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Wednesday Reads: Kids Books About Empathy, Teen Pregnancy News, and My Dad Thinks I’m a Boy is Here!

Happy Wednesday Readers! Only two days left in August, the summer has slipped away from us and soon it will be Autumn. Which in Cincinnati means we’ll either get rain for 30 days or a week long heat wave. I just want to bake stuff with pumpkin spices dammit!

Empathy is an important skill to encourage in our kids, it’s essential to building healthy relationships. Tinybop’s Catalina Gonella has collected a list of 13 childrens books that teach empathy to help us in that task.

There might be a glimmer of hope in the fight against bullying…

Over the period of the study, from 2005 to 2014, students’ reports of being bullied in all of those ways decreased, as did reports of perpetrating bullying, and of witnessing bullying. And more students reported feeling safe at school.

So in these Maryland school districts, things were getting better, and the improvement tended to accelerate around 2010. The study did not involve instituting anti-bullying programs, nor did it account for what practices were in place in participating schools. Therefore the researchers could not attribute the improvement to particular programs.

Dress Code Follies! SoCal teen (and possible Jedi) Remy Altuna was told by her school that “not wearing a bra can make people assume bad things.”  And 4 year old Jabez Oates was excited about his first day of school, only to be sent home because his long hair violated the school’s antiquated dress code (Jabez is proud of his long hair, it’s never been cut.)

The way we talk to and about little boys can do a lot of harm. A clown with the Twitter handle @boguspress laid out an epic twitter rant about one little boy who just wanted a blue butterfly painted on his face…

Teen Vogue Time! The teen birth rate is at an all time low, so the Trump Administration is cutting the funding to an Obama era program aimed at teen sex education. Because of course they are…

The Trump administration is making moves to cut back yet another Obama-era program — this time, one that was aimed to reduce the number of teen pregnancies across the country.

According to NBC News, the Trump administration has proposed to cut more than $200 million from the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, which began in 2010 and was renewed in 2015 for five more years. The program is designed to give $89 million a year to 81 organizations throughout the United States in an effort to promote sex education to teens. The funding cut would result in the program ending in June 2018 as opposed to June 2020, as it was originally scheduled.

A New York based artist has re-envisioned a whole lot of your Disney faves as if they were trans, it’s very cool.

Schools in Turkey will stop teaching evolution this fall… If you know kids in Turkey, buy them tickets to Jurassic Land in Istanbul instead!

Sophie Bell’s book “My Dad Thinks I’m a Boy,” is available now at Sophie’s Etsy shop! Cool!

This weeks video is the new single “My Name is Ruin,” from New Wave pioneer Gary Numan and comes to us courtesy of our Emigo and Orbit Blogger Chris Hall of Literate Perversions.  Chris writes about how the themes of apocalypse in the video resonate with our perilous times, as well as delving into Numan’s upfront issues with Asperger’s. Enjoy…

 

Features Image Credit Sophie LaBelle

 

 

Louis Doench

Lou Doench is a 52 year old father of three. Twelve years ago he married the coolest woman in the world and gave up the lucrative career of being a photography student to become a stay at home husband and Dad, or SAHD. An atheist geek, or a geeky atheist if you prefer, Lou likes reading, photography, video gaming, disc golf, baseball and Dr. Who. He has been playing Dungeons and Dragons since 1976. Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is also an excellent home cook, not that his children would know because they only eat Mac & Cheese. Follow Lou on Twitter @blotzphoto or check out his photography at www.flickr.com/photos/blotz/

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