Children O7

The Times recently ran part of a wire story with the headline "Pediatricians Fight Church Limit on Care."(Part I, Jan. 6) But the article told only one side of the story. There's no question--most pediatricians care deeply for and about children. But they certainly aren't the only ones who care! Most parents, regardless of their other differences, share a deep love for children and an active concern for their safety and well-being. This includes Christian Scientists. We have relied on healing through prayer for over a century because it's brought comfort and healing to those we love.

David Halberstam is America's Alexis de Toqueville. For almost 40 years, he has chronicled our national life, from the tragedy of Vietnam to the triumphs in the National Football League. Now, in "The Children," he returns to his roots as a young reporter for the Nashville Tennessean, where he covered the start of the civil rights movement, the sit-ins that galvanized a generation.

Robin Abcarian asks: "If Our Kids Are So Valuable, Why Aren't Their Caregivers?" (April 30). And I reply by asking: If our kids are so valuable, why aren't they being raised by their parents? I agree that the people raising our country's children are worth much more money than they currently receive. But let's stop using Band-Aids on a severed artery. Child care should not be the critical issue. Parenting is. Children are learning all day long. My children do not wait until after 5:30 p.m. to ask critical questions--questions that will shape their character and nurture the values that will help them be kind and compassionate in an often cruel and confusing world.

There is no point in beating around the bush: I fell in love with Susan Cooper's book Dreams and Wishes as soon as I started to read it. The subtitle of this collection by the award-winning children's author and screenwriter is "Essays on Writing for Children," but it could as well be "Essays on Reading to Children." Read it and you will be better armed next time you walk into a bookstore to buy your son or daughter something to read.

As an educator, I was pleased to read the letter from Dr. Stephen J. Wilson in the Times Valley Edition of March 28. He is to be commended for his strong interest in the education of young children. Because his strong concern about the teaching of "invented spelling" may reflect the concerns of many parents, it is an appropriate subject to examine. But I say "No! No! No! Teachers do not teach invented spelling. However they do recognize that children learn to write by inventing their own spelling."

Since I seem to have created a furor of backlash with my letter (June 11) regarding my 15-year-old who got the $96 bicycle ticket, I would appreciate the opportunity of responding. First, in the interest of brevity, I did not accurately portray the actual incident in my original letter. Contrary to the impression it evidently conveyed, and which The Times' accompanying illustration reinforced, my son did not ignore a stop sign and go zooming out into an intersection. He was making a right-hand turn.

I would like to respond to the article (Feb. 11) regarding the failure of more than 32,000 children to pass kindergarten in Los Angeles in a two-year period and to board member Rita Walters who was appalled by this. My dear Ms. Walters, your obvious lack of expertise in the educational process is showing. Educators have been aware forever that: 1--Children arrive at school with varying amounts of background experiences to bring to the learning process. 2--Not all children mature at the at the same rate, just as they do not learn to walk, talk, etc. at the same time.

"Here is a book that you could read on the beach, it is that pleasant and diverting; but here is a book that, if taken to heart by the right people, could change the face of America. If you think you've read your last book on education, try just this one more."

A vivid, warmly nostalgic novel that evokes a child's vision of the 4th of July weekend, 1935. While visiting a farm in Upstate New York, Mary Ann Hubbard (who prefers to style herself Princess Miranda) and her shy friend, Lolly Zimmern, play games of make-believe as they watch the grownups play games of their own: some silly, some deadly serious. Mary Ann's father, a stuffy bureaucrat, arrives with a briefcase full of papers and refuses to leave his work for even a few hours of leisure.

Despite the story's melancholy ending (Janusz Korczak and the Jewish children in his orphanage died in the Treblinka concentration camp), Lifton does a fine job of evoking Korczak's lively mind, his generous heart.

Some writers essay again and again the same virtual territory, circling ever more tightly inward toward fundamental themes, preoccupations and apperceptions, striving to get it, finally, absolutely, right. Others palpably change and develop with each novel, taking on new subject matter, extending their reach, pressing the scope of their regard and ambition. A few, a scant handful, do both. Tim Powers, for instance. The writer he most reminds me of in his best moments is Theodore Sturgeon.

Robin Abcarian asks: "If Our Kids Are So Valuable, Why Aren't Their Caregivers?" (April 30). And I reply by asking: If our kids are so valuable, why aren't they being raised by their parents? I agree that the people raising our country's children are worth much more money than they currently receive. But let's stop using Band-Aids on a severed artery. Child care should not be the critical issue. Parenting is. Children are learning all day long. My children do not wait until after 5:30 p.m. to ask critical questions--questions that will shape their character and nurture the values that will help them be kind and compassionate in an often cruel and confusing world.

Silly you. You thought a hotel suite was a spacious setup with one room for sleeping in, another for entertaining or watching television. Between those rooms, there would stand a wall and a door, the better to provide refuge for families that want to put children in a separate room, or for business travelers who want to hold meetings without a bed in sight.

A family of four, three or even two children is more than enough challenge for most frazzled parents. But how about six or eight kids? Or 48? That's how many foster children John and Dorothy Leicester took into their sprawling seven-bedroom house in Pacific Palisades during the 15 years that their own six children were growing up and vacating their rooms. "We did everything for them that we did for our own," said Dorothy, 66.

As an educator, I was pleased to read the letter from Dr. Stephen J. Wilson in the Times Valley Edition of March 28. He is to be commended for his strong interest in the education of young children. Because his strong concern about the teaching of "invented spelling" may reflect the concerns of many parents, it is an appropriate subject to examine. But I say "No! No! No! Teachers do not teach invented spelling. However they do recognize that children learn to write by inventing their own spelling."

A father is about to ground his 14-year-old son, who has failed to do his chores after repeated reminders. But, as he is winding up to deliver a familiar lecture, he looks into his son's eyes and realizes that the teen-ager is both exhausted and stressed out. Disturbed that he'd been too preoccupied with work to notice this sooner, the father asks, "Are you OK?" This unexpected compassion immediately breaks down the teen-ager's defenses. "I'm sorry, Dad," he says, fighting back tears.

For every decade since they were born, baby-boomers have inspired books, movies and television shows that examine and explore their lives. As college students during the '60s, "The Graduate" set out to define their questions and doubts. In the '70s, hippies were out and "Saturday Night Fever" was in. Now, after "In Search of Excellence" and "Iacocca" have left the best-seller lists and after baby-boomers have their careers in order, they are having babies.

To begin at the end--and why not, seeing that Angela Carter has written this rambunctious feminist celebration as a kind of music-hall variety show: Here are Dora and Nora Chance dancing and singing on the moonlit pavements of Brixton. Brixton is a raffish South London neighborhood--"on the bastard side of old Father Thames"--where the true Cockney spirit, in exile from the property developers of the East End, fuses with West Indians, Africans, East Asians and Middle Easterners.

Branded a dangerous subversive in his lifetime, transformed after his death into the ethereal, almost angelic, victim of a harsh, cruel world; posthumously praised as perhaps the greatest lyric poet in English, but also damned as a confused enthusiast incapable of generating a concrete image or formulating a coherent thought, Percy Bysshe Shelley has continued to be a controversial and elusive figure well into the second century that has elapsed since his birth in 1792.

Michael, the youngest of the three children through whom this first novel is told, visits his father's New York City office one day and sees a painting of a damaged fleet of ships. Whether the fleet has been torn by war or wind Michael doesn't say, but he does recall his father's complaining that terrorist activity in Puerto Rico has badly damaged the family's supermarkets in the Caribbean.