Dogs are wonderful creatures. Our home is shared with a beagle named Baxter, a sweet-hearted canine of simple tastes and constant optimism. I often wonder this:  If I knew as little of what was going on as he does, would I be as happy as he is? Probably.

Brittany Shahmehri is a very creative mom, and she knows the way to a boy’s heart — through his stomach. Shahmehri and her husband want their two boys to love books and reading, and they have come up with a great way to make books come alive for children.

Every generation worries about the next — and usually with good reason. Here is another reason for worry about today’s adolescents and young adults — they don’t read. That is a generalization, of course. But the generalization seems to be holding true.

The New York Times ran a major article on transgender children on December 2, adding considerable visibility to an issue that had, until recently, hardly been mentioned in public. [See my article of October 18, 2006, "Gender Confusion in the Kindergarten?"]

Administrators at Willett Elementary School in Attleboro, Massachusetts recently banned tag. That’s right folks, no more of that dangerous and frightening game in which one kid runs after another. None of that in Attleboro. They have discovered trouble with a capital “T” and its name is “Tag.”

TIME magazine, not to be mistaken for a journal on youth ministry, suggests in the current issue that evangelical youth ministry is trending toward substance and away from what it calls a “sugarcoated” approach.