By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff Ben Harvatine had been practicing hard before he hit the mat and couldn’t get up. He’d been dizzy for a while during wrestling practice, but that hadn’t alarmed him: it’s what happens when you’re cutting weight in a 100-degree room. The twenty-year-old MIT student wound up in the hospital and spent months recovering. It was a concussion, the first he said he’d gotten in more than a decade of wrestling. “For a week or two I struggled to carry on conversations,” he told me when I interviewed him by phone a few weeks ago. He couldn’t keep up in his mechanical engineering and architecture classes. And he was sensitive to light. “I effectively didn’t go… Read More

By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff Sometimes you send Grandma up with the kids to read books at bedtime and they spend all their time watching the Beatles on YouTube. My six-year-old now knows the words to “Twist and Shout” and, like her grandmother, thinks Paul is a heartthrob. Perhaps this is going on in your house this summer. The odds are good. As of next year, 60% of all grandparents will be Baby Boomers. Consider for a moment the reality of Generation Z, (or Generation i, or Generation 2K, or if you prefer, Generation Homeland) hanging out with their Boomer grandparents. These post-millennials are called digital natives, having spent their entire lives connected. I’m pretty sure it was my six-year-old… Read More

By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff A twitter follower of the On Parenting blog asked: What happens when your kids are in school & have a lack of control (over) what & when they are told about tragedies? Several years ago, when I first started teaching, I had a student discuss how he learned about the attacks on the World Trade Center, where his father worked and where he would die. He was sitting in class and his uncle came running into the room and grabbed him. And he took him home. I’ve often thought about how this boy, who’d grown up to become a grounded and thoughtful teen, would have felt had a well-meaning teacher or administrator turned on the television or… Read More