Tag Archives: Children

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Growing Up

Things That Get Kids in
Trouble or Joy Early On

There are many ways to manage a blog, not unlike how anyone would treat their own houses. Some put out dazzling displays to catch the eye of net surfers: every week, a new garden-dwarf video has the potential to go viral. Many turn it into a living room, full of family pictures and tchotchkes above the fireplace. Yet others are more like backyards, where you find pics of a rusty BBQ grill or of a missing-wheel bicycle; old vases with cigarette butts, or shipwreck stories about broken men.
Here at Colltales, we’ve built a shack to shelter our readers. Anyone’s welcome to browse the shelves, go through the toolbox, inspect the old trunk full of mementos from another era. Such a place, folks, is where we’d hoped to find the connection to today’s theme: a quick look at three interesting kids, whose recent antics landed them on the news, and a bunch of boys, whose high-pitched singing voices seem to be dwindling faster than that of their predecessors.
Writing a blog feels often like a trek into a foreign country: you know some words of the language, and you’re prepared to camp anywhere, if necessary. But whatever you come across is what will ultimately define your trip, and the new memories you may gather about the new place and the people will depend on how capable you’ll be able to think on your feet.
If we’ve played this correctly, that’s exactly where you, dear reader, are at now: there’s a lot around you that you can’t quite decipher yet, and Continue reading →

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Half-Past Child

The Teen Brain
of Adolescence

Chances are, if you have a teenager or two living at your home, you may have been puzzled by how their minds work. Or how you should kill them. Either way, you’re definitely not alone in this quagmire: they wouldn’t be able to tell you either.
Parents, siblings, psychologists, and pretty much everyone and the grandfather of that oh so adjusted adolescent who suddenly murdered his whole family, have agonized over what makes those years between childhood and early adulthood so mind boggling.
At least, since the concept of adolescence itself was created around the time the Industrial Revolution. It definitely changed forever the way humans were supposed to be raised, grow and leave their homes to join the world workforce and form families of their own.
Such radical changes haven’t stopped reshaping the nuclear family ever since. After WWII, specially, new generations effectively took the helm of society mores with the birth of a youth culture that suddenly was no longer expected to follow on their parents’ footsteps.
The pill and the sexual revolution of the 1960s helped to consolidate Continue reading →