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Sex education: Talking to your school-age child about sex

Sex education doesn’t need to be a single tell-all discussion. Follow your child’s cues about what he or she needs to know — and when.

Sex education often begins as simple anatomy lessons during the toddler years. But during the school-age years, your child might start asking specific questions about sex. Not sure what to say? Consider this guide to discussing sex with your school-age child.

Expect detailed questions

Toddlers and preschoolers are often satisfied with vague answers to questions about where babies come from. But school-age children tend to ask more-specific questions about the connection between sexuality and making babies. As your child’s questions about sex become more complex — and perhaps more embarrassing — he or she may turn to friends or other sources for information.

When your school-age child inquires about sex, ask what he or she already knows. Correct any misconceptions, and then offer enough details to answer the specific questions. Don’t laugh at your child’s questions or use nicknames for your child’s sexual anatomy, which may send the signal that these body parts shouldn’t be discussed.

Consider these examples:

What’s an erection? You might say, “A boy’s penis is usually soft. But sometimes it gets hard and stands away from the body. This is called an erection.” Describe how an erection can happen while a boy is sleeping or when his penis is touched. This might also be the time to describe a wet dream.

What’s a period? You might say, “A period means that a girl’s body is mature enough to become pregnant.” Explain how menstruation is an important part of the reproductive cycle. You might offer details on bleeding and feminine hygiene products.

How do people have sex? If your child wonders about the mechanics of sex, be honest. You might say, “The man puts his penis inside the woman’s vagina.” Consider using a book with illustrations or diagrams to help your child understand.

Can two girls have sex? Or two boys? It might be enough to say, “Yes, there are many types of intimate relationships including those between two people of the same sex.” Be available then to answer specific questions your child may have about homosexuality. In this and other issues regarding sexuality, brief answers to specific questions will serve your child best.
What’s masturbation? You might say, “Masturbation is when a boy rubs his penis or a girl rubs her clitoris.” Remind your child that masturbation is a normal — but private — activity.
Even if you’re uncomfortable, forge ahead. Remember, you’re setting the stage for open, honest discussions in the years to come. Consider who’s best to educate your child —you, the TV, the Internet or your child’s friends?

Preteen angst

Between ages 8 and 12, children often worry whether they’re “normal” — particularly when it comes to the size and symmetry of the penis, testicles and breasts. Explain what happens during puberty for both boys and girls. Offer reassurance that children of the same age mature at different rates. Puberty might begin years earlier — or later — for some children, but eventually everyone catches up. You might want to share experiences from your own development, particularly if you once had the same concerns that your child has now.

Responsibilities and consequences

Talk to your child about the emotional and physical consequences of becoming sexually active, such as pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections and a range of feelings. Discussing these issues now can help your child avoid feeling pressured to become sexually active before he or she is ready. While you’re telling your child about the dangers of sex, don’t be afraid to mention the joys, too. Let your child know that sex can be beautiful in a loving, committed relationship.

Everyday moments are key

Use everyday opportunities to discuss sex. Teachable moments are everywhere. If there’s a pregnancy in the family, talk about how a baby develops inside a woman’s body. If you see a commercial for a feminine hygiene product, use it as a springboard to talk about periods. If a couple on a TV show begin dating, talk about relationships and falling in love.

Take your role in sex education seriously. Encourage your child to take care of his or her body, develop a healthy sense of self-respect, and seek information from trusted sources. Your thoughtful approach to sex education can help your child develop a lifetime of healthy sexuality.

Are Dragons Real? Facts About Dragons

Dragons are among the most popular and enduring of the world’s mythological creatures. Dragon tales are known in many cultures, from the Americas to Europe to India to China. Though they populate our books, films, and television shows, they have a long and rich history in many forms.
It’s not clear when or where stories of dragons first emerged, but the huge, flying serpents were described by the ancient Greeks and Sumerians. For much of history dragons were thought of as being like any other exotic animal: sometimes useful and protective, other times harmful and dangerous. That changed when Christianity spread across the world; dragons took on a decidedly sinister interpretation and came to represent Satan. In medieval times, most people who heard anything about dragons knew them from the Bible, and it’s likely that most Christians at the time believed in the literal existence of dragons. After all, Leviathan — the massive monster described in detail in the Book of Job, chapter 41 — seems to describe a dragon in detail:
“I will not fail to speak of Leviathan’s limbs, its strength and its graceful form. Who can strip off its outer coat? Who can penetrate its double coat of armor? Who dares open the doors of its mouth, ringed about with fearsome teeth? Its back has rows of shields tightly sealed together; each is so close to the next that no air can pass between. They are joined fast to one another; they cling together and cannot be parted. Its snorting throws out flashes of light; its eyes are like the rays of dawn. Flames stream from its mouth; sparks of fire shoot out. Smoke pours from its nostrils as from a boiling pot over burning reeds. Its breath sets coals ablaze, and flames dart from its mouth” (NIV).

The sims 4

The Sims 4 is a 2014 life simulation video game developed by Maxis and The Sims Studio and published by Electronic Arts. The Sims 4 was originally announced on May 6, 2013, and was released in North America on September 2, 2014 for Microsoft Windows.[1] A Mac compatible version of the software was made available for digital download on February 17, 2015.[2] There are currently no plans for a console release.[3][4] The Sims 4 is the first PC game to top all-format charts in two years and sold 408,150 copies worldwide in the first four days. As of November the game has sold over 1.10 million copies worldwide.[5][6] The game has received mixed reviews since its release.[7]

The game has the same concept as its predecessor, The Sims 3. Players control their Sims in various activities and form relationships. The game, like the rest of the series, does not have a defined final goal; gameplay is nonlinear. The Create-a-Sim and Build Mode tools have been redesigned to allow more versatility when creating game content. Emotional state plays a larger role in gameplay than in previous games in the series, with effects on social interaction, user interface, and personality.

GAMEPLAY
The Sims 4 is a life simulation game, similar to its predecessors. Players create a Sim character and explore different personalities which change the way the game plays out. Sims can multitask such as talk while doing a task. Sims’ moodlets also change the gameplay. For example, a Sim can do a task while being either angry or totally excited.[8][9][10]

A lot of furniture and a detailed build-and-buy system are present along with neighborhoods and landscaping.

The Sims 4 also includes a lot of social features, such as importing Sims and houses other people have made into your game. This impacts the world around your Sims.

Similar to previous Sims games, player-created challenges abound. One of the most prevalent is the Legacy Challenge, in which players control a single Sim and try to make its family line last for ten generations.

Are Ghosts Real? Science Says No-o-o-o

If you believe in ghosts, you’re not alone. Cultures all around the world believe in spirits that survive death to live in another realm. In fact, ghosts are among the most widely believed of paranormal phenomena: Millions of people are interested in ghosts, and a 2005 Gallup poll found that 37 percent of Americans believe in haunted houses — and nearly half believe in ghosts.
Ghosts have been a popular subject for millennia, appearing in countless stories, from the Bible to “Macbeth,” and even spawning their own folklore genre: ghost stories. Part of the reason is that belief in ghosts is part of a larger web of related paranormal beliefs, including near-death experience, life after death and spirit communication.
People have tried to (or claimed to) communicate with spirits for ages; in Victorian England, for example, it was fashionable for upper-crust ladies to hold séances in their parlors after tea and crumpets with friends. In America during the late 1800s, many psychic mediums claimed to speak to the dead — but were exposed as frauds by skeptical investigators such as Harry Houdini.
It wasn’t until the past decade that ghost hunting became a widespread interest around the world. Much of this is due to Syfy cable TV’s hit series “Ghost Hunters,” now in its 10th season of not finding good evidence for ghosts. The show spawned several spin-offs, including “Ghost Hunters International” and “Ghost Hunters Academy,” and it’s not hard to see why the show is so popular: the premise is that anyone can look for ghosts. The two original stars were ordinary guys (plumbers, in fact) who decided to look for evidence of spirits. Their message: You don’t need to be an egghead scientist, or even have any training in science or investigation. All you need is some free time, a dark place and maybe a few gadgets from an electronics store. If you look long enough, any unexplained light or noise might be evidence of ghosts.
The idea that the dead remain with us in spirit is an ancient one, and one that offers many people comfort; who doesn’t want to believe that our beloved but deceased family members aren’t looking out for us, or with us in our times of need? Most people believe in ghosts because of personal experience; they have seen or sensed some unexplained presence.
The science and logic of ghosts
Personal experience is one thing, but scientific evidence is another matter. Part of the difficulty in investigating ghosts is that there is not one universally agreed-upon definition of what a ghost is. Some believe that they are spirits of the dead who for whatever reason get “lost” on their way to The Other Side; others claim that ghosts are instead telepathic entities projected into the world from our minds.
Still others create their own special categories for different types of ghosts, such as poltergeists, residual hauntings, intelligent spirits and shadow people. Of course, it’s all made up, like speculating on the different races of fairies or dragons: there are as many types of ghosts as you want there to be.
There are many contradictions inherent in ideas about ghosts. For example, are ghosts material or not? Either they can move through solid objects without disturbing them, or they can slam doors shut and throw objects across the room. Logically and physically, it’s one or the other. If ghosts are human souls, why do they appear clothed and with (presumably soulless) inanimate objects like hats, canes and dresses — not to mention the many reports of ghost trains, cars and carriages?
If ghosts are the spirits of those whose deaths were unavenged, why are there unsolved murders, since ghosts are said to communicate with psychic mediums, and should be able to identify their killers for the police. And so on; just about any claim about ghosts raises logical reasons to doubt it.
Ghost hunters use many creative (and dubious) methods to detect the spirits’ presences, often including psychics. Virtually all ghost hunters claim to be scientific, and most give that appearance because they use high-tech scientific equipment such as Geiger counters, electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors, ion detectors, infrared cameras and sensitive microphones. Yet none of this equipment has ever been shown to actually detect ghosts.
Other people take exactly the opposite approach, claiming that the reason that ghosts haven’t been proven to exist is that we simply don’t have the right technology to find or detect the spirit world. But this, too, can’t be correct: Either ghosts exist and appear in our ordinary physical world (and can therefore be detected and recorded in photographs, film, video and audio recordings), or they don’t. If ghosts exist and can be scientifically detected or recorded, then we should find hard evidence of that — yet we don’t. If ghosts exist and cannot be scientifically detected or recorded, then all the photos, videos and other recordings claimed to be evidence of ghosts cannot be ghosts. With so many basic contradictory theories — and so little science brought to bear on the topic — it’s not surprising that despite the efforts of thousands of ghost hunters on television and elsewhere for decades, not a single piece of hard evidence of ghosts has been found.
Why many believe
Many people believe that support for the existence of ghosts can be found in no less a hard science than modern physics. It is widely claimed that Albert Einstein suggested a scientific basis for the reality of ghosts; if energy cannot be created or destroyed but only change form, what happens to our body’s energy when we die? Could that somehow be manifested as a ghost?
Pin It Carol Anne: Hello? What do you look like? Talk louder, I can’t hear you! Poltergeist helped define a paranormal culture in the United States.
It seems like a reasonable assumption — unless you understand basic physics. The answer is very simple, and not at all mysterious. After a person dies, the energy in his or her body goes where all organisms’ energy goes after death: into the environment. The energy is released in the form of heat, and transferred into the animals that eat us (i.e., wild animals if we are left unburied, or worms and bacteria if we are interred), and the plants that absorb us. There is no bodily “energy” that survives death to be detected with popular ghost-hunting devices.
While amateur ghost hunters like to imagine themselves on the cutting edge of ghost research, they are really engaging in what folklorists call ostension, or legend tripping. It’s basically a form of playacting in which people “act out” a legend, often involving ghosts or supernatural elements. In his book “Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live” (University Press of Mississippi, 2003) folklorist Bill Ellis points out that ghost hunters themselves often take the search seriously and “venture out to challenge supernatural beings, confront them in consciously dramatized form, then return to safety. … The stated purpose of such activities is not entertainment but a sincere effort to test and define boundaries of the ‘real’ world.'”
If ghosts are real, and are some sort of as-yet-unknown energy or entity, then their existence will (like all other scientific discoveries) be verified by scientists through controlled experiments — not by weekend ghost hunters wandering around abandoned houses in the dark late at night with cameras and flashlights.
In the end (and despite mountains of ambiguous photos, sounds and videos), the evidence for ghosts is no better today than it was a year ago, a decade ago or a century ago. There are two possible reasons for the failure of ghost hunters to find good evidence. The first is that ghosts don’t exist, and that reports of ghosts can be explained by psychology, misperceptions, mistakes and hoaxes. The second option is that ghosts do exist, but that ghost hunters are simply incompetent. Ultimately, ghost hunting is not about the evidence (if it was, the search would have been abandoned long ago). Instead, it’s about having fun with friends, telling stories, and the enjoyment of pretending to be searching the edge of the unknown. After all, everyone loves a good ghost story.

Quick, Easy Sugar Cookies Recipe

2 3⁄4 cups flour (all purpose is fine)
1 1⁄2 teaspoons baking soda
1 cup butter (softened in microwave)
1 1⁄2 cups sugar
1 egg (large)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Optional

1 teaspoon cinnamon
sugar (for rolling the dough balls in before baking)

DIRECTIONS

Preheat oven to 375°F In a bowl, mix flour and baking soda.
In a larger bowl, cream sugar and softened butter until smooth. Mix in the egg and vanilla extract. Blend in the dry ingredients slowly until combined. I first made these with a fork instead of a mixer and it was fine. Hand roll into balls (teaspoon size) and place on an ungreased cookie sheet. Optional: Roll the dough balls in a mix of cinnamon and sugar before placing on the baking sheet.
Bake 8 – 10 minutes or until light golden brown. Let the cookies cool for 2 minutes away from the heat before devouring.