Childhood

Phil Jackson never liked to compare Kobe Bryant to Michael Jordan. Believe me, I tried everything. Sometimes I'd ask him after random Lakers practices or before games against Charlotte, the team Jordan owned. Or after games in Chicago, where nostalgia hopefully would add to the mix. There would be a little nugget here, a tiny nibble there, but nothing that mattered. It's coming out now, though, in Jackson's 339-page memoir co-written with Hugh Delehanty and available Tuesday: "Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success.

Indiana Jones, the swashbuckling fictional adventurer, would seem to have nothing on John Goddard. As a boy growing up in Los Angeles, Goddard dreamed of adventures in faraway lands and spent his life pursuing an elaborate set of goals. He wanted to climb the world's most perilous peaks, navigate its major rivers and explore its most remote regions, among many other ambitions. Goddard, an adventurer, explorer and lecturer who evidently fell only a few goals short of a boyhood list that numbered more than 100, died Friday at a Glendale hospital of complications from cancer, said his son Jeffery.

If you are a teacher in debt, there's good news and bad news. There are literally dozens of programs that could potentially help wipe out your student loans. But most of them have narrow requirements that may lock you out. Just ask Troy Dale, a high school counselor from Ellis, Kan. He and his wife have $23,000 in student loans that they've been paying down for nearly a decade. At their current rate, they'll still be paying off their student debts when their oldest child enrolls in college.

Beneath the massive trees of the Malibu mountains, four small groups of people clad head-to-toe in red, green, yellow or blue stand around several long tables playing a heated game of flip cup. "Get it, blue!" a young woman shouts into a bullhorn. "You got this, green!" hollers another. It looks a little like a frat house basement dragged into the light of day, but this competition is much more innocent. It's part of Adult Color Wars, a weekend designed to give adults a chance to relive their days at camp.

“Downton Abbey" is going to look quite different when it returns for a fourth season. On Friday Siobhan Finneran -- better known to fans as O'Brien, Lady Grantham's constantly scheming, severely coiffed maid -- confirmed that she is leaving the beloved costume drama. Finneran follows co-stars Dan Stevens and Jessica Brown Findlay out the door, though it seems likely her character will do so under less tragic circumstances than theirs: In the Season 3 finale, O'Brien was jockeying hard for a new job that would allow her to see more of the world.

A Florida mother was arrested this month for allegedly stabbing her two sons' bullies in the back with box cutters. News reports stated that after calming down an altercation between her sons and a group of boys, the mother reignited the situation and attacked the boys, sending two to the hospital. Last year, a teenage boy posted something nasty and hurtful in response to a teenage girl's Facebook posting. The girl was distraught, contemplated hurting herself and complained to her mother that she had been bullied.

Re "Search for a lasting good," Column, Dec. 18 Sandy Banks' piece on the Newtown, Conn., shootings was thoughtful. I agree that it will be a worthwhile struggle to get some sensible gun control laws put in place. And even though we will never be able to burn all the spindles in the kingdom, we can considerably reduce the opportunity for harm. But what about motive? Our kids' brains are marinating in violence because of the toys we buy them, the ads they see and the media they use. This is true for all kids - bright and average, well adjusted and troubled.

Today's professionals didn't fantasize about becoming presidents and princesses when they were younger -- instead, their childhood dream jobs involved occupations such as engineering, writing and science. American boys wanted most to be professional or Olympic athletes, according to a survey from LinkedIn, a social network for workers. Girls aspired to become teachers, according to the poll of more than 8,000 professionals worldwide ( hat tip to the Huffington Post). In the U.S., men also said they had hoped to grow up as airplane or helicopter pilots, scientists, lawyers or astronauts.

Chatty kids tend to become chatty adults. Roll-with-the-flow kids tend to become roll-with-the-flow adults. Impulsive kids ... humble kids ...  insecure kids ... well, you can see where this is going. Personality traits tend to stick with us. Researchers at UC Riverside, the Oregon Research Institute and the University of Oregon figured this out, with the help of a National Institute on Aging grant, by analyzing teacher personality ratings of children along with videotaped interviews of those now-adults four decades later.

A childhood marked by abuse or physical deprivation can leave lifelong marks on a person's health, raising the risk of heart disease, psychiatric disorders and chronic poverty. But a new study finds that the far more common and subtle experience of emotional neglect in childhood seems to confer another health risk at the other end of life: a higher likelihood of stroke. Compared with adults who believed themselves loved and emotionally nurtured as children, those who reported a "moderate" absence of parental warmth and care were almost three times more likely to have suffered strokes that left indelible imprints on their brains, says the study.

TUCSON - Young people granted immigration relief and work permits under a new Obama administration program still won't be able to obtain driver's licenses in Arizona, a federal judge has ruled. Although the decision is a win for Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, who issued the executive order denying driver's licenses to this particular group, it's just the first battle in a case that will probably be argued on constitutional grounds. U.S. District Judge David G. Campbell on Thursday turned down a request for a preliminary injunction blocking Brewer's order but stated that the plaintiffs - a contingent of immigrant rights groups - would probably prevail on their claim that the governor's order violates guarantees of equal protection under the U.S. Constitution.

For William Wilson, the former Los Angeles Times art critic who died Saturday at the age of 78, art was a childhood refuge, a teenage survival mechanism, and, finally, a career that saw him chronicle the city's rise in art-world stature from his first byline in 1965 to his retirement in 1998. "He grew up under really rotten circumstances, and was just a self-made person," said Diane Leslie, a novelist who was a close friend. Another longtime friend, artist Don Lagerberg, said Wilson died in his sleep at a Los Angeles care facility from Alzheimer's disease, which had been diagnosed about four years ago. Wilson, born July 5, 1934,  never knew his father and often talked of hard times growing up in Los Angeles with a single mother who was given to radical mood swings and who fell to her death in an apparent suicide when he was 18. Among his boyhood memories, Leslie said, was eating a great deal of canned tuna - and noticing that sometimes the can had a picture of cats on it. He often spoke of how his mother took him to the library, where he would pore over picture books.

Using a method similar to California's to fund early-childhood education, President Obama is proposing a tax hike for his "Preschool for All" plan in the budget presented to Congress. The proposed 94-cent hike on cigarettes is projected to generate more than $78 billion over 10 years. Some Los Angeles-based early-childhood education providers praised the proposal for its plan to fund education for preschoolers across all types of socioeconomic backgrounds. “The president's plan falls right in line with what [Los Angeles Universal Preschool]

HOUSTON -- A Texas man being held in connection with a Tuesday stabbing that injured 14 at a Houston-area community college told investigators he had been fantasizing about such an attack since he was 8 years old, officials said. Dylan Quick, 20, was being held without bond Wednesday and cooperating with investigators, Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia said during a briefing with Lone Star College officials at a detention facility near downtown Houston. Garcia said Quick, who was a student at the Lone Star CyFair campus about 30 miles northwest of Houston, had been "matter of fact" in describing the attack, "very forthcoming" and cooperative in responding to questions.

Mickey Rose was a childhood friend of Woody Allen, sharing his pal's fervent enthusiasms for baseball, jazz and movies and later becoming the young filmmaker's writing partner for his early, madcap comedies "Bananas" and "Take the Money and Run. " Rose, who went on to become a television comedy writer, penning jokes and sketches for Johnny Carson, Sid Caesar and other top comedians and shows of his era, died Sunday at his home in Beverly Hills....

A Florida mother was arrested this month for allegedly stabbing her two sons' bullies in the back with box cutters. News reports stated that after calming down an altercation between her sons and a group of boys, the mother reignited the situation and attacked the boys, sending two to the hospital. Last year, a teenage boy posted something nasty and hurtful in response to a teenage girl's Facebook posting. The girl was distraught, contemplated hurting herself and complained to her mother that she had been bullied.

Children who have been victims of abuse may suffer long-term psychological effects well into adulthood. But now, a new study shows that the effects of abuse can be physiological as well. People who had been subjected to maltreatment during childhood actually had less volume in certain parts of their brains, according to a new study released Monday by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers from Harvard Medical School in Boston studied 193 adults aged 25 and younger, and interviewed them to see whether they had been subject to a variety of different types of abuse, from 'harsh corporal punishment' down to 'parental verbal aggression.' They scanned the subjects with an MRI machine to see what their brains looked like.

Young Barry Obama is struggling with his pingpong shot. Or rather, 12-year-old Hasan Faruq Ali is struggling to play left-handed in imitation of the character he is portraying in a new Indonesian film, "Little Obama." "Hasan has the walk, he has the posture of Barry," said Slamet Djanuadi, a consultant on the film and a childhood friend of President Obama when he lived in Indonesia from 1967 to 1971. "But Barry was a better pingpong player," he laughed, watching Hasan hit the ball off the table.

A real estate agent in Portland, Ore., has gotten hold of a literary property: The childhood home of children's book author Beverly Cleary. The 1910 bungalow was listed this month at $362,000. Cleary is 96 and in an assisted living facility that celebrates her work -- Ramona is everywhere. Her family moved to Portland from rural Oregon when Cleary was 6. She published her first novel, "Henry Huggins," in 1950. The middle-reader book included a minor character, a bratty little sister named Ramona.

Childhood attention deficit hyperactivity disorder frequently persists into adulthood, bringing heightened risks of additional psychiatric issues and nearly five times the risk of suicide, according to a 20-year study that followed children diagnosed with the disorder. The study, to be published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, is the most extensive to date establishing links between childhood and adult ADHD, and between adult ADHD and other mental health diagnoses. Only about 38% of those who had ADHD as children made it to age 27 without either continued ADHD symptoms or at least one other psychiatric disorder, according to the study, which was based on a sample of more than 5,000 people born between Jan. 1, 1976, and Dec. 31, 1982.