The bank sent me an overdraft notice on the checking account of one of my daughters. I encourage my college-age girls to monitor their accounts. Even so, they sometimes overspend.

What should I do? Send her an angry letter? Admonition might help her later, but it won't satisfy the bank. Phone and tell her to make a deposit? Might as well tell a fish to fly. I know her liquidity. Zero. Transfer the ...

When my sons were little, we used to join hands and have prayer at the end of the day. Then I'd give them a kiss good night. When my son Phil was about 9 years of age, he got in bed one night and said, "Mom, I can't remember whether Dad kissed me good night or not." So, Judy told me. I tiptoed up the steps, bolted through his door like I was a monster, and dove in his bed and wrestled with him and ...

The Thing in the Bushes is a book about corporate blind spots. Authors Kevin Graham Ford and James D. Osterhaus point out that most leaders of companies or other organizations know "something is seriously wrong, but they can't see it. Something unidentified and insidious is lurking in the shadows like a 'thing in the bushes,' and it has the organization in a death grip." Through careful research, ...

During 2009's World Population Day (an annual event, observed on July 11, that seeks to raise awareness of global population issues), Indian Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad promoted an unusual idea for dealing with overpopulation in India. He suggested a new policy that would allow most of the poor in rural India to have access to television. According to his vision, "amorous couples would watch ...

In The Manger Is Empty, Walter Wangerin Jr. shares personal memories from past Christmases. In a chapter entitled "A Quiet Chamber," he recalls Christmas, 1944. That year, in the days leading up to Christmas Eve, Walter's father did the same thing he always did at Christmastime: he went into a room in the house, removed the outside door knob so the kids couldn't get in, and he decorated a Christmas ...

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One of the more memorable of those moments came when I was a second grader at P.S. (Public School) 33 in New York. On a spring day shortly before lunch hour, my father came to the door of my classroom. After a brief word with the teacher he gestured for me to join him. "Son," he said, "clean off your desk and come with me." Soon after, we were walking down the hallway and out the front door of ...

Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is the third installment in "The Mummy" franchise of movies. Each of the stories follows Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his wife, Evelyn (Maria Bello), as they hunt for buried artifacts and confront monsters of all kinds. In this scene, Rick and Evelyn have just discovered that their son, Alex (Luke Ford), has dropped out of college in order to follow in his parents' ...

When my son Scott was just learning to walk, he fell on a cement driveway and split the area below his chin so deeply that the floor of his mouth was exposed. Hospitals and doctors were 250 kilometers away over tortuous mountain roads. I had no surgical instruments with me. A quick catalog of our resources turned up a less-than-impressive array of one darning needle, coarse thread, one pair of rather ...

During one memorable at-bat the spring of my son's first baseball season, he repeatedly hit the tee instead of the ball. And it was obvious what the problem was. He wasn't keeping his eye on the ball; he was looking right at me instead. He was unable to get a base hit until finally I stepped out of sight.

We joked about that the rest of the season, but what the incident shows is the power of fatherly ...

Number of fathers who were part of married-couple families with children younger than 18 in 2008: 25.8 million

Estimated number of stay-at-home dads in 2008: 140,000

Percentage of preschoolers who were regularly cared for by their father during their mother's working hours in 2008: 25 percent (about 2.9 million children)

Number of single fathers with custody of their children in 2008: 1.8 million (comprising ...