In this case, it's drugs.  Mom and Dad need money to feed their habits.

That is another issue.  I can sort of understand that.  If we could deal with the drugs problem then many other problems would magically go away.  It has a terriffic dividend, but we need a lot more understanding of the social mechanism of drug abuse.  I really don't think much is being done to tackle the roots of the problem, just pruning at the visible branches.

I say legalize it all, tax the hell out of it, and sell it through government centers with boring little booths.  You can buy all you want, but you have to use it in a boring little governmental booth and pay the tax on it.

I know.  I found some notes passed in class by a friend and I when we were innocent little high school sophomores - at the age of fourteen.  In it, I am carrying on about putting a leather mask with nose and mouth holes on our history teacher's head, and "teasing" him with a feather and some hot candle wax.  I was shocked.  Where did I get such knowledge?  At fourteen?  I like to think of fourteen year olds who are romantically entangled with thirty year olds as the innocents, but I certainly wasn't at that age.  Though I hadn't Done It yet, I certainly knew what It was all about, and was looking forward to It.

It seems OK to think of fourteen year old boys stealing cars, breaking and entering, commiting acts of vandalism but to think that some girls might achieve similar levels of creativity is not.  Sexist?

Absolutely.  In the U.S., girls' arrests are up, but girls are still much more likely to get arrested for status offenses, such as being out after curfew, being in a bar while underaged, etc.  Boys are not arrested for such things.    
So prosecuting the offenders is not easy or reliable.  Once again we need to tackle the problem further back and try to create a culture where such activities are just unacceptable.  This is difficult but I am encouraged by what the police and government have achieved here with regard to drinking and driving.  In my student days, going out in the car to get pissed was a 'laddish' thing to do, and dodging the cops on the way home was considered a game.  "Watch the kerb, watch the fuzz, and hold her steady!".  Over the last couple of decades the effects of this behaviour have been impressed upon the public to the extent that most people, even the 'lads' think it a stupid thing to do.
If only we could achieve similar results with drugs and abuse.  As long as we remained, as a public, unaware that it was a problem, then the perpetrators believe their situation is a personal individual thing, like the drinking drivers think "Well -I- can drive OK after a few drinks."  The first step is bringing the problem out into the open and dissecting it in public so that those involved recognised that they are on a well beaten path and can give a name to what they are doing.  That makes a resistance to proceeding along that path, and many would then shun it before they got hooked.

I think it would help if we stopped eroticizing children and childhood.  I am sick of opening up the Sunday paper, which has the color Target, Kmart and Wal-Mart supplements in it, and seeing pictures of little girls and boys in underwear adverts with coy little smiles on their faces.  Do the advertisers not know that this kind of material is invariably found in pedophiles' possession in large quantities, right next to the dirty videotapes?

Probably not, and probably don't care anyway if it sells kids clothes, or even better just gets customers into the store where they can be brainwashed properly.  Think about the guys that work in advertising agencies and create these adverts.  They don't usually have a background in social work (although they probably know quite a bit about drug abuse).

I also think it would help if we embarked on an intensive campaign to deglamorize prostitution.  I am fairly good friends, in a we-used-to-go-to-the-same-conferences-and-say-hello kind of way, with Margo St. James, the founder of COYOTE.  (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, a group that advocates for the decriminalization of prostitution).  She had some wonderful stickers that she would put up in areas where runaway children would congregate.  The one I remember the best had two frames:  one had a picture of Richard Gere, saying, "Typical Prostitute's Client?"  The other frame had an obese, dirty-looking older man with a cigarette in his mouth and a ratty old car behind him and said, "Think Again."  Centered underneath the two frames it said, "Who do YOU think has to pay for it?"
And really... the guys I have seen trolling for fourteen year olds of either sex are rarely hotties.  They are generally pretty repellent.

Hmm, yes it needs to be said, but I don't think that most kids that get into prostitution have many illusions about clients by the time they get there, perhaps they do about how much of their takings goes to organised crime.

Oh, you'd be amazed.  The girls I worked with in Waikiki were, on the average, around 16.  They worked a circuit.  They had been lured into prostitution around their homes in the Midwest, and then got taken to Vegas (as promised).  What they didn't know is they then got taken to Calgary, Fairbanks, Nome, and Honolulu.  Then they started all over in Las Vegas again.
Vegas is where they made the nasty discovery that the guy who wanted to take them away for a lifetime of glamor was also the guy who wanted to make money for them.  By the time they made it to Honolulu, they still really, truly believed that some rich guy was going to come along and fall in love with them, à la Pretty Woman, in spite of the fact that the tricks they were turning were military personnel. 
They generally started out at fifteen.  By the second time I saw them in Honolulu, when they were sixteen, they had been "sold" to some local pimp, were drug-addicted, and had been taught to mob Japanese tourists and steal their wallets.  They had no clue what was planned for them next.  As soon as their looks started to fade, around the age of seventeen, and as soon as they had gotten thoroughly used to what Asian guys want to do with a prostitute (anal sex, no condom), they got shipped off to Bangkok.  Bangkok is not on the "circuit," and they don't return from there.
We managed to get a few kids out of the life, but still... it just used to break my heart when someone came up to me and said, "Cat, Cat, my old man is letting me go to Bangkok with this rich Chinese guy!"  (To a Midwesterner, all Asians are Chinese.)  We'd tell them and tell them, and have them talk to guys at the consulate in Bangkok, and it STILL made no difference.  They flew off, and we never saw them again.  Now I'd LIKE to think that some bazillionaire German tourist fell in love with all of them and whisked them away to live in wedded bliss in Bavaria, but I have a bad feeling that ain't so.

What did surprise me was how repellent the average prostitute was too.  One would have to be pretty desperate to go with the ones that hang around Manchester city centre.  I always wanted to answer "Do you want a good time?" with "Why, do you know someone who could give me one?".  Mind you I guess the 'hitch-hiking effect' applies: you don't copy the guys standing by the road, they are the ones that can't get lifts; and the prostitutes that approach you are the ones that can't get clients.

Yes.  The ones in Waikiki were always very good looking and dressed (sleazily) very well, but outside of Waikiki... Long haul truckers and prostitutes do a brisk trade around the truck washing centers on East Valley Highway, and THOSE women... toothless, straggly-haired, smelly, dirty... It gives me hope.  I feel ugly being bald and boobless, but at least I'm clean, witty, and charming.

I don't know what to do about physical (e.g. beating) abuse.  I think that has always been and will always be with us, as different cultures approve of different levels of it.  Samoan kids coming to the U.S. start to get into trouble because in Samoa they KNOW their parents love them by how much they get beaten.  Once they get here, their parents are afraid to beat them and they feel unloved, and start being bad.  I was spanked, sometimes enough to bruise, as a child, and I don't recall feeling particularly abused.  Now that I'm an adult, I don't feel as if I would ever need to spank a child, but a) I'm not a parent and b) I am a product of my time and culture.

I think the sanction of a smack should be there for small children, and to be credible it has to be used albeit VERY rarely, once only and immediately in punishment of exceptionally unacceptable behaviour. 

Absolutely.  Like if the child wrenches free of the parental paw and runs into the street.  Or keeps on reaching for the stove in spite of multiple parental warnings.  And it's ONE smack, on the (clothed) bottom.  Never on the face.

I don't think that repeated strokes add anything, except perhaps gratification for the issuer, and I don't think that delayed punishment is much help either.  I remember as a child wondering why parents smacked children for crying "I'll give you something to cry about!". 

 Oh, you got that, too?  We got it in the form of a questions: "Do you want me to give you etc. etc."  I tried both yes and no answers at various times; neither one works, and in fact makes parents angrier.

It was hardly likely to stop them.  I do not believe that one slap constitues abuse, whether by a parent or teacher.  I think a blanket ban on physical punishment effectively condones bad behaviour.  I think that the alternative forms of punishment that are available, ie psychological punishment, are probably more damaging.  I am sure it hurts Natasha more if I am angry at her than if I were to hit her, indeed I am sure that for her the disapproval implied by a smack is more painful than the thing itself. 

Yes.  My parents soon learned that spanking me didn't do much good.  Taking all the books out of my room and keeping me from reading was a hassle for them, but it really worked on me.  GOD I hated that, and I never repeated the behavior that led to it. 

The only time I did smack her it was only a token, to focus her attention on my anger.  I can't even remember what it was for, some wanton act of violence I think.
Teachers I talk to are usually amused by this story.  When I was a student, one of my collegues was walking past a school when a crocodile of children came by under the supervision of a young female teacher.  One of the boys was misbehaving and giving verbal abuse.  My friend, as he passed said to the teacher "You are not allowed to hit the children are you?" (the rule was new then) "No."  SLAP  "There you are." and he walked on.
I don't know that this extends to older children, I would think that it only works if the parent/teacher is sufficiently bigger/stronger than the child to have the authority.  

I don't think it works as discipline at all.  I think all it does is anger and humiliate the child.  I can't see smacking a child over the age of five.  After five, you can reason with them and come up with other punishments.  Of course, I make that pronouncement from the lofty height of no-I-don't-actually-have-any-children-of-my-own.

However the one-time landlord of the pub next door proudly told a tale of his youthful exploits of drunken driving, how he was stopped by a large policeman who administered a summary knockout punch, which certainly made him think twice before doing it again.  Very effective but so easily abused.  He had also been peppered by a shotgun blast of salt-and-gravel when a farmer caught him poaching, although in his defence he said he had only been after rabbits.

Yes.  I, myself, look askance when I see a single dad with custody of his fourteen-year-old daughter.  I feel bad for doing it, but I've heard LOTS of stories about abuse in that situation.  I never hear ANY stories about daughters growing up in single-parent dad-led homes normally.  I believe that the latter is far more likely, but what do I see more often?

Well a normal home doesn't make much of a story.  How many stories do you hear about children growing up normally in any situation.  I think one has to look at the background to the situation - what happened to the relationship between the parents etc. 

Yes.  I have no doubt that you will do an excellent job of raising Natasha.  If you were a creep, I don't think Artyom would still be hanging around with you.  That's what told me you were okay.

From what he told me last time, there are two reasons why he comes home, one, it is cheaper than his digs, and two, the bed is more comfortable. Last year the reason he gave was to get some vitamins, instead of junk food. That was more of a compliment.  It isn't to get money 'cos he knows I won't give him any more until he earns some for himself (well, more than he blows in the pub the same week).

One trouble with being a widower is that we tend to get lumped together with divorcees even though we never broke a promise.

Oh, sniff, I don't know why, but that made me cry.  Are there Parents Without Partners groups in England?  Or are they mostly filled with divorced people?

I never saw any.  I think maybe in London, not here in the sticks.

The noise that's going on behind me you'd think Natasha was getting abused. Actually she's screaming at the computer trying to finish the last level of Pandemonium.

Wow!  I never get to the last level of anything.  You must be sure to tell her what a brilliant child she is.
Well she is, but there is a little more to that story.  Cindy's brother gave her the game having played it out himself (well, that's a pretty sad guy who has nothing better to do aged about 35 but still...)  He had noted 18 level passwords on the back of the pack, so she didn't have to work through all the levels in sequence.  That said she has certainly done most of them, and she raced through the first eight this afternoon just to show she could. Level 18 was a right b****, significantly harder and longer than the others. She and her friend Emily (10) have been bashing at it on and off for about six months and probably spent as much time on that level as the rest put together.  Yesterday she had nothing much to do and Emily was away so she wanted me to help her with it.  After a little while I pointed out that she was actually getting a better success rate than I was so she was better off without my help.  That seemed to encourage her and an hour later she was writing down a level password having finished it.  Huh, why did the last level give a password.  Well it turns out there is another Boss level (they happen after every six levels - ) at the end, that she had not been given a password for.  So it was quite an achievement but the story isn't over yet. It isn't really a matter of being brilliant, although it helps, it is a matter of being stubborn.  That she inherits from me, once I get hold of a problem it is hard to let go.

Hey, I've seen retarded kids who were stubborn.  Take it from me:  y'all are brilliant.
The only game I'm good at on the computer is FreeCell.  How pathetic.

I dunno about pathetic, I use that to clear my mind between jobs.  I don't often have time for big games.  I'm showing over 1500 games on the statistics (my win rate is 70% but it lies, if you restart a game it only counts the result of the first try, so that is pretty meaningless because I always replay games until I win, being stubborn.)
I used to do minesweeper, but then I got a new computer with a sooper-dooper graphics card which may do wonderful 3d rendering but it doesn't do minesweeper worth a damn.  I think it is in more colours or something, but the result is that the edge definition of the tiles is much worse and my speed is down by about 50% so I can't compete with my old scores.

Aloha, Catharine (who is gratified to learn your win ratio at FreeCell, as hers is 85%.  However, she is terrible at Minesweeper.)

I find that I tend to lose a lot when I am sleepy because I couldn't be bothered doing so much look-ahead.