I Promised To Help Manessa – Save Girls From Predators

No jokes or wicked comments today – but I promised my Twitter friend Chris I would try to help. Please read this entry, link to it, tell others and help find this young lady who may be with her 37-year-old “boyfriend” – her family is worried sick and Kevin Childs, if the allegations are true, needs to be locked up.

Please help get Manessa back and protect other girls.

From the above site – How to Help:

We’re reaching out to everyone we can. There are several things we hope will help.

1. We don’t know if she has access to a computer. If she’s not being held against her will and does have access, we’re expecting she will try to reach her friends by logging into her mySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/prettygirl224. If you are a mySpace user, please leave her a message that let’s her know that she is loved and appreciated, that her life still has great value and potential and that she should return home.

• Update – As of December 2nd, Manessa still hasn’t accessed her mySpace account since November 17th, and all comments are moderated by her. This means that nothing is getting through. A colleague and friend, Chris Penn, created a new myspace page where a number of her friends have come to join and show their support at http://myspace.com/savemanessa

2. Leave her a comment on this website in the ‘friends’ or ‘others’ section. Let her know she’s loved and appreciated. Let her know what it was like when YOU were 16, and what you think of what she’s doing, and encourage her to figure life out while with people who really love her.

3. Please Digg this story. We’re trying to get it in front of as many people as we can as quickly as we can. We need people to see this so they can start keeping an eye open for the two of them.

4. If you are a friend and know something, PLEASE SPEAK UP. She apparently isn’t living whatever dream she was running to. Her best friends haven’t seen her for weeks. There are a number of ways to get information to those who need it.

• Email us at savemanessa@gmail.com
• or call the hotline in the US – 860-906-7398.
• In Florida, contact the Hernando County Sherrif’s department @ 352.754.6830. The Detective handling this case is Det. Randy Williamson.
• In Bristol, contact the Bristol Police Department @ 860.584.3011. The Officer handling this case is Officer Scott Thomas.

5. The Donovans (Mom & all 3 sisters) run a family operated business which, as of Saturday, Dec. 3 are closed for business. Since the whole clan is in CT, no one to mind the shop. They are accepting donations on their business website.

Wicked Smart Babies?

The lengths people will go to these days to push their children in education is a questionable debate. Should we be stimulating our 4-month-olds with flash cards, signing up for preschool at age 1 and testing our toddlers? My opinion is to relax a little but then again I’m not a Harvard grad…

In September Boston Magazine’s cover story was on choosing the best pre school. It profiled the best Boston-area schools for parents with 1- and 2-year-olds obsessing over what pre school their kids would get into and – gasp – what horrible fate would befall them if they weren’t accepted into the most promising. I found myself wondering if we were hurting our children by lackadaisically choosing one of the local church-run preschools. We had actually considered a Montessori school but ultimately decided against it for a variety of reasons – the $10,000 per year tuition notwithstanding, we were more concerned about pushing our child too hard too soon – five days of full school a week seems like a lot to us for a 3-year-old.

But still, Boston Magazine’s article made me wonder if we had made the right decision… did I need to get caught up in the craziness and if I didn’t obsess like the parents in the article, would my children suffer? As a product of a state school and someone who found success more in the classes of life than an ivy league school, I started to wonder.

Then, last week Boston Globe Magazine had an article about whether or not you can make your baby smarter. As a mother who has seen friends obsess about this topic since the moment they took a pregnancy test, the topic was of great interest to me. This particular article profiled families who begin educational programs at birth… regular flash card sessions with the Mona Lisa, Aristotle and Erasmus of Rotterdam, for example…families with pre-school age children speaking of cubism and impressionist composers.

Even more disturbing were the profiles of educational programs from entities such as the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential near Chestnut Hill here in the Boston area that runs the Better Baby Institute program. This program emphasizes what the article calls “early intervention.”


I was relieved to learn from many scientific studies highlighted in the article that just because I didn’t have headphones on my stomach during my pregnancies, my children probably wouldn’t suffer behind their classmates with more obsessive mothers. Apparently all those flash cards and weird practices like putting your newborn in a darkened room and pointing a flashlight at his eyes for a minute, 10 times a day (what?!) won’t necessarily make him or her any smarter than my boys, currently running around with buckets on their heads, pretending to be Buzz Lightyear.

Unstructured play has long been touted as one of the best things for children and their development. In this day and age, with all the pressures from technology advancements and worldwide competition, our children will be overworked and stressed out like the rest of us soon enough. Lighten up – teach by example and hard work and let them enjoy being children. The rest will take care of itself.