Dear parents,

The number one rule of good parenting: patience. It is trendy for kids to act like they hate their parents, but if you are patient enough to muscle through those years you will be thanked. The most important thing to remember is that they will always love you, and that they know you will always love them. Whether you tell them every day or once in their life, your kids understand this unconditionally.
Give them space, but don't let them walk all over you. Discipline is hard but necessary. Try to be as understanding as possible, but know that solid ground rules must be set. The main role of a parent is to keep their children safe, so safety must be at the forefront of any decisions you make. That being said, let kids be kids.
Whether you fit the description or not, you are being seen as the perfect example of an adult. The decisions you make and the actions you take have an effect on every moral trait of your offspring. You have a huge responsibility on your shoulders, so act responsibly.
You have been entrusted with this delicate, new soul encased in a tiny human, and you must love and nurture and mold it into a wonderful human being with its own stories and opinions and ideas. Though your job never ends, the day your child greets you as a friend is the day you have succeeded.
Love, a daughter

Civic Duty

I think that it should be a civic duty for all people to have empathy and withhold judgement, specifically in public. It is all too easy to get angry at other people for petty things like the way they dress or talk. And people are so paranoid about being judged negatively that they often restrict themselves and put on a facade in public. I know this is really cliché, but you can meet a lot of interesting people when you look past outward appearances.
Everyone has bad days, and some people are just always exceptionally grumpy. It is hard to be patient with these people, especially on YOUR bad days, but chances are you will never see that person again. If someone grimaces at you on the bus, flash them a smile. I challenge the world to make every human interaction positive. One has to remember that everybody has their own struggles, and that something as simple as a smile or even a compliment from a stranger can make somebody's day.
P.S. dear Mr. McCarthy I did my Integration blog, so you can check that while you're here cool thanks

Integration in America

Chicago is a famously segregated city. There are often sharp divides between neighborhoods. Devon feels like a completely different world than Wicker Park, which is the polar opposite of Pilsen. Every street in the city has its own culture and background. This is seen by many as a bad thing: when communities stay separate, there can be hostility between groups and the world views of members remain singular and biased. It is true that this country has a past riddled with oppressed groups that have had to struggle for their basic rights, and it is true that this discrimination still exists. But, having grown up in Logan Square, it was at first hard for me to believe that there are still such awful people because I see so little of them. I went to a diverse grammar school and go to a very diverse high school. One of the things that worries me the most about the future is that pretty much any college I decide to go to will have significantly bigger populations of only a few types of people. I have loved going to completely integrated schools. But by no means do I think that anything should change about the way Chicago neighborhoods work. You can go anywhere in the city and experience the culture and foods of every ethnicity. Though certain areas have residents of mostly one or two ethnicities, it isn't weird to see a white person in China Town or a black person in Greek Town. People can celebrate their own cultures and feel a sense of belonging in the places they live, while still being exposed to others. It's a win/win situation. The kids that get to go to schools other than their neighborhood school get to be exposed to this even earlier.
The only way to promote integration is to fight poverty. There are so many more white kids going to college and succeeding because there are more white families able to afford to live in nice neighborhoods and send their children to good schools. I may be biased, but Affirmative Action is unfair and counterproductive. If we really want to solve this problem, we need to go to its source, which is rooted in unbalanced racial class distributions.