Children

This week's deals include three specialized offers for trips to three distinct places. Although New Englanders have visited islands around the world, many have never seen two Massachusetts ones: Cuttyhunk and the Elizabeth Islands. The Massachusetts Audubon Society will offer day trips there this month. The exploration begins with a 1F-hour boat trip from Woods Hole through Vineyard Sound and Buzzards Bay along the Elizabeth Islands, with commentary focusing on landmarks, geology, wildlife and the history of the quiet, protected islands.

A former Baltimore County gymnastics teacher pleaded guilty yesterday in what federal prosecutors called one of Maryland's largest child pornography cases. Patrick David Bogan, 41, an Edgewood resident who worked with children at a White Marsh gymnastics center, could receive a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison after admitting to acquiring child pornography through the mail and over the Internet. Authorities were led to Bogan after he accessed an Internet file linked from an FBI-controlled computer while perusing a bulletin board that contained child pornography.

For parents who worry that a child's tantrums or other disruptive activity portends academic failure, there's reason for hope. Two new studies show that children who enter kindergarten behaving badly can turn out to be successful after all. One study by an international team of researchers examined indicators of social and intellectual development in more than 16,000 children and found that those who had interrupted the teacher, ignored or resisted instructions...

Dolores of Baltimore wants a second opinion. The 70-year-old owns a house, but wonders if she should put the names of her four children on the deed to avoid estate taxes when she dies. She says a lawyer told her years ago that it doesn't matter as long as she named the children as beneficiaries in her will. "But will they have to pay more taxes that way, or will it be a legal hassle for them without their having been named on the house deed?" she asks in an email. I ran Dolores' question by two Maryland estate planning lawyers.

Someone sent me a file of photos of Costa Rican beaches and surf and beautiful, languid people in shorts and sandals - sent it to me here on the frozen tundra, where this morning my sandy-haired, gap-toothed daughter and I struggled through the sleet and snow toward school, like Washington crossing the Delaware. We can't all go to Costa Rica. Some of us must stay at our posts and sacrifice personal comfort to make sure the roads are plowed so the children can attend school and learn about gerunds and string theory and the lifeways of the Yoruba people.

A federal review of safety concerns about cough and cold remedies ought to be quick and result in restrictions on the products' marketing and use, Baltimore's health commissioner said yesterday. Dr. Joshua Sharfstein and a group of prominent pediatricians petitioned the Food and Drug Administration Thursday to warn parents against giving cough and cold medications to young children. The group wants the FDA to require drugmakers to stop marketing products for infants and babies. It also wants warning labels stating that the medications "have not been found to be safe or effective" for children under 6. FDA officials announced plans yesterday to review the matter over the next several months.

For Marie Atalla, the small white-paneled house and green yard on quiet College Road in Sykesville represents the fulfillment of a dream. After searching for the right location, renovating and planning, Atalla, who grew up in Egypt, is set to open Ava Wanas Montessori School, for children 2 to 5 years old, this fall. Hers follows the decades-old Montessori School of Westminster and Mount Airy's Misty Mountain Montessori, a program going into its fifth year, said Marliese Roth, its director.

It looks like a typical three-bedroom home, with a nursery, a teen game room and fully stocked refrigerator in the kitchen - the works. The only thing different about Harmony House is that no one will live there. On Tuesday, the Anne Arundel County Department of Social Services will reopen the old parsonage of a Pasadena church as a place where birth parents can spend supervised time with their children in a homelike environment, receive training in being better parents and learn how to put their families back together.

DEAR AMY -- I recently married the father of six wonderful children. So far, most of the kids seem to approve of me. However, two don't - they are 6 and 9 years old. They go out of their way to make me feel as if I am nothing. I have tried many times to reason with them and convince them that I am actually the best thing to ever happen to their father and to them. How can I make them realize that they really do depend on me to make their lives as happy as possible? So far, the 6-year-old has been the toughest to deal with, and he seems to enjoy calling me names and watching me cry. Both of these children have severely bratty tendencies, but he is the worst.

Of all the photos to emerge from Virginia Tech last week, one is particularly telling. A student is standing on a sidewalk, and at her feet lie a mesh laundry bag and a tote bag, a well-loved stuffed bear peeking out from its strap handles. The photo caption says she is waiting for a ride home, but if a bag of laundry and a stuffed animal don't say "college student going home," I don't know what does. A steady stream of students left campus last week in search of the comfort and safety of home.

Just a few months after her husband drowned their three children, Amy Castillo found herself standing on top of a mountain during a Christian missionary trip to China, winds whipping, rain pouring down. She asked herself a question: "Can I live with this?" A long time passed before she could honestly answer. The man she once playfully called "sexy thing," who swept her off her feet and quickly became her best friend, had gradually vanished over the past five years. In his place was a manic, suicidal stranger who spent entire nights at Baltimore strip clubs, blew thousands of dollars in wild shopping sprees and accused her of being self-righteous and manipulative.

In recent days, a misguided and unfocused debate related to the closing of group homes serving foster children would have us believe providers' only interest is self preservation. This has obscured issues of far greater importance to the safety and well-being of abused and neglected children. For more than a decade, the state allowed unprecedented, unplanned and unguided growth in the number of group homes, concentrated in a handful of least resistant communities. This development did not result in the most beneficial array of services, nor did it ensure the development of services where they are needed.

Mark Castillo and his three children spent the day downtown, at the Maryland Science Center, before he checked into the Marriott Inner Harbor hotel at Camden Yards about 5 p.m. March 29, 2008, according to a statement he gave police at Maryland Shock Trauma Center a day later. By then, the children were dead, and Castillo was recovering from self-inflicted stab wounds to his neck. "My plan," he said on the tape, "was after [we] had a good day, to, uh, take their lives." The tape was played during a hearing Wednesday on a defense motion to suppress Castillo's statements to detectives.

That's not schooling As a former teacher in both public and private schools and, presently, as an advisory teacher for a well-known home schooling program, I was dismayed by the article, "Where whatever children do is schooling" (Sept. 3). I disagree that children can guide their own learning without some type of structure or curriculum. Most parents, I believe, would find teaching their children in this manner incredibly challenging, to say the least. No one can argue that reading to children isn't enormously beneficial, but only a few children will learn to read just from this method, nor will they necessarily learn to read or do math via video games.

On one of his last days of summer vacation, Hunter Sears would have preferred to still be in bed at 10 a.m., or maybe just settling in for a few good hours of television. So why, exactly, was the 13-year-old Anne Arundel County boy sitting in his Annapolis pediatrician's office yesterday, his orange T-shirt rolled up to his shoulder as a nurse first took blood from his arm and then gave him a shot he didn't need to get? Hunter was pediatric volunteer No.1 of an expected 600 nationwide for an experimental vaccine against the H1N1 influenza virus, a new strain of flu that appeared in April and which officials fear will be widespread come fall.

The stories were horrifying and heart-wrenching: a boy beaten bloody while in foster care; a 15-year-old girl tortured and starved to death by a mentally ill guardian; a 5-year-old fatally scalded by his mother after state officials removed him from a safe foster home. It's no wonder such egregious cases of abuse and neglect have helped drive a 25-year-old lawsuit over how the Maryland Department of Human Resources and the Baltimore Department of Social Services care for the state's most vulnerable children and adolescents.

A century ago, Teddy Roosevelt had the wisdom and foresight to bring together a disparate array of experts and advocates at the White House to discuss the condition and needs of America's children and what government, businesses, and nonprofits could do to make the lives of the nation's youngest citizens better. The 200 participants in this first White House Conference on Children focused on how to improve the lot of institutionalized and neglected children and strengthen poor families, resulting in state legislative action across the country and the creation of the Children's Bureau, the first federal agency to monitor children's welfare.

When an unvaccinated child in Dr. Daniel Levy's practice came down with whooping cough this year, the Owings Mills pediatrician made a decision: He would no longer see patients whose parents refused to have them immunized against that disease or others, such as measles and meningitis. The risks posed to his other patients were too great, Levy reasoned. And he felt he couldn't give adequate care to children whose parents rejected some of his most basic advice: That routine childhood vaccines are safe and are the key to preventing diseases that used to kill many before they could reach adulthood.

Everyone knows 21st-century children are weak-willed, mush-brained slugs addicted to television and video games and no more capable of unhooking themselves from their electronic stimuli than a tick swearing off mammals. So when National Turn-Off-Tune-In Week began on Monday, two youngsters of my acquaintance - ages 10 and 13 - decided to meet the challenge. As I noted on the Second Opinion blog this week: Why is the family room barricaded? The youngest - no doubt sensing his own frailty in this arena - blocked the door leading to the big-screen TV. He taped "do not watch" notes over every video display in the house and picked up a challenging chapter book from the library in preparation.

With a hairnet on his head and too-big plastic gloves slipping off his small hands, 9-year-old Michael Woods began making a sub sandwich by placing a slice of cheese on the bread. Then other schoolchildren add two slices of turkey, a slice of ham and some lettuce to finish off the sandwich, one of 700 that Michael and other children of Constellation Energy Group employees assembled Thursday to feed people at Our Daily Bread, a soup kitchen in Baltimore. "Yeah, it's fun," Michael says as his father, Gary, a Constellation information technology employee, stands nearby.