When I was growing up, my Dad let my brother and me have the run of his wood shop, and kept up a steady stream of Lego kits, Estes model rockets, chemistry sets, Heathkit projects, and other fun science stuff from the Edmund Scientific catalog, and the rest was history. I'd like to give my kids that kind of experience. If your kids were interested in science, computers, robots, and building stuff, how would you build and outfit a lab/shop for them (and you) to play in?

Sounds a lot like the stuff I had as a kid.

First, parents with two or more children should be more willing to punish their older children who engage in risky behaviour in order to influence the actions of their later-born children. Second, to the extent that parents can establish such reputations, their older children are less likely to engage in risky behaviour as teens. In essence, the reputation model implies that risk-taking of adolescent offspring and parental responses to such behaviour vary systematically by birth order.

Administrators of the Raymondville school system said they will review the district's cell phone policy after a report of an assault on a middle school student that was recorded with a cell phone and then displayed on YouTube.

It was at least the second time this year students from the school district uploaded violent videos to YouTube, said school board president John Solis. Early this year, a Raymondville High School student used a video to solicit someone to beat another student.

The father of a 13-year-old girl whose recent video-recorded beating was uploaded to the video-sharing Web site said he may press assault charges against the other students he blames for injuring his daughter.

Regino Garcia said Friday he is dissatisfied with the response of school administrators who he believes did not adequately punish those involved in the beating.

If this video wasn't recorded (and posted to YouTube), would there be evidence of the beating? How many eyewitnesses would have stepped forward?

If there is one thing good about a surveillance society, it's that those wronging others are more likely to be caught.

At my job interview in September, I suggested (based on some wonderfully helpful feedback from readers) that the Anne Arundel CC model of evening childcare might be a great way to help returning adult students succeed. My argument was that working parents would be much more able to commit to regular class attendance if they could drop off their kid(s) at a good childcare center on campus. Ideally, keep the cafeteria open late enough that they could grab something to eat before class, too. A parent who knows her kid is okay is able to focus on other things.

The students I spoke to loved the idea. The women I spoke to loved the idea.

The men did not love the idea. I didn't get the job.

I've worked at two colleges now that have evicted their onsite daycare centers. (My previous college did that the same month TB was born. I was fit to be tied.) Daycare centers tend to be money-losers, and enrollment-driven institutions don't like to use space that could have gone to tuition-paying students for just about anything else.

Trying to balance a single college's budget, I get that. I really do. I wrote that $250 check every week for TB's daycare (the going rate around here at the time), and it was painful. I did the math once; it worked out to $13,000 a year, and there was no financial aid. And the daycare workers weren't exactly getting rich.

Something is fundamentally wrong.

That's when he showed her the manuscript for his children's picture book, "My Beautiful Mommy" (Big Tent Books), out this Mother's Day. It features a perky mother explaining to her child why she's having cosmetic surgery (a nose job and tummy tuck). Naturally, it has a happy ending: mommy winds up "even more" beautiful than before, and her daughter is thrilled.

The reassuring tale helped win Acosta over--she scheduled breast augmentation and a tummy tuck. Since February, when she had the surgery, she and Junior have read the book a half dozen times, and she says it helped him feel excited rather than scared. "I didn't want him to think [the surgery] was because I was hurting. It was to make me feel good," she says.

Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.

No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn't want to lose it. And no, I didn't trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn't do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, "Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I'll abduct this adorable child instead."

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I've told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It's not. It's debilitating -- for us and for them.