Ba đã quá hèn nhát nên đã không lên tiếng khi tụi con bị người lớn vì bênh vực con mình mà đã giận dữ với tụi con. Thậm chí cả ba cũng rầy la tụi con khi thấy con người ta khóc. Người ta thương yêu con họ hơn ba yêu thương tụi con. Ba vì sợ mếch lòng người lớn nên đã yên lặng.

Nhưng ba rất hảnh diện khi thấy tụi con bị đối xử như vậy mà vẫn không khóc. Cuộc đời này là vậy đó con. Trong tương lai con sẽ còn gặp nhiều chuyện khó khăn hơn. Nếu con có nghị lực sẽ không ai có thể đánh gục tụi con. Cha mẹ sẽ không lúc nào cũng ở bên con. Nên tụi con phải mạnh dạn lên. Đừng để thiên hạ làm tổn thương đến con.

Be resilient, my sons.

Just read Le Guin’s excellent No Time to Spare last December and found out she passed way on Monday. RIP.

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub explain democracy in a short, well-executed video.

A short, insightful interview with Tonya Harding on “The Daily.” Worth listening on your commute.

As their kid became more sensitive, especially when he was around our kids, the parents saw our boys as bullies. They sought out advice from other parents. Without knowing our kids, other parents told them to jump in immediately to intervene when their kid being bullied.

Instead of coming to us to raise their concerns about our kids, they took it upon themselves to deal with our kids. If they were to use the opportunity to teach them about bullying then I would have appreciated their effort. Instead they immediately jumped to defend their boy whenever he got upset. At first they raised their voice a little. When my kid said “You are mean,” their kid didn’t get a chance to respond, the mother replied, “He is not mean. How is he mean? That’s not nice to say.” Although I did notice the tone was a bit upsetting, I did not respond. Then it continued to escalate to yelling and grabbing. In retrospect, I should have spoken up. I have too much respect for them and I didn’t want to cause any friction within the family.

Their interventions did not helped their kid because he learned that his parents will defend him no matter what he did. As he got more sensitive, the attacks gotten more vicious to our kids to the point that I needed to straighten up the parents even if it has to fracture our relationships.

Now that we recognized the issue, I hope that we can work together to help the kids have a better, friendlier relationship. Family gathering should be fun, not stressful. They are at the age now that they can play on their own. I don’t want to have to hover them all the time to make sure that no one is crying or upsetting. Since they haven’t beat each other to the pulp yet, we can still help them overcome their conflicts. We just need to step back and give them space.

The title of Segura’s latest Netflix special should be a warning. From retarded to squinting to porn, his jokes are disgraceful yet brilliant. His dark comic isn’t for everyone, but if you are open to controversial topics, you’ll love it. Watch it now before Netflix removes it.

Want to see some extremely fucked up stock photography? Follow @darkstockphotos.

Adam Gopnik:

Child rearing is an art, and what makes art art is that it is doing several things at once. The trick is accepting limits while insisting on standards. Character may not be malleable, but behavior is. The same parents can raise a dreamy, reflective girl and a driven, competitive one—the job is not to nurse her nature but to help elicit the essential opposite: to help the dreamy one to be a little more driven, the competitive one to be a little more reflective.

Gopnik concludes:

Nothing works in child rearing because everything works. If kids are happy and absorbed, in the flow, that’s all we can ask of them, in Berlin or in Brooklyn. Nothing works in the long run, but the mistake lies in thinking that the long run is the one that counts.

When a parent got upset, grabbed your son’s arm, and spoke to your kid in an angry tone, you needed to address it. For the sake of family relationship, I had stayed silence, but the progression has escalated. As soon as their kid got upset, the parents rushed in to defend. I had no problem if the parents use the moment to teach the kids about conflict. I have a problem when the parents defended their own kid by yelling at the other kids. My concern is when the parents get upset, yelling, and then grabbing. What’s next? Punching? Even though I understand that the family dynamics will change forever, I needed to intervene to avoid the violence.

I proposed that all of the parents take a step back and let the kids work out the conflicts themselves. If they can play together then they can solve the issues together. At age 6 to 8, they can communicate among themselves. When they get out of hand then we would step in. Stepping in doesn’t mean yelling or grabbing the other kids and defend your own.

I want the kids to work things out themselves and not having to depend on the parents. The other parent didn’t agree because he felt that his kid always got picked on. Isn’t the whole point for the parents to step back is to let the kids learn to defend themselves? We can’t be there for our kids every second. If the parents want to defend their own kid then I would have to step in as well. The kids’ conflicts then become the family’s conflicts. That would be ugly.

I understand that the love and the emotional attachment make it hard for the parents to step back. We are in the age of “my child is above all.” I have assessed my own emotion to see if my feeling has taken over my thinking and reasoning. Am I being too dramatic over the situation? I have come to the conclusion that I am not because I am fine with letting the kids handle their own issues. I am fine with letting the parents handle the situation fairly. I am not OK with the parents yelling and grabbing the other kids in order to defend their own. The line is drawn when the adults can’t control their emotion and get upset with the other kids. Adult can get upset, but they simply can’t channel their angriness on the kids.

Since we could not come to an agreement and the other parent could not offer any suggestion, the temporary solution is avoid conflicts. I don’t want to separate the kids because they have been together since they were born, but it is better than becoming a family issue. We can change the kids, but we can’t change the parents.

Through his observations and interactions with his daughter, Crystal tries to make sense of the English grammar. It’s fascinating to see how his daughter progressed from using one word at age two to forming complete sentences as she grew older. Unfortunately, I don’t get anything out of it as far as making sense of the rules of English grammar. If you want to learn the technicality of grammar, this is not the right book.