AOL Tech

Pam

Member since: Sep 21st, 2006

Pam's Latest Comments

Blog Activity
Blog# of Comments
ParentDish3 Comments
Gadling1 Comment
Switched1 Comment
AOL Jobs1 Comment
Daily Finance1 Comment

Recent Comments:

A light sleeper's lament: six things you shouldn't do in a hotel (Gadling)

Jan 14th 2012 8:20AM I had been driving for ten hours with a five-year-old when I finally stopped at a motel for some rest. At 10 p.m., the noise in the hallways started and didn't stop. I called the front desk. The second time I called, a cheerful person said, "Well, Darryl Strawberry is staying here and all his people are kind of excited. They're just celebrating." That was supposed to satisfy me. It didn't.

Insane Customer Service Calls: They Called About WHAT? (AOL Jobs)

Feb 3rd 2011 9:25PM Thirty years ago I worked at a TV station. While complaining to a co-worker about weird calls, I was told that those who show up in person are worse. Sometime before I started there, a family had shown up with a truckful of household items they had collected to donate to a family who had been burned out of their home - on a soap opera. The generous people couldn't understand that the fire had been part of a fictional story.

How Do I Handle Strangers Touching My Baby? (ParentDish)

Jun 1st 2010 2:44PM I don't mind admirers or a little touching but there is a limit. For instance the young woman who was admiring my baby and suddenly jumped because the baby tried out her new teeth on the finger of the woman. What the Sam Hill was her finger doing in my baby's mouth!?

Woman Terminates Adoption Because She Can't Bond With The Child (ParentDish)

Oct 1st 2009 7:21PM I've been a foster/adoptive mother for almost three decades. I don't know what this woman's situation was exactly but adoptions do disrupt and sometimes the only fault the adoptive parents have is naivete. Foster/adoptive parents are always working with less information than is necessary to parent well. We haven't been there from the beginning and don't know what traumas the child endured before they came to us. And any trauma affects a child's ability to bond - even an infant's. I went to a training not long ago that talked about the synapses that must connect in a baby's brain in the first three months and in the first three years. If those particular synapses don't happen on time, they may never happen. And when a child is in distress, more energy is put into developing the "fight or flight" survival portion of the brain than the other areas. The other issue here is that adoptive parents - especially of infants - rarely get enough pre-adoption or continuing education. I can't emphasize enough how important it is for this training to take place. Children are bounced from home to home very often because the parents in the home know just enough to be dangerous and not enough to be prepared.

Pre-Teens Build Successful iPhone App (Switched)

Jul 3rd 2009 1:09PM The concept is the same as printed flash cards which have the problem on one side and the answer on the other. The child looks at the problem, figures out an answer, then checks the back to see if it is correct. Meantime, the problem and answer are imprinting in their mind each time they look at them. This teaching method has been around for generations and is not part of the concern that learning is too easy. It's just getting their attention with technology and taking them through the same learning process used on us and our parents. Chill.

DIY stimulus: CEO gives workers $1000 each from his own pocket (Daily Finance)

Apr 5th 2009 2:26PM Many years ago, I worked for a newspaper company in New England. The owner, Bill Wasserman, has taken a small weekly paper and built it up to a company that published about 20 weeklies and a couple of monthlies. He sold it for a big profit and then shared the money with the employees. A thousand dollars for every year of service. I had been there less than two years but I got more than $1,600. Some folks got checks for over $20,000.

A class act.

Jon and Kate - Are they good enough parents for TV? (ParentDish)

Jul 31st 2008 9:12AM Kate has some growing up to do in how she deals with her husband but he seems to be able to take care of it in ways that work for them. He's quieter but he'll put his foot down or ignore her when he wants to.

As for avoiding messes with the kids, I think anyone who has had to clean up with two or three children has learned to avoid some kinds of messes. Someone with eight little kids has to be in survival mode most of the time. The fact that she's willing to take them to activities and places where just keeping up with them all would be exhausting means she's willing to put herself out and exhaust herself for them.

Just buckling that many kids in and out of carseats once or twice a day would be too much for me.

This person writing the article is very ready to judge her based on his experience with his kids. I'd be interested to know if he is the one who does the laundry, cleans the house, bathes the kids and deals with all the other consequences of messy play in their house - not just once in a while but on a daily basis. If he's not, he should shut up.