Jo Frost, "Supernanny from the hit ABC show, just answered Washington Post reader questions on everything from potty-training to discipline. Here is a sample:

Minneapolis, Minn.: Hi Jo -

I have a just-over-three-year-old boy who is not yet potty trained. I have tried everything I have read about in books ('potty prizes', encouragement, positive rewards, special underpants, praise, stickers...) to encourage him to use the potty but he is just not interested! I feel like he is ready and capable of using the potty - and we had a streak over Christmas when he actually was using it, but then stopped. Should we keep trying (and if so, what do we do next?) or should we back off for awhile?

Jo Frost: He's more than capable of being potty trained. However you have played and toyed with the idea and he has half-heartedly done so. You need to make up your mind one way or another (and the answer should be yes). Number one: take note of his fluid intake. 2: take him completely out of diapers, no half-measures. 3: Diapers only at bedtime. 4: you will need to spend a week doing this - stay local, no big trips. You can find a step by step guide in my first Supernanny book...

Arlington, Va.: Hi, Ms. Frost!

We are new parents to a 7-month old, and I am wondering about how best to incorporate a routine into our day. Specifically, our baby isn't a great sleeper and doesn't have set napping times. She'll usually take a 1 to 2 hour nap in the morning, but we have trouble getting her to sleep in the afternoon. And we always get her to sleep by walking her in the stroller, as she will cry if we put her down in her crib. Do you have any tips on starting a baby on a routine?

Jo Frost: She should be taking a midmorning nap and then one straight after lunch. Creating a framework is going to be key for her. She may doze off around 5 for half an hour. Not until her eating schedule is in hand should you implement the sleeping technique. In my new book I detail my "controlled crying" technique. In short - Put the baby in the crib, go out, the baby will cry, you go in and say shh and rub the tummy... repeat, doubling the time in between.

The death toll in Burma after a vicious cyclone hit the country this past weekend could reach 60,000, the number of people reported dead or missing, according to the Washington Post.

Because the country is headed by an incompetent, despotic regime, the people are not easily receiving aid. MoveOn.org passed around a link to donate to Burmese monks, who in turn, have been giving food and shelter to the country's poorest people.

These People Scare Me: I was recently perusing the responses to New York Times Magazine's green edition, when I came across this gem:

(Michael) Pollan asserts as self-evident that a small carbon footprint is always a moral good. But suppose a child is very sick and the nearest hospital is 50 miles away. You can ride a horse and the child might die, or take a helicopter and ensure the child lives. In that case, using more fossil fuel is clearly a moral good. Offering this same sort of choice, if played out less dramatically, is why the green movement may fail.

Pollan is asking for human beings to deliberately make their own lives harsher, duller, perhaps even shorter for the sake of an abstraction. Whatever your belief in the merits of cutting carbon emissions, it’s easy to see why this neo-Romantic argument may not win many converts.

Especially inane, though, is Wendell Berry’s suggestion that “specialization” has been bad for humanity. Division of labor has allowed man to rise from savannas and caves to cities, to feed multitudes and to cure deadly disease. Specialization is precisely what will produce the experts who will ultimately figure out how to make cheap energy without fossil fuels. That process, not some Arcadian fantasy that all humanity will voluntarily regress to a semi-industrial state, is the way to a cleaner world.

HAMPTON STEVENS

Kansas City, Kan.

Okay.

Other Strange Encounters: Here is another one of those quirky Berkeley Parents Network letters, although I bet this woman's situation is not as uncommon as we'd like to think:

My husband recently had a one night stand with a woman with whom he previously (about 2 years ago) had a longer-term affair. The one night stand resulted in a pregnancy, and they've decided to keep the baby. The woman lives in another city so he will be parenting from afar - we also have a child together. We started marriage counseling a couple of weeks ago and, at least right now, we both think we'd like to stay together. We definitely have issues outside of this one that we need to work on, and are both committed to doing so. I'm honestly not that hung up on the affair at this point - it's the realization that there will be another child in his life, with another woman, and that child will likely be incorporated into our family in some way, shape, and form in the future. Plus, the fact that the child will be in another city means he will probably spend time away from us, which is hard to handle. Has anyone dealt with a similar situation? This is all very fresh and new and I know my feelings will change over time (because they already have a million times in about 3 weeks!) but I need a little long-term perspective on how this situation might ever really work...thanks!
anon

Whew. This woman sounded remarkably calm for what her husband did. Can't wait for the responses...

Leaving Foster Care: The Washington Post followed around this remarkable young woman as she was leaving the foster care system. At 21-years-old, Marie Willis is learning to live on her own, and is handling it with such aplomb.

What else is in the news? What is on your minds today? Have a good weekend all!

Even moderate drinking increases a woman's risk of breast cancer, according to a story in the Washington Post.

A recent Harvard study of 878 people found that nearly two-thirds of drinkers and about a third of teetotalers considered such imbibing to be safe and healthful. So healthful that about 30 percent of those surveyed said the purported health benefits of alcohol are one reason they drink.

The link between alcohol and breast cancer is something that "almost nobody in the study had heard about," says the survey's lead author, Kenneth Mukamal, an internist at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston. Only 10 percent correctly identified breast cancer as a possible risk of moderate drinking, the researchers reported in the journal Family Medicine.

I, too, thought an occasional glass of wine -- although I tend to drink like once a month, if that, at this point -- was good for me. Remember all the hoopla surrounding red wine's benefits for the heart? As it turns out alcohol consumption is so potent that it can catch  up to you later on in life, according to the Post.

These results offer a cautionary note for younger women and underscore that it's never too early to go easy on alcohol. The researchers tracked nearly 10,000 women for 27 years. They found that the amount of alcohol the women consumed when the study began, rather than after menopause, correlated best with their breast cancer risk nearly three decades later.

If women do drink, there's widespread agreement that they should avoid having more than one drink per day. (A drink is 5 ounces of wine, 12 ounces of beer or 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits such as whiskey, tequila or vodka.) Just that amount of alcohol translates to "about a 10 percent increased risk of breast cancer," says Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health.

This story is one of those health myth-debunkers that is good to know.

There was much press coverage this past week on Pope Benedict XVI's first visit to the United States, including a massive mass at Yankee Stadium. But the Washington Post recently highlighted a sad part of the Catholic Church's agenda keeping many Filipinas in poverty: its visceral opposition to birth control.

There are many reasons why this country is poor, including feudal patterns of land ownership and corrupt government. But there is a compelling link between family size and poverty. It increases in lock step with the number of children, as nutrition, health, education and job prospects all decline, government statistics and many studies show.

Birth and poverty rates here are among the highest in Asia. And the Philippines, where four out of five of the country's 91 million people are Roman Catholic, also stands out in Asia for its government's rejection of modern contraception as part of family planning.

Acceding to Catholic doctrine, the government for the past five years has supported only what it calls "natural" family planning. No national government funds can be used to buy contraceptives for the poor, although anyone who can afford them is permitted to buy them. Local governments can also buy and distribute contraceptives, but many lack the money...

"Family planning helps reduce poverty," President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said in a 2003 speech that detailed her approach to birth control. But she said then and has since insisted that the government would support only family planning methods acceptable to the Catholic Church.

There's an column in the Washington Post today that brings up a subject that is intriguing to me.

Fiona Mathews of the University of Exeter and her colleagues studied 740 women who were pregnant for the first time.The more calories they consumed in the year before they got pregnant the greater their chances of ending up with a boy. Fifty-six percent of the women who ate the most calories had boys compared to 45 percent of those who consumed the least, the researchers reported this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

When the researchers examined exactly what the women ate, those who tended to eat cereal for breakfast were the most likely to have a boy. That's right: A big bowl of cereal. Same goes for potassium and salt -- providing support for those old wives tales.

Since I have one daughter and one son, this made me try to think back about my eating habits prior to each of their conceptions.

Here is a concept we have never discussed before: paying tuition at a public school. We have discussed school choice, in general, but have never explored whether parents could or should pay for their children to attend public schools in other districts.

Some families in Washington D.C. are doing just that, according to the Washington Post.

It isn't clear, however, if these families are receiving a huge boost than if they attended their local public schools. But they are taking advantage of programs not offered at their local schools like International Baccalaureate, the Post reported.

Tuition-paying students are a small but significant part of the broader movement known as school choice. Several states have enacted open enrollment policies in recent years that require educators to allow families at low-performing schools to transfer not only within but outside their school system, according to the Education Commission of the States.

In Montgomery, Julia is one of 58 students attending 26 county schools this year under the nonresident tuition option, which allows principals to admit students from outside the county if the school has space. Most come from the adjoining D.C. and Prince George's County school systems, each of which has dozens of schools cited for low performance under the No Child Left Behind law. Tuition approximates the per-student cost of an education in Montgomery schools.

The tuition-paying students are scattered across the region: 20 in Fairfax County, 30 in Charles County, six in Loudoun County and one in Alexandria. They pay from $6,415 to $18,886. Even the distressed D.C. school system has 60 students paying tuition, most of them drawn to a handful of specialized high schools.

In Julia Egger's case, her parents are paying $13,627 for her to attend Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland where she is enrolled in the IB track. The family lives in Washington D.C. but did not deem its local public high school safe, could not pay $30,000 a year for a private school and did not want to re-locate. Her mother drives her to school. They must leave before 7 a.m. to arrive on time, although the parents of other non-residents work nearby and find the school's location convenient.

I am not sure how I feel about commuting so far away for school and I questioned whether it was fair for these families to write off their local public schools because of NCLB. But it is cool that their dollars are benefiting public schools rather than stuffing the coffers of already endowed private or parochial schools. What do you think? Would you commute and/or pay tuition at a public school?

In case you missed it, Newsweek had a cover story on surrogate mothers. It was balanced and offered a lot of new information such as the disproportionate number of surrogate mothers who are young, military wives. They have health insurance that covers the procedure. Also, surrogacy allows them to earn money and help someone.

Despite some people denouncing it as exploitive, it made me think the opposite: I would consider becoming a surrogate for my closest family or friends. Also, if I needed the additional income, I could think of many worse ways to make money than give this wonderful gift to another couple.

An Effed Up Story: This is unspeakably tragic. Despite his wife’s protestations, a Maryland courtroom ruled that a mentally ill man was entitled to see his children. The man in question, Mark Castillo, went to a hotel, drowned the couple’s three children and then tried – unsuccessfully – to kill himself, according to the Washington Post.

He is in custody now. But what troubled me about this story was his history of making threats to his wife, including killing the children. I think I would have skipped town before handing over my children to this man. I can’t imagine what is running through that poor woman’s head right now. Shudder.

What Patient Rights? I was dismayed at the personal conduct of the gynecologist mentioned in this reader’s letter to New York Times Magazine’s “The Ethicist” column. Her gynecologist has asked her to waive her right to sue in favor of a “binding arbitration to settle any potential disputes,” or the ob-gyn will not treat her. Here is why the practice is unethical, according to ethicist, Randy Cohen:

The law may allow it, and (except in an emergency) medical ethics permit doctors to choose their patients, but a doctor’s criteria for choosing are still subject to scrutiny. Your doctor has instituted a dismal policy that compels patients to surrender a basic legal right in order to receive medical care.

If a single physician were so skittish about malpractice suits (or so uncertain of her own skill) that she would see only patients who would forgo access to the courts, no problem: you could walk down the street to another practitioner.

But if all, or nearly all, doctors make the same demand, there’s nowhere else to go; a fundamental right is eradicated. Conduct that is merely inconvenient if pursued by a few people can become intolerable when widely adopted.

Universal healthcare anyone?

Maryland is considering upping the age in which students can drop out of high school from 16 to 17, according to a story in the Washington Post.

My initial reaction was why is this even a consideration? Of course, we should insist that students stay in school! But apparently some legislators oppose it because there is a budget crisis and they don’t want to keep supporting kids who no longer want to attend class.

Senators debated whether keeping teenagers in school longer should be a priority in a year when the state's economy is slowing and its budget is being cut. Some suggested that the state would be more effective at stimulating a student's interest in learning by intervening with more resources at a much younger age.

Sen. Ulysses Currie (D-Prince George's) called the decision on whether to raise the mandatory attendance age a "tough issue," given the high dropout rate. But he said teenagers are "getting smarter today than they were" and may have "maxed out with what is taught in school" by the time they are 16.

Sen. Thomas M. Middleton (D-Charles) said the legislature should devote more resources to general equivalency diploma programs for students who quit school but take classes toward a high school diploma.
"I have concern we're spending money on kids that want to get out of school," said Sen. J. Lowell Stoltzfus (R-Somerset).

Almost 10,300 Maryland students dropped out of public schools last year, with Baltimore in the lead, according to a legislative analysis. Prince George's followed, losing 1,838 students, or 6.2 percent of the total, and Montgomery was next, with 1,342 dropouts or 5.2 percent of its student body.

The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne Jr. had a brilliant response to the self-reliant corporations that now want a government handout.

Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.

The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. They have lost "confidence" in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe have any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another's portfolios.

So they have stopped investing. The biggest, most respected investment firms threaten to come crashing down. You can't have that. It's just fine to make it harder for the average Joe to file for bankruptcy, as did that wretched bankruptcy bill passed by Congress in 2005 at the request of the credit card industry. But the big guys are "too big to fail," because they could bring us all down with them...

In a deal that the New York Times described as "shocking," J.P. Morgan Chase agreed over the weekend to pay $2 a share to buy all of Bear Stearns, one of the brand names of finance capitalism. The Federal Reserve approved a $30 billion -- that's with a "b" -- line of credit to make the deal work.

Seriously. I always wondered how we allowed corporations to devalue workers in this country; how businessman Mitt Romney could actually berate his fellow Republicans on a debate stage for attacking corporations. For me, he was delusional, completely out of touch with the realities of most Americans.

I appreciated Dionne's vent!

Stacey Garfinkle at the "On Parenting" blog at the Washington Post opened up, yet, another interesting dialogue surrounding Eliot Spitzer's involvement in a prostitution ring and his resignation as governor: How do you explain marital infidelity to your children, especially if it is out in the open as in Spitzer's case?

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been linked to a prostitution ring and has now stepped down from his public role. While his actions as a public official aren't about parenting, I can't help but wonder how he is talking about and explaining this to his three teenage daughters.

In his very public apology, he focused first on his family, his wife of 20 years standing by his side. At some point, either before or after the press conference, the Spitzer family talked behind closed doors. What did they say about the scandal? About their marriage? About what it will mean for their girls?

...Personal. That's what it must be for Spitzer's daughters, who are clearly old enough to be affected by what's going on. When I was kid, my mom used to have a mantra: The family's problems don't walk out the front door. Like anyone else, we had our share of problems. If I ever thought about talking troubles with friends, my mother wouldn't have stood for it.

But that was a different era, before reality TV, the Internet and camera phones. I'm not sure she could draw the same line today. Whether public or private, how do you (or would you) explain your flaws to your kids? And how do you deal with marital strains and struggles around your kids?

All good questions. Should we shield our children from personal problems like marital ones? How do you explain your personal and marital flaws to your children?

Newsweek ran a trend story about ivy league schools lowering tuition and giving out generous financial aid to middle class families. As the experts in the article noted, these institutions ran the risk of taking in only two types of students: those whose families could pay full tuition and everyone else who was forced to take out student loans to obtain an education.

But now that these schools are poised to take in more middle class families, state schools and second and third-tier private colleges will lose their smartest students. Nonetheless, there is a college crunch for the children of baby boomers and less money, overall, for young people to study.

Sex Toys Allowed in Texas: (Editor's Note: This item was corrected.) I did not know this, but a Texas court struck down the state's ban against dildos and "pocket pussies" on, of all days, Valentine's Day, according to Slate. Virginia, Alabama and Mississippi also ban the sex toys.

Phasing Out Plastic Bags: Whole Foods plans to stop bagging in plastic on Earth Day, April 22, according to the Washington Post. It will become the first American grocery store to phase out plastic bags.  

Patrick Swayze Has Cancer: Actor Patrick Swayze has pancreatic cancer, according to USA Today. While it appears that he is responding to treatment, this bit of news left this Dirty Dancing fan crestfallen.

Update On J-Lo's Babies: It is official. Jennifer Lopez and husband Marc Anthony did have twins, a boy and a girl, according to People magazine. As expected, they named them Max and Emme.

The new parents welcomed their son and daughter on Feb. 22. Emme was born at 12:12 a.m. and weighed 5 lbs. 7 oz., and Max followed at 12:23 a.m., weighing 6 lbs.

Sorry to become the purveyor of bad news. But the credit crisis has affected so many people, including homeowners and now -- kids who want to go to college.

Another casualty of the subprime-mortgage meltdown are prospective college students who are finding it more difficult to take out a bank loan to pay for school, according to the Washington Post. And those students who really need the money, like those who attend community college or a trade school, are finding it nearly impossible.

Students seeking federally guaranteed loans, which are popular because they offer fixed, below-market rates, could be required to pay higher fees to borrow money, according to university finance directors and lenders.

An even greater burden may fall on those taking out private loans, which have become increasingly common as students look for new sources to finance the soaring costs of college. These loans often have variable rates, and they are projected to jump this year.

And at community and for-profit colleges, some students may be denied private loans entirely because the financial industry considers them riskier investments than their peers at other educational institutions.

Two of the nation's largest student loan organizations -- Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency and College Loan Corp. -- have stopped participating in the federal loan program. Other firms like Sallie Mae are tightening credit requirements for private loans.