On a recent drive past the urban mega-cemetery where the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway intersects the Long Island Expressway, my five year old exclaimed “Look, a stone forest!”  It was a wondrous, important place in her eyes, and though she had visited graveyards, she had never taken in such a striking panoramic view of one.  Having officiated at several of her own pet funerals in her brief career as a thinking, feeling being, she exhibited a comfortable somberness at the sight.  I could see her lips move slightly as she attempted to count in hushed amazement the innumerable headstones rocketing past our view.  “What are all those stones for, Daddy?” (more…)

Coney Island is real.  It is neither safer nor more dangerous than anywhere else, neither pristine nor tarnished.  It is where someone in your extended family proposed years ago, a magic place to which generations past have travelled from far and wide.  But it is also that spot you heard was “seedy” and housed an aspect of your generation’s “bad element.”  It is a place where grand dreams have flourished, and others have died tragic deaths.  It’s where we have gone to talk to the girls and boys of our dreams, get sand kicked in our faces by bullies, and either quailed in fear or rose to the challenge.  It is the amusement park venue on the beach in “The City that Never Sleeps!”  How you can you beat that for quintessential American entertainment saturation? (more…)

We want our kids to succeed, not just because of our obligation to provide them with good lives, but because we love them and want them to be happy.  So, how much parental intervention is warranted in the face of a growing teen’s natural ups and downs, successes and failures, joys and sorrows?  Where do we draw the line and maintain control of decision-making for our kids while we’re simultaneously nurturing their capacity for independent decision-making?  (more…)