Parenting Today

by

Laura Tiche and Annie Pendleton

Contextualization

The idea for this Parenting Today article stemmed from an assignment to respond to Jonathan Swift’s essay, “A Modest Proposal.”  In this article, Swift offers an outrageous solution to a contemporary problem.  Clearly, we have done the same.  We chose to find a solution for incompetent parents and their bratty children due to our dining hall frustrations on football game days when kids run out of control eating massive amounts of sugary frozen yogurt creations while their parents try to control them, but to no avail.  We do not necessarily condone the type of parenting advice offered in Parenting Today, but we hope it gives parents and other readers reason to consider how children should be disciplined.

Biography

Laura Tiche and Annie Pendleton are amongst the select few truly educated people who can draw perfect chair cyclohexanes.  In addition to this monumental achievement, Laura and Annie are also (now) published writers and well-established authorities on a variety of subjects, including, but certainly not limited to, successful child rearing (although they have none of their own), creating chaos through chemistry, and power-walking up Jordan’s stairs.  Originally from the middle of nowhere north of Pittsburgh and even farther out in the boondocks of northern South Carolina, these two pride themselves on doing what is generally considered shocking and distasteful, like being free spirits and voting Democrat.  Future plans include saving the world one rotten little monster at a time. 

The following annotations are from websites we used in creating our article.  We used the websites more for layout and design ideas, and only a few were used as contextual sources.

"Brainwashing." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 15 Nov 2007, 07:12 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 19 Nov 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brainwashing&oldid=171617058>.

Although Wikipedia is not accepted by some teachers, the articles almost always provide valid links to websites from where the article’s information came and offer facts that can be verified by other sources.  The brainwashing article found on Wikipedia provides a general summary of brainwashing techniques.  The article was useful for our purposes because we did not want all of the details of brainwashing, we were only trying to get a general idea of the concept of brainwashing, which is exactly what the article provided.

McGraw, Dr. Phillip Calvin. "Common Discipline Mistakes." Parenting. 2007. 18 Nov 2007 <http://www.drphil.com/articles/article/250>.
Dr. Phil always has something interesting to say about anything, including parenting and discipline. This article describes some of what are, in his opinion, parenting mistakes.  He includes things like “inconsistent discipline” and “inappropriate punishment”, so we were sure to avoid those in our behavior alteration methods.

Pavlina , Steve. "Behavioral Conditioning." 02 Nov 2007 11 Nov 2007 <http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2004/11/behavioral-conditioning/ >.

This article provided us with all the ammunition necessary to create the three easy steps theme in our article.  It outlines a great number of tasks that are suggested to conditioning yourself to perform better.  The three steps we used come loosely from these instructions.

Pavlik , Rebekah. "Behavioral Parenting." Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies (2007) 11 Nov 2007 <http://www.behavior.org/parenting/>.

The name of the article on this Cambridge explains quite well as to why we found it helpful while writing our article.  The Cambridge center is a well known and reliable source.  Also, we have certainly learned a good deal about the importance of adult influence on a child’s development.