at the same hotel where her mother had passed away hours before.

Beverly Hills police confirmed that Bobbi Kristina was taken to Cedars-Sinai early Sunday morning. “It wasn’t along the lines of yesterday. It was for ‘precautionary measures,’” says Beverly Hills police Sgt. Brian Weir. “I think she is going to be fine.”

Others aren’t so sure. Family members are concerned that the loss of her beloved mother—“her world,” say some—may be too much for the teenager to handle.

“It was just the two of them after the divorce,” says LaVar, “They depended on each other, and it was so natural for Bobbi Kristina to take care of her mother in any way she could. She wanted her to be OK more than anything.”

Friends say Bobbi Kristina tried to stay as close to her mother as possible wherever they happened to be. She would often guide the superstar away from situations that would cause embarrassment and push aside people she deemed to have an agenda not in her mother’s best interest.

At a Grammy press junket on Thursday, Bobbi Kristina removed her mother after Houston’s behavior and conversation turned erratic. Hotel employees say Houston was sweating profusely and had been seen earlier skipping around the hotel. “Her daughter just pushed her past the reporters who were asking questions,” says a hotel employee. “She was like, ‘Mama, let’s go. Let’s go.’ She just took charge.” But Bobbi Kristina wasn’t as successful at keeping her mother away from Los Angeles nightclubs, where she’d chain-smoke and drink the night away.

Over the years the 19-year-old had become all too familiar with her role as caregiver for her mother and her father. Both singers spoke publicly about their drug use over the years with Diane Sawyer and Oprah Winfrey, describing addictions that would make any parent unfit.

“Even as a child, she felt responsible for Whitney in so many ways,” says a close friend of the singers. “And for Bobby as well, but Whitney was her heart. That’s a lot of pressure on a child, but she also knew her mother needed her more. How does a young girl handle losing all of that at once?”

While Bobbi Kristina may have appeared to be the “grownup” in the mother-daughter relationship, Houston was fiercely devoted to her daughter and had become more so in recent years. Houston reportedly told those close to her that she wanted to be fully present in Bobbi Kristina’s life from here on.

That desire also stemmed from Houston’s belief that because of her hectic career, she’d missed many of the key moments in her daughter’s early life. There was also concern over racy pictures the teenager posted of herself on Facebook and other blogs.

Last year it was even suggested that Bobbi Kristina had entered rehab for drugs as well. Family members deny that Bobbi Kristina had or has a drug problem.

“Again we’ve been kept away from not just from Whitney but Bobbi Kristina as well,” says LaVar. “We couldn’t talk to her or gauge how she was doing or what she was doing. That really hurt because it’s so easy to get lost out there in that industry. It happened to Whitney.”

Avant can’t forget the last advice he gave Houston when he saw her in the Bahamas in 2009. The singer was divorced and discussing plans for comeback, despite the negative impact of her marriage.

“I told her. ‘Don’t blame Bobby. This isn’t about Bobby. This is about you,’” says Avant. “I wanted her to understand that and to do something about it. I told her bluntly, ‘You have to get it together if you want to get better and get back on top. Blaming someone else makes it easy not to fix the problem.’ I wanted her to fix the problem. She didn’t, and I’ve lost a good friend.” ( The Daily Beast )

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6 Good Reasons To Tell Your Children Bald-Faced Lies

6 Good Reasons To Tell Your Children Bald-Faced Lies - Lies We Tell Our Children - I am a liar. I lie daily to my children, if not two or three times a day. Some of these lies are mere bluffs. Imagine my lovely four-year-old refusing to brush her teeth before bed. Frustrated, I tell her that if she isn't polishing her pearly whites by the time I count to three, she's in time out. Actually, there is no way I am going to prolong the bedtime routine another five-minutes while she loudly moans behind her bedroom door waking her younger sister. However this one little fib accomplishes my main objective; it's a quicker path to me being able to type at my computer with a glass of white wine, and the current season of Real Housewives of Any City playing on Bravo.

My lies vary in great degree. There are small lies like "Sure I'll buy you that princess ball gown for your birthday!" The truth is that I am just attempting to make it through Target without a colossal breakdown and her birthday is over five months away, so the possibility that she will remember this request come April is less than the chance of Elmo being hit by a runaway bus.

There are also big lies, such as, "Neko (our cat) went to live on a big farm where she will be able to play with other cats and dogs." We all know what the farm metaphor really stands for, but at the time I wasn't prepared to tell my then three-year-old about the harsh realities of pets and death. I was grateful for such a simple alternative explanation.

As parents we lie for various reasons. Many of them are for the benefit of our children, but in the spirit of "truthiness" the majority of these deceptions are for our own sake. Here are just a few of the reasons we so readily bend the truth with our little ones:

1. To save time. On a typical weekday morning I am in a rush to wrangle two kids into their car seats and make it to preschool by 8:45. In the process one asks, "Can we watch Team Umizumi this afternoon?" Instead of explaining that there will be no time, what with the myriad of errands I need to accomplish, including toting both girls to the doctor's office for their annual flu shots, I simply respond, "We'll see." The child, satisfied with the reply, climbs into the car.

2. We lie because sometimes we don't know all the answers. "Mommy, why is that flower blue?" Having no clue, and knowing that admitting this will get me nowhere with this particular toddler, I respond, "So that it can combine with the red flowers to make purple ones."

3. We lie because it is often easier than telling the truth. "If you don't eat your vegetables, you won't grow big and strong." To be honest, I've known plenty of children who refused all things green or orange and lived to be healthy adults. However, explaining nutritional wellbeing, the national obesity epidemic, and the value of consuming one's daily vitamins is futile with the four-and-under crowd.

4. We lie to be nice. "I made you a beautiful picture of a butterfly. Do you like it?" Umm... what butterfly? All I see is a pink scribble next to a green one. "I love it!"

5. We lie to keep their innocence. That is what Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy really are -- lies we perpetuate to keep our children innocent, young, and believing in magic. Some may argue that this is wrong, but maybe the real harm is not fostering their beliefs in fairy tales.

6. We lie to protect ourselves. For parents, simple lies to avoid the subject of death, flow from our mouths like cheap from Target. When seeing a dead pigeon on the sidewalk, I have effortlessly fibbed, "Oh Honey, he is just sleeping." While I do want to protect my girls from sorrow, I know that the larger part of me is lying to guard my own anxiety with mortality.

I am not advocating dishonest parenting. I know fully well that these are just excuses for my behavior. I've read the articles that explain how children learn to lie from their parents and that by the age of four children already lie at least once every two hours. Yet I still hope to raise my own girls to be honest and trustworthy. That said, I am still not sure if I am ready to give up my white lies; I just foresee too many extended conversations delaying getting out the door for school, prolonging bedtime, and requiring me to explain the intricacies of human reproduction to a child that sleeps in Dora the Explorer diapers. ( huffingtonpost.com )

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Why I quit lying

Why I quit lying -- I spent my childhood listening to my mother tell one whopper of a story after another.

One set of our ancestors allegedly found a baby wrapped in vines after a storm, she said. Another discovered a valuable diamond brooch covered in tar in a bathroom stall. What's more, three of her uncles, all baseball aficionados, were buried at the site of a North Carolina field where they once played. And here's the kicker: They were supposedly interred in their respective fielding positions.

No wonder she held people in rapt attention at dinner parties, in line at the market, at bus stops.

Jaw-dropping events were apparently commonplace in my mother's formative years -- no surprise, since she was such an outsize character herself. A saucy redheaded southerner, Mom could be demure one moment and shocking the next, with a laugh so loud and sudden it turned heads. And she had stories to tell.

Sometimes parents' tall tales are handed down to their children like family heirlooms

I didn't, as far as I knew. I was raised in Delaware (referred to by many as Dull-aware and Dela-where?) with three older siblings in a garden-variety suburban atmosphere. I yearned to be unique like my mother; I wanted to fit into the world of fascinating dinner-party conversation that she so effortlessly inhabited. And so I invented other realities in order to make myself equally intriguing and charismatic.

After my brother and sisters flew the coop, I frequently traveled as an only child with my parents. Our journeys provided me with countless opportunities to make things up. I often pretended to be Lebanese, speaking in a broken accent and refusing to do certain things that went against the "rules of my culture," like eating Pop Rocks, which I hated anyway. On other occasions, I told people my mother was a flamenco dancer, or that I was related to Goldie Hawn.

I was careful not to bring up these fibs when my parents were around, and so I never got caught. Later on, in college, I kept on lying. Why not? I was good at it. Studying abroad in France one semester, I felt truly fluent in French the night I was able to tell an histoire à dormir debout (tall tale) in a bar.

My fictions continued over the years and even bore fruit: I went to graduate school for creative writing. There I was in my ideal habitat -- a natural exaggerator surrounded by natural exaggerators -- and yet, to my surprise, I found myself drawn to Dave, the one student in my program who didn't seem eager to impress everyone with his raconteur skills.

In short order, he forced the truth out of me. On our first or second date, Dave asked me so many earnest questions about my award-winning background in ballroom dance that I finally confessed I knew only the jitterbug. I braced myself for his reaction, but he didn't recoil in horror. To the contrary, he said he found me fascinating -- the real me, completely stripped of my fabrications.
As I began telling him about my actual childhood, I discovered that my life hadn't been as ho-hum as I'd always thought.

I had spent years pretending to be Lebanese! That was interesting. My dad was a corporate lawyer who danced in the kitchen like Zorba the Greek. Pretty colorful, right? What's more, I was raised around the corner from my maternal grandparents -- my step-grandfather, a double amputee from World War II, and my grandma, an oyster-bar owner who once sang back-up for Mel Tormé.

Come to think of it, my childhood was wonderfully weird, and if I hadn't spent my time trying to shock and amaze people (and keep pace with my mother), I might have realized it earlier.

I practiced living Dave-ishly, engaged by the real world and paying close attention to its stunning details. He was a constant source of inspiration: When I introduced him to my family and friends, he asked authentic, probing questions and found out more about them in minutes than I had in years.
He was the one to learn that my elderly neighbor had survived the Bataan Death March, why my brother had given up the saxophone, and that my father had gotten caught in a snowstorm on the night of President John F. Kennedy's inauguration.

I followed his lead. Now that I was not expending considerable energy trying to keep my fibs straight, I found that I was better at inquiring about other people -- and at listening to their answers. I cordoned off fiction, saving it for my novels, and dedicated myself to nonfiction in my everyday life.

I also concluded that it would be a good idea to marry Dave, and did so.

Not long after the wedding, inspired by Dave's relentless search for truth, I confronted my mother and demanded that she come clean about her outlandish stories, which I had long since figured were bunk.

There was one tale, for example, that she would tell about an aunt who had cared for her blind, bed-bound mother for years -- and then suddenly hanged herself from a bedpost. I told my mom it wasn't possible. "How does someone hang herself from a bedpost? It's, what, three feet off the floor?" I pressed for a confession.

My mother was flustered. "It's true!" she insisted indignantly. Two days later, flushed with vindication, she knocked on my front door and handed me a yellowed newspaper clipping. The headline read: WOMAN HANGS HERSELF ON A BEDPOST.
It was a true story. Unlikely, but true. And it forced me to reconsider the veracity of all my mother's wild tales. What if somewhere in North Carolina there was an old baseball field where her uncles were buried at first, second, and third plates? Maybe I was the descendant of a baby who was found wrapped in vines. Or not. Or maybe the truth was someplace in between.

I decided then and there to hand these legends down to my own children, much the way another family might bequeath a cherished homemade quilt. And I'll be honest: I don't know whether the stories are fact or fiction. But they are part of our heritage nonetheless.

This year my mother gave me a present, an old-fashioned dinner ring with five small diamonds embedded in white gold. She had worn it for as long as I could remember. I was touched beyond words. The diamonds of my mother's ring, once part of that aforementioned brooch found in a lump of tar in a bathroom stall, remind me, daily, that I don't need to make things up. The world, just as it is, has endless gifts to offer. ( RealSimple.com )

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The house that dad built

The house that dad built - Windows that dimmed the light, bedrooms too small to sleep in – Isobel Atkinson’s childhood home was eccentric but enchanting

In the 1930s, when my father became engaged, he bought an acre of land and the stone from two derelict cottages and drew up plans for building our family home.

It wasn't something of which he had any experience, but he was optimistic and undaunted, a practical Yorkshireman. His fiancée lived some distance away in Scotland and was the very opposite of practical, so I think that her input would have been slight.

I have a photograph of my mother, on a visit to the site, nicely dressed, smiling to camera and holding a stone. I suspect that will have been the only stone she ever held.

The house plans were eccentric, the unequal distribution of interior space due to the fact that my father had already bought the matrimonial bed. He had purchased at auction an enormous half-tester with matching sideboard.

This furniture was created from carved wood, reputed to have come from Wakefield Cathedral during the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. The bed had pegged figures that could be lifted from their niches and heavy side curtains. This was the bed in which I was born, the doctor taking the precaution of having the wooden figures taken down before asking my mother to push.

On Sunday mornings my brother and I were allowed to join our parents in their bed and given strict instructions not to wriggle and let in any cold draughts. There was room for the whole family to stretch out in comfort. Because of this bed my parents' bedroom had been designed to be large. Our home, overall, was not. This presented no problem at first, but when my brother grew until his feet touched his bedroom wall the upstairs rooms had to be reconfigured.

The house looked well enough from the outside with its stone walls and leaded windows. These had small diamond-shaped panes that threw only a subdued light into the rooms and were a nightmare to clean. 'Home improvements' were constantly taking place. It was clear that a man had designed the house. The kitchen was not a practical place and after alterations it became even less so.

My father was full of bright ideas. One of these was to have an ironing-board fixed within a cupboard. Open the cupboard door, let down the board, et voilà! This worked well enough until he decided to move the kitchen door a little to the left, in order to give more space for his armchair in a favourite corner of the living-room. Once the door had been moved you could iron or you could go in and out of the kitchen but you couldn't do both because the ironing-board now neatly filled the doorway.

The staircase was ill lit, twisting up with a short flight of steps before each right-angled turn. I took every corner with care for fear of what might be around it. If I could not persuade anyone to accompany me upstairs then I would sing loudly for a bit of false courage and arrive on the landing with only one more turn on the corridor before the safety of my room. No architectural prizes for you, father!

The house was set well back from the road and approached over a long straight driveway, and the gates were usually kept closed to give our dog the freedom to roam the garden. The postman disliked being ominously shadowed up and down this pathway by the doberman and waved his cap to send the dog away.

What a mistake! From then on our postal service became very erratic. When letters did arrive the envelopes often bore the pencilled message, 'Could not deliver, dog out.' I loved the garden and especially the orchard, where the fruit trees were under-planted with hundreds of spring bulbs.

I worried as a child about having to grow up and leave my home, but as a young adult I went without a backward glance. My parents sold the house while I was living elsewhere. I have never been back, but I sometimes wander happily through my childhood home in my dreams, accompanied by my grown-up daughters, who have never been there. There are some places that you never leave. ( telegraph.co.uk )

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British family is shrinking as 60 per cent of parents say we can't afford a second child

British family is shrinking as 60 per cent of parents say we can't afford a second child - Almost two thirds of parents who have one child say they are too poor to have a second.

The crippling cost of bringing up youngsters means the average size of a British family is ‘shrinking’, a report claimed yesterday.

It found the average bill for raising a child from birth until the age of 21 is around £270,000.

The 'modern' family: In light of the growing costs of bringing up children, many parents simply cannot afford a third child

From nappies to cots, shoes to dentists’ bills, new bicycles to the cost of school trips and after-school clubs, the costs are endless.

And this is before parents have embarked upon luxuries, such as foreign holidays and private education – which costs an average of £8,000 per term.

When asked why they were not going to have a second child, 58 per cent of parents with one child cited ‘money’ as the overwhelming reason.

Some 64 per cent of those with two children say they cannot afford to have a third.

Researchers warn: ‘The average UK family size could be set to shrink as the cost of bringing up a child spirals to £271,499.’ Figures from the Office for National Statistics show the average number of children born to married or cohabiting couples has fallen.

Costly exercise: The cost of bringing up a child has spiralled to £271,499

In 1971, such couples typically had two dependent children. The latest figures, from 2009, show they have an average of 1.7. The number of married or cohabiting couples who have one child has risen from 16 per cent in 1972 to 20 per cent today.

The report comes as families face the biggest financial squeeze since the 1920s.

The cost of living is rising faster than salaries, with state workers set for a two-year pay freeze if they earn £21,000 or more and private sector workers typically getting a two per cent rise.

Motoring costs are particularly high with record petrol prices and a 33 per cent hike in the average cost of comprehensive car insurance.

Louise Colley, mother of three-year-old twins, said: ‘When I had my scan and found I was having twins, I joked: “That’s private school out of the window”. As a mum, I completely understand the financial pressures that parents are under. Nursery fees, in particular, are astronomical.’

The research by insurance firm Aviva was based on interviews with 1,000 parents with children under the age of 22. It divides the £271,499 total bill for raising a child into four categories.

These are ‘education’, which includes anything from school trips to private school fees and university costs. The total bill is £66,938.

Next is ‘household services’, which includes items such as internet connection, train fares and help towards a deposit on a child’s first home. The total bill is £77,080.
The third is ‘clothing and food’, which includes all nappies and prams, children’s clothes, shoes and boots, as well as food and school dinners. The total bill is £69,332.

The final category is ‘leisure’, which includes children’s activities, pocket money, holidays and toys. The total bill is £58,149. ( dailymail.co.uk )

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When kids turn into fussy eaters

When kids turn into fussy eaters - A study has suggested that telling your child to clean their plate may help produce a fussy eater, while tight control of what they eat could make children prone to overeating.

Jane Wardle and colleagues at University College London surveyed 213 mothers of 7- to 9-year-old children.

In the study, mothers were asked about how their children responded to food: whether they would typically overeat if given a chance, along with whether they'd eat slowly or routinely fail to finish meals.

Mothers also reported on their own mealtime strategies, including whether they tried to get their children to eat when they weren't hungry or whether they believed their children would overindulge without eating restrictions.

Overall, Wardle and her colleagues found a correlation between the mothers' pressure to eat healthy food and children's degree of fussiness over food. In addition, the more mothers restricted their children's food, the more likely mothers were to say their children would overindulge if allowed.

The links were seen regardless of the children's weight.

But the team also said the parental strategies could be responding to how the children ate, with thin children often being pressured to eat and more diet restrictions being put on a heavier child.

"With growing evidence of a genetic basis to eating behavior and food intake in children, the present results are consistent with the idea that mothers' feeding practices are, to some extent, responsive to their children's predispositions towards food," Wardle and her colleagues wrote.

But they added that it's important to recognize that children may both influence, and be influenced by, their parents' diet management. ( indiatimes.com )

The study has been published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

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Sex slavery in America: One girl’s nightmare

Sex slavery in America: One girl’s nightmare - Wendy escaped captivity near Houston after six years; her friends weren’t as lucky

To 15-year-old Wendy, the two well-dressed men who approached her and her two friends at their middle school in the small Honduran village of El Gancho seemed like legitimate businessman: They appeared wealthy, drove a nice car, and carried business cards. When the pair offered to take the three girls to America to work in a textile factory, “I felt like I had won the lottery,” Wendy says.

Wendy had long dreamed of helping her single mother support the seven children in their family. When her mother warned against going with the businessmen, Wendy told her not worry. “When I come back, I will buy you a car,” she told her mother, so that she would no longer have to walk 22 miles to her job in a pineapple field.

In 2002, Wendy and her friends, 15-year-old Sujeli and 14-year-old Ana, embarked upon a journey that would turn into a daily nightmare of being kidnapped, beaten, raped and forced to work in brothels servicing six to 10 men a night. Wendy says she worked alongside girls as young as 12 who were given daily beatings if they did not make enough money for their captors.

Booming business

Experts like U.S. Attorney Ed Gallagher say that selling women and young girls is a business second only to the drug trade: a booming, $28 billion-a-year enterprise. “I think most Americans would be shocked to learn that there are sex slaves right here in Texas,” says state investigator Mike Barnett of the Texas Alcohol and Beverage Commission.

The T.A.B.C. has cracked down on the dozens of cantinas that have opened up on the outskirts of Houston serving liquor and selling girls. Investigators stumbled into an illicit world where young women and girls are held captive as virtual sex slaves and sold for $65-100 an hour for sex. Experts estimate that thousands of such girls are in cantinas throughout U.S. border towns.

“You walk into a cantina and choose a beer and a girl. The girl’s beer costs anywhere from $15 ti $20, and you are buying the company of that girl for the time that it takes her to drink that beer. Then, if you want to have sex with her, you take her to the back where you pay cash for a mattress, paper towels and spermicide.” Barnett says. “These cantinas are printing cash.”

With as many as 20 girls in each cantina, prosecutors like Linda Geffin, chief of the Harris County Attorney’s Special Prosecution Unit, say these organized criminals are tough to battle.

After six years, Wendy escaped one such Houston cantina. A kind American family allowed her to call her mother for the first time since her captivity began. “I was so happy. I felt like a bird who had been living in a cage,” Wendy says — but she still lives in daily fear for her family.

Sadly, her friends Sujeli and Ana have not been so lucky; Wendy learned from her mother that neither of the girls’ friends or families have ever seen or heard from them again. Ana’s mother died without knowing the fate of her only daughter.

“Life is hard,” says Epinpanio, Ana’s father. “Everytime I see a young girl, it reminds me of the daughter I lost.”

MSNBC traveled to Honduras to investigate missing girls, and to Houston to profile the small state agencies that are waging battle against the vicious human traffickers who sell women.

“I’ve seen farmers that treat their livestock better than these men treat these women.” says investigator Barnett. “I think the average American citizen would be disgusted if they realized that this is happening in right here in the U.S.” ( msnbc.msn.com )

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Parents pass on 'irrational fear' of spiders and snakes to their children

Parents pass on 'irrational fear' of spiders and snakes to their children - If you're terrified of spiders, or fearful of snakes, then blame your parents.

A study challenges the widely held view that we are hard-wired to fear creepy crawlies and instead suggests we learn to be scared of them in the first years of life.

Fear of snakes is one of the most common - and in Britain - irrational phobias. Half the population is thought to suffer even though most have never actually seen a snake.

Irrational phobia: People are not born with an innate fear of creepy crawlies - but we learn how to be scared of them in the first years of life, scientists believe

Experts at Rutgers University in Newark showed seven-month-old babies two videos side by side – one of a snake and another of a non-threatening animal.

At the same time, the babies were played a recording of either a fearful human voice or a happy one.

The infants spent more time looking at the snake videos when listening to the fearful voices, but showed no signs of fear themselves, the researchers report in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Past studies have shown that people can be taught to fear almost anything. In one Swedish study, scientists showed volunteers images of snakes, spiders, flowers and mushrooms while giving them a small electric shock.

Unsurprisingly, the volunteers learnt to associate all the images with fear.

In Britain half of women and a fifth of men are thought to be frightened of spiders, irrespective of whether they are dangerous or not.

Many scientists argue that the phobias, exploited by Hollywood movies such as Arachnophobia and Snakes on a Plane, evolved millions of years ago when our ancestors lived alongside a host of deadly reptiles and insects in Africa.

Natural selection is likely to favour people who stay away from potentially dangerous animals, they say.

But the latest study challenges the theory that snake and spider phobias are innate.

In a second experiment, three-year-olds were shown a screen of nine photographs and told to pick out a named object.

They identified snakes more quickly than flowers, and more quickly than other animals that looked similar to snakes such as caterpillars and frogs.

The children who were afraid of snakes were just as fast at picking them out than children who had not developed a snake phobia.

'What we’re suggesting is that we have these biases to detect things like snakes and spiders really quickly, and to associate them with things that are yucky or bad, like a fearful voice,' said Dr Vanessa LoBue of Rutgers University, an author of the paper.

Babies detect snakes quickly - and then learn to be afraid of them really quickly, she said.

In one Swedish study, scientists showed volunteers images of snakes, spiders, flowers and mushrooms while giving them a small electric shock.

The volunteers learnt to associate an electric shock with all the images - but the effect lasted a lot longer with snakes and spiders.

Another U.S. study found that monkeys raised in a laboratory are not afraid of snakes, but will learn to fear snakes more quickly than they learn to fear rabbits or flowers. ( dailymail.co.uk )

Babies recognise potentially dangerous animals, but are not yet scared of them

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School gate mums make each other feel like failures

School gate mums make each other feel like failures - Mothers who meet each other at the school gates make each other feel more inadequate than celebrities who effortlessly shed their baby weight and appear adept as parents, a study has found.

More than 90% of mothers compared their child-rearing skills against those of their friends and relatives, according to research by Netmums, the parenting website.

Four in 10 respondents to the survey said they felt their friends were better than them at being parents, while one in five lied to others about how much time they spent playing with their children and the food they cooked at home.

The group is calling on the Coalition to offer parenting classes to all new mothers and fathers and to promote a more realistic image of the “good enough” parent instead of reinforcing false expectations.

The campaigners have won support from Labour leader Ed Miliband, television presenter Kate Garraway, and the Prime Minister, who said: “Parenting is incredibly rewarding but as all parents know it can be tough at times too.”

David Cameron has backed the new campaign to stop mothers making each other feel inadequate by competing to be “perfect parents”.

The survey of 5,000 users of the website found that mothers who met each other at the school gates had a greater influence on making each other feel inadequate than celebrities who effortlessly shed their baby weight and appeared adept as parents in the media.

A quarter of mothers lied to each other about how much television they allowed their children to watch and 15% exaggerated the amount of quality time they spent with their partners.

The campaign - The Real Parenting Revolution – called for a return to the “good enough” approach to parenting conceived by child psychologist Donald Winnicott in the 1950s.

Winnicott argued that parents who did not achieve perfection helped their children to develop self-reliance and a sense of their own identity.

Siobhan Freegard, co-founder of Netmums, said parents should be more willing to seek help and advice.

“No one is born knowing how to be a parent – you get along the best you can,” she said. “We hear from mums all the time who are struggling with all the conflicting advice being given to them about how to reach parenting perfection – and who are coping with huge amounts of guilt when they don’t achieve this.

“We want 2011 to be the year when mums and dads across the country can accept that being ‘good enough’ is just that.” ( telegraph.co.uk )

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Sex and the single parent

Sex and the single parent - Even good parents can set a bad example when it comes to their sex lives - Liz, a distant relation, is an elegant woman, early thirties, career oriented and focused. In short she's a successful Ms Independent.

She's also a good single mum - you only have to speak to her two daughters aged 6 and 4 to find out how intelligent and well-adjusted they are.

However when it comes to her choice of men Liz loses some of her focus. After a disastrous first marriage I think she developed a commitment phobia.

Whenever I visit her she's shacking up with a different man. Her rate of 'men turnover' is anything between three and four months. As a result her kids have dropped the ‘uncle' tag and use the first name basis when referring to Liz's rainbow of bedroom friends.

Consciously or subconsciously Liz picks men who are also not willing to commit. After toying with a bedroom friend Liz gets tired of the man and tosses him away like a used tissue. She's addicted to variety.

If Liz was childless I wouldn't be concerned about her escapades. What example is she setting for her kids? If she carries on this irresponsible behaviour I worry that the girls will form a distorted view of relationships with members of the opposite sex - history tends to repeat itself.

This woman is oblivious of the risk of abuse that she’s exposing her daughters to by bringing an array of men into her home. My personal prescription? Liz should sort out her emotional baggage and get into a monogamous relationship-for her daughters’ sake.

I know many single parents who act responsibly in this regard. How single parents satisfy their sexual needs is their business.

But every parent should be aware of how his or her behaviour in this area is under the close scrutiny of the young ones under his or her care.

The ‘do as I say and not as I do' dogma never works with children.

Young ones see through the hypocrisy and follow their parents' behaviour. In my view parents should never do things which they do not want their children adopt in adulthood. ( parent24.com )

How should single parents handle their sex lives?

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