Word: fear
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wealthiest (but perhaps not some of the best-looking) young people in the country. Somehow in the struggle to cope with all the talent and prestige, with the sliding scale of relative happiness in constant flux, we criticize. We cling to the thing about ourselves we find distinctive. We fear so passionately that somebody might have everything—brains, looks, social connections, a sense of humor—that we tear down and pick apart. Nobody should have a beach house in Antigua and a summa thesis. Nobody should be a Class Marshal and a Rhodes Scholar. The person...
...West Point in 1899 and took an apartment near the campus, supposedly so she could watch him with a telescope to be sure he was studying. But in the 1990s something dramatic happened, and the needle went way past the red line. From peace and prosperity, there arose fear and anxiety; crime went down, yet parents stopped letting kids out of their sight; the percentage of kids walking or biking to school dropped from 41% in 1969 to 13% in 2001. Death by injury has dropped more than 50% since 1980, yet parents lobbied to take the jungle gyms...
...walled living room in south Austin, Texas, eating organic, gluten-free, nondairy coconut ice cream. This is a Slow Family Living class, taught by perinatal psychologist Carrie Contey and Bernadette Noll. "Our whole culture," says Contey, 38, "is geared around 'Is your kid making the benchmarks?' There's this fear of 'Is my kid's head the right size?' People think there's some mythical Good Mother out there that they aren't living up to and that it's hurting their child. I just want to pull the plug on that...
...Fear is a kind of parenting fungus: invisible, insidious, perfectly designed to decompose your peace of mind. Fear of physical danger is at least subject to rational argument; fear of failure is harder to hose down. What could be more natural than worrying that your child might be trampled by the great, scary, globally competitive world into which she will one day be launched? It is this fear that inspires parents to demand homework in preschool, produce the snazzy bilingual campaign video for the third-grader's race for class rep, continue to provide the morning wake-up call long...
Ronald Davis, the chief of police in East Palo Alto, Calif., and former captain of the Oakland Police Department, said the “code of silence is not a sinister plot—that’s what makes it so dangerous.” He said officers fear that telling the truth about colleagues’ misdeeds will harm their careers, and he tries to encourage openness. “Police solidarity,” he said, comes from a “we versus them mentality”, which he agreed leads...