The three children told police that they were so uncomfortable with their nanny that they locked themselves in a bathroom to avoid her. Aza Hrnjic, 22, a nanny in suburban Washington, D.C., is accused of showing porn to the kids and urging them to pose nude in front of a Web camera.
Hrnjic has been charged with child abuse and is being held on $350,000 bond, the Washington Post reported. The kids under her care were a 5-year-old boy and two girls ages 10 and 12. Hrnjic had been working at the home in Hyattsville, Md., for about a month and a half.
The kids told police that they refused to pose in front of the Web camera. Hrnjic allegedly had sexually explicit conversations with them and showed them porn from Web sites.
Three-year-old Damilyn McElveen of Baton Rouge, La. died today after accidentally being left in a daycare van. The blue-and-white van was parked outside of Wanda’s Kids World, according to the Advocate.
Apparently, the child was picked up by an employee of the daycare this morning, and then left in the van all day, when temperatures were in the 90s. Police were notified just before 3 p.m. that daycare workers had found the child in the afternoon, attempted and failed to revive her using CPR.
The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration has tips here on preventing such tragedies.
Photo by Jalalspages
Eight-year-old Taylor Williams flew out of Houston last Saturday and ended up in Fayetteville, Ark., instead of Charlotte, N.C., where her father lives. The very next day, 10-year-old Miriam Kamens flew from Boston to Newark, N.J., when she was trying to go to Cleveland to visit her grandparents.
“I just feel it was total incompetence and a lack of caring,” Taylor’s mother Wendy Babineaux told the Houston Chronicle. ”That they did this with my child and turned around the next day and did it with another child shows they do have major problems.”
Both girls were flying as unaccompanied minors on flights operated by ExpressJet, which is under contract with Continental. The airlines says in both situations two flights were departing simultaneously from a single doorway and miscommunication among staff led to in kids being boarded on the wrong planes.
Babineaux said Taylor — who finally got to Charlotte at about 10:30 p.m. — doesn’t know what happened, and the mother doesn’t plan on telling her daughter until after she returns to Texas next month. “I don’t want her to get (on the return flight) and be all nervous,” she said.
The airlines can’t get luggage from point A to point B. Why should parents expect them to be able to transport kids any better?
Once again, a mother learns the hard way that it’s better to take your kids inside the store than leave them out in the car.
Jennifer Macy of Indianapolis went shopping this week in a drug store while her three young children were left in the family van — with the keys in the ignition and the engine running, police said. So her 3-year-old boy jumped in the driver’s seat.
Somehow, the van was shifted into reversed and hit another car in the parking lot, a prosecutor said. A 7-year-old sibling jumped out of the van and ran inside. Luckily, no one was seriously injured, WTHR TV News reported. Macy was charged with child neglect and could face up to three years in jail. Meanwhile, a judge has ordered her not to have contact with her kids.
American teens sented and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day. WTF, that’s a lot of LOLing!
A story in the New York Times suggests that all that time spent tap-tapping away might not be healthy. One pediatrician quoted argues that sending hundreds of messages could be interferring with much needed sleep. Some kids who are overzealous texters see their grades drop, or even their thumbs start to hurt.
Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is the director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, has studied teens and texting for three years. She argues that texting may make it tougher for kids to separate from their parents – one of the chief jobs of adolescents – since they can text them 15 times a day, asking banal questions like, “Should I get the red or the blue shoes?”
Yet, even when a teen’s grades drop because of rampant texting, and mom and dad confiscate the phone, they may be sending mixed messages by their own addiction to the Blackberry or iPhone. “Teens feel like they’re being punished for behavior that their parents indulge in,” says Turkle.
Now, excuse me while I go text my daughter to tell her to put away the phone and spend some time outside.
Paging Dr. Suess! A new study finds that kids ages three to eight really love being read to at bedtime, and the little bookworms would like more stories, mom and dad.
Almost two-thirds of kids surveyed said that they wished that their mother and father would spend more time reading to them. Kids ages three and four were the most hungry for more storytime, with three-quarters of them clamoring for it. And more than half of children ages 3 to 8 said that storytime was their favorite thing to do with their parents, Reuters reports.
“The results of our research confirm the traditional activity of storytelling continues to be a powerful learning and emotional resource in children’s lives,” said child psychologist Richard Woolfson, who conducted the study. “It can be very difficult for parents to find the time to read with their children, but these moments can help build strong bonds and play a vital part in their child’s development.”
Disney/Pixar commissioned the study, which also found that storytime ranked higher than TV or videogames among pasttimes for kids.
It’s touching that the world’s kids are eager to hear a whole stack of books at bedtime, but the cynical parent has to wonder how much that desire really has to do with a budding lust for literature. It could also be part of a savvy ploy to delay bedtime just a few more minutes.
Photo by khrawlings
Children are more likely to drown in backyard pools than in public ones, according to a new report from the Consumer Products Safety Commission.
Nearly 300 children younger than five drown in pools and spas each year. About 3,000 suffer injuries that require emergency room visits in spas or pools annually. Some 80 percent of those emergencies occur at residences.
An American child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming accident than by playing with a loaded gun, according to Steven D. Levitt, a university of Chicago economics professor, and author of “Freakonomics.”
Since summer is almost here, for tips on how to install a safe barrier around your pool, and how to supervise young children around water, click here.
A father of four in Salem, Ore., was arrested Tuesday for allegedly putting an electric dog collar on each of his kids to shock them.
Todd Marcum, 41, did it, “because he thought it was funny,” according to local police, the Statesman Journal reported. The children, ages 3, 6, 8 and 9 had each been shocked at least once, according to a statement by their father.
Marcum would allegedly chase the 3-year-old around with the collar and make him cry at the threat of being shocked, too. The dog-collar dad was taken into custody by police on four charges of criminal mistreatment, while the children were left in their mother’s custody.
Madlyn Primoff, 45, made good on the threat that so many parents make when their kids are squabbling in the car: She allegedly kicked them out on the curb, according to the Associated Press. Now, the Manhattan lawyer, who lives in the tony suburb of Scarsdale has been charged with child endangerment.
Police say that Primoff left her daughters, ages 10 and 12, at a street corner in a business district in White Plains on Sunday evening. They were about three miles from their home.
According to the police report, the older girl eventually caught up with her mother, but her sister was rescued by a “Good Samaritan” who called the police. Around the same time, the mother called the cops from home to report her daughter missing. Primoff was then directed to the White Plains police station, where she was arrested.
The woman was parking her car when she ran over the kids on Sunday. Authorities said her 5-year-old child was killed and her 3-year-old was injured, the Fresno Bee reported.
The Fresno County, Calif., woman apparently put her foot on the accelerator instead of the brake. The Sheriff’s Department did not release her identity.