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All stories relating to kids

Introducing: Playful Grounds, the new kid-friendly coffee shop in Little Italy

Kids and coffee, together at last (well, sorta) (Image: Karolyne Ellacott)

Playful Grounds has only been open a few days, but the kid-friendly College Street café is already garnering plenty of attention from the neighbourhood. Indeed, when we dropped by, one mother looked around incredulously before asking, “When did this open?” The shop is the creation of Davina Cheung-Brown and Tera Goldblatt, who met at a local drop-in centre. “We wanted to create a place that has everything moms need,” Goldblatt told us. “Drop-in centres are life savers, but we wanted an adult place that can accommodate kids—rather than the other way around.” Tired of getting the hipster brush-off in regular coffee shops, the duo decided to open a café that welcomes kids but can still appeal to adults.

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The Informer

From the Print Edition

February 3, 2012 | 8:05 am

8 Comments

Jan Wong: Why aren’t schools teaching kids about the pleasures and perils of sex?

The answer is simple: our curriculum is shamefully outdated, and the Liberals are too scared to fix it
By Jan Wong | Illustration by Jesse Lefkowitz

Adam and Eve nibble an apple from the Tree of Knowledge and suddenly realize they’re both naked. Unfortunately, sex ed isn’t part of God’s plan, and He evicts them from the Garden of Eden. These days, some folks in Toronto are acting quite God-like themselves, insisting that the next generation live in innocence and ignorance. Heaven forbid our youth get to know themselves in the Biblical sense.

Our public schools are under attack by an evangelical Christian organization called the Institute for Canadian Values, whose leaders believe, as a basic ideological tenet, that teaching up-to-date sex education in schools will corrupt and confuse our children. The institute is run by a man named Charles McVety, who is quite skilled at getting media attention. Shamefully, most journalists have checked their brains at the door, blandly covering the institute’s actions and claims without questioning their legitimacy or standing up against the influence of the church on the state.

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The Informer

From the Print Edition

December 16, 2011 | 8:00 am

17 Comments

How bullying became the crisis of a generation

Kids are committing suicide, parents are in a panic, and schools that neglect to protect students are lawsuit targets
By Denise Balkissoon

Mitchell Wilson had a short life. He was born in March 2000 at Markham-Stouffville Hospital to Craig and Shelley Wilson. From the age of three, he had trouble running and jumping. He climbed stairs slowly, putting both feet on each step before moving up. He fell often, and sometimes he couldn’t get up on his own. His doctors thought he had hypermobility syndrome—joints that extend and bend more than normal.

When Mitchell was seven, his mother was diagnosed with an aggressive melanoma. Her treatments left her distant, sometimes testy and mean, and in so much pain that she rarely left her bedroom. “I sort of kept Mitchell away,” Craig Wilson told me.

“He basically didn’t talk to his mother during the last four months of her life.” Wilson often left his son to his own devices while he took care of his dying wife and ran his family’s industrial knife business. Mitchell spent most of his time in his bedroom, playing video games. He comforted himself with food, and by the time he was four feet tall he weighed 167 pounds. Once, in a Walmart, he fell to the ground and his grandmother had to ask store employees to help her lift him.

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The Informer

From the Print Edition

December 15, 2011 | 10:30 am

8 Comments

Q&A: Julian Marchese, 15-year-old day-trading savant

He created a computer program that can earn money while he’s at school. Who says today’s kids can’t manage their finances?
By Malcolm Johnston | Photography by Daniel Ehrenworth

Julian Marchese
How did you get into the stock market?
I wanted to set my parents up for financial freedom, so I Googled ways to make money, and I started reading up on the stock market. When I was 8, I saw my parents log in to their brokerage account, and I remembered the password and went in and bought stock for an airline company. My mom nearly had a heart attack.

Why an airline company?
It was 2004, and the airline industry was coming back post-9/11. Another time, when I was 9, I recommended that my parents buy into a uranium company. They didn’t, but in two months the company tripled in value.

You went on Dragons’ Den with a computer system you designed that can make you money while you’re in class. How does that work?
I created a few mathematical models and plugged them into a software platform so that it can trade without me being there. I back-tested the strategy for four years. I’m only 15, so I can’t trade on my own yet, but if I’d invested $50,000 in 2008 it would now be at $180,000.

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The Goods

Buyer's Market

December 8, 2011 | 5:38 pm

Comments

Holiday Gift Guide 2011: a beautifully crafted toy elephant for children and adults

Typically when we think of toy animals, we think of the soft plush items of our youth that we can brush against our face. Then we found Hattie the Elephant ($140), who could easily bring joy to a curious child or sit on top of a desk as a quirky focal point. Click on to check out 19 other kid-friendly treasures »

Available at Kol Kid (647 Queen St. W., 416-684-0368).

The Informer

Political Whoas

December 7, 2011 | 12:15 pm

1 Comment

Apparently, city hall is looking to recoup lost revenue on the backs of Toronto children

Toronto’s budget chief Mike Del Grande thinks the city should consider shaking down your kids for their allowance charging two bucks for a swim at an outdoor pool or a visit to Riverdale Farm. The lefties on council were (predictably) upset by the proposal, with Adam Vaughan calling it part of a “war on children.” But, hey, the city has to create revenue somehow—provided, of course, that somehow doesn’t involve a vehicle registration tax. Read the entire story [National Post] »

The Informer

From the Print Edition

December 1, 2011 | 11:30 am

20 Comments

Toronto writer Alexandra Molotkow shares the secrets of her cybersexual education

I’m among the first generation to come of age on the Internet. By 13, I was an expert at chat room sex, spotting cyber-pervs and hiding my secret life from my parents
By Alexandra Molotkow | Illustrations by Dave Lapp

In 1997, when I was in Grade 6, my friends and I sat at the back of the classroom and talked about sex. We would speculate on what it felt like and place bets on how old we’d be when we finally lost our virginity. We would make fun of the way orgasms sounded in movies and imagine what celebrities’ sex lives involved. Later, at home, we’d reconvene on ICQ, one of the Internet’s first major instant messaging systems, which allowed us to have conversations we wouldn’t want our parents overhearing. That was what the Internet was to us: pretty much what a tree house would have been a few years earlier.

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The Goods

Buyer's Market

November 21, 2011 | 5:00 am

Comments

Holiday Gift Guide 2011: 90 of the best presents money can buy

Holiday Gift Guide 2011

By Marc Lewis

Memoir: Opium Dreams My family and I moved to the Netherlands from Toronto in the summer of 2010. I’d been a psychology professor at the University of Toronto for over 20 years, my wife, Isabel, had a research job at SickKids, and we were both offered faculty positions in Nijmegen, a nice little city near the country’s eastern border. We were feeling a bit stagnant, our twins were still young, and it seemed like a good time for an adventure. But hauling suitcases and children from Canada to Europe took its toll on my 59-year-old body.

According to the MRI, I was developing what’s loosely called sciatica. The nerves in my lower spine were getting squished, causing pain in the back of my legs. In September, the pain was bothersome; by early October, it spurted intermittently like a sulphurous geyser; and by late October it was excruciating—an ugly, dirty pain that lived like a demon in my body. I sometimes let out a screech when rolling over in bed at night, which freaked the hell out of Isabel and embarrassed me to no end. “Go back to sleep, it’s not that bad,” I’d say. But really it was.

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The Dish

From the Print Edition

October 31, 2011 | 12:30 pm

4 Comments

Toronto’s five best restaurants to bring the kids along and eat well too

No frozen chicken fingers. Just five restaurants that satisfy young palates and keep the grown-ups happy

Best For Kids

Reasons to love Ceili Cottage: its drippingly juicy pork bangers in caramelized onion gravy with creamy mash; an eye-closingly cheddary mac-and-cheese; and its decadent sticky toffee pudding. 1301 Queen St. E., 416-406-1301.

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The Informer

Ford Focus

October 13, 2011 | 3:30 pm

6 Comments

Doug Ford comes out pro-Pepsi and anti–healthy drinks in another acrimonious city hall battle pitting left versus right

Depending on whom you ask, Doug Ford is upset because either the city is force-feeding kids healthy drinks or it’s not force-feeding them enough sugar. Apparently, Ford is angry that regulations, which ban bottled water and require vending machines on city property to be half-stocked with healthy (healthier than pop, at least) options, are costing the city a nice chunk of change.

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