| Support for stability: SCIE’s response to Care Matters White Paper
The measures reflect many of SCIE's recommendations drawn from work with care-experienced young people, parents, practitioners and researchers. Chair of SCIE, Allan Bowman, welcomed the challenging political initiative of raising the national profile of the lives of children in care. Speaking about the paper, he said that care-experienced young people will particularly benefit from support after the age of 16 and more structured ways of participating in service development. "Young people from care have told us that they want stability, to be listened to, taken seriously, involved fully in decisions about their lives, and helped to become independent adults. High-level support for young people during their transition to adulthood is vital to build the necessary resilience, self-esteem and empowerment to progress with confidence.
Tennis coach takes athletes to school
An apparent mismatch on the tennis courts of the Discovery Bay Athletic Club on Sunday resulted in a close match and plenty of entertainment for some 50 spectators on hand.To those watching, it seemed like just another friendly game between 20-somethings and men twice their age. But to national tennis guru Wayne Bryan, it might as well have been match point at Wimbledon. Bryan, holding a microphone just outside the service court, spoke in dulcet tones as if he were announcing the game to a national audience.As the match went back and forth, coming down to a close victory for the younger guys, it was easy to forget that just an hour before, Bryan was teaching the groups how to properly hold a racket.The match was a culmination of a daylong clinic hosted by Bryan, the head coach of World Team Tennis’ Sacramento Capitals and father of the top-ranked doubles team in the world – Mike and Bob.With his good-ol’-boy charm and encouraging style, it’s easy to fathom that he’s one of the most sought-after tennis coaches in the country."It was a lot of fun," said Alex Wisner from Discovery Bay.
New Chicago Moms Blog site lets mothers write it out
Some of the most recent posts were about (over?) strategizing your kid's life, raising your child in a suburb with a diverse population, and a "parenting war" going on over whether you coddle your baby at every whimper or let him cry it out. The new blog site, perhaps not surprisingly, is called Chicago Moms Blog (www.chicagomomsblog.com). It's a collection of local, so-called "mommy bloggers," who maintain their separate Web identities but are also now grouped together on the theory that there's power and possibly advertising dollars in numbers. There's certainly a detailed examination of the experience of motherhood. Parking her child in front of "The Wiggles" one morning so she could shower, writes Elizabeth York, was a leap onto a slippery slope. " 'The Wiggles' was just a gateway drug to Happy Meals, Disney cartoons, and (gasp) shopping sprees at Target," she says, sort of fretting over the loss of some of her parenting ideals.
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