Hasta La Gadget!

A long time ago, I was a kid.

And when I was a kid, I played.

There was some homework. I did it, or I put it off until the next morning and raced to get it done before school, but somehow there was plenty of time to go out and play with the neighborhood kids.

We’d play ball and ride our bikes in warm weather. Ice skate in the winter. Lego, Girder and Panel, and board games whenever.

Fast-forward to today.

My children, my wife and I are slaves to homework.

Play is a rarity.

The homework load is mind-boggling.

My ninth grader has three hours a night.

My sixth graders have an hour to two hours.

Why?

What has turned happy homes into homework hell?

I can think of three possible reasons.

First, teaching to the test.

Schools, and therefore administrators and teachers, are graded today on how their standardized test scores compare with other schools.

So, the whole year is about cramming kids’ heads with knowledge, so their administrators and teachers can keep their jobs.

Second, fear.

Parents are afraid that if their kids don’t do a ton of homework, the kids will fall behind in an educational arms race.

If kids don’t get into a top school, in today’s economy, they’ll never make a living. So, we bully them into competing with classmates instead of letting them enjoy childhood.

The third possible reason: We adults are total failures at achieving work/life balance, and we’re modeling our failed, miserable lifestyles for our kids.

Used to be that work happened only at the workplace. Now, with smartphones, work happens everywhere: on vacation, during family dinner –even in the bathroom.

Adults used to sleep with each other.

Now they sleep with their CrackBerries and iPhones.

Schools have all day to teach kids reading, writing and arithmetic, along with whatever social pablum administrators and society want to shove down kids’ throats.

Why can’t kids get home and do what they’re really supposed to do — play? Move? Have fun?

It’s not just about getting kids off of technology.

It’s about getting kids off the treadmill of competition and credentialism.

Am I the only parent who’s doing more homework as an adult than in our own childhoods?

Am I the only parent who’s sick of the system that denies kids the right to be kids?

Who the hell made this ridiculous system?

And why aren’t there any alternatives for parents who don’t want their kids working like little robots instead of playing and resting?

I’d complain more, but I have to do math right now with my kids.

The recent non-indictments in the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, both unarmed black males, have led to a national conversation about the dangers of simply being alive while black — a concern that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio says he shares on a very personal level.

De Blasio addressed the nation in a live press conference Wednesday shortly after a grand jury announced its decision not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who placed Garner in a prohibited police chokehold during an attempted arrest on July 17, killing him.

In his remarks Wednesday, the mayor, who is white, mentioned his son Dante, who is 16 and biracial. He spoke about the dangers Dante may face when interacting with police.

“This is profoundly personal to me,” de Blasio said. “I was at the White House the other day, and the president of the United States turned to me, and he met Dante a few months ago, and he said that Dante reminded him of what he looked like as a teenager. And he said, ‘I know you see this crisis through a very personal lens.’ And I said to him, I did.”

De Blasio went on to note that he and his wife, Chirlane McCray, who is black, “have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers that he may face.”

The mayor described his son as “a good young man, [a] law-abiding young man who would never think to do anything wrong” — but he noted that “because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face, we’ve had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.”

De Blasio’s remarks echoed the anxiety many families feel as police tactics across the country grow increasingly militarized and as officers continue to exercise lethal force on black men, women and children.

The mayor described “that painful sense of contradiction that our young people see first, that our police are here to protect us, and we honor that, and at the same time, there’s a history we have to overcome.”

“For so many of our young people, there’s a fear,” de Blasio said. “And for so many of our families, there’s a fear.”

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Did you know over 400,000 Coloradans got insurance this past year thanks to Obamacare?

10 million Americans got covered thanks to Obamacare.

And guess what? In 2013, health care costs grew at their slowest rate since anyone started keeping track of such things (in 1960, for those of you wondering).

Obamacare is working. It’s not perfect. There’s more to do. But more people are covered and costs are slowing down. That’s a decent start to fixing the health care crisis America has been facing for years.

Open enrollment is happening right now. It runs through February 15, 2015. So for people in need of health insurance or looking to shop around, now is the time to do it.

Getting more people informed and enrolled is the goal of the Got Insurance! campaign. Real stories of real people getting the care they need. Oh, and Congresswoman Diana DeGette and Uncle Sam lend a hand to help get the word out.

So take a second and head on over to the Got Insurance! website and learn what you need to know to get the coverage you need.

Think of it as the most important holiday shopping you can do this year.

When I learned that I was chosen as one of ten honorees for the L’Oréal Paris 2014 Women of Worth award, I was immediately overwhelmed with gratitude for the opportunity to represent my cause. But, in my mind, I am not a woman of worth as much as I am a part of a powerful community of worth. My story as a “woman of worth” begins and ends with hundreds of other women of worth. My role, every step of the way, has been to be open to learning from, collaborating with and building a community through women who have embraced the fight against childhood cancers and said, “I know I can help.”

Three months after my then four-year-old son Max was diagnosed with brain cancer, and with the support of a number of extraordinary women, the MaxLove Project (MLP) began. We started with a partnership with the Cloud b company, maker of beautiful plush sleep toys that project stars on to the ceiling. When I asked if we could purchase several Twilight Turtles to give to Max’s friends in the hospital for cancer treatment, their visionary founder, Linda, agreed and filled our garage with them, free of cost.

Another essential step for Max, and the mission of MaxLove Project, was our connection with an extraordinary healer, Ruth McCarty. We are fortunate to be at CHOC Children’s Hospital, which supports inpatient Traditional Chinese Medicine, overseen by Ruth. After seeing Max’s response to Ruth’s treatments, we began to ask why all families fighting cancer don’t have access to this. As we built our nationwide network and community, we witnessed overwhelming inequities. The odds disproportionally affect children of disadvantaged populations. With disproportionate access to whole-body wellness, therapeutics meant to heal, the odds are stacked high against our kids. Not just the odds that diseases and treatments present, but the additional challenges in access to the non-toxic complementary therapeutics that help our kids stay strong in the fight. Inspired by Ruth’s work at our hospital, we decided that MLP had to have as its central mission the goal to support families fighting childhood cancers with integrative treatments like acupuncture and also evidence-based nutrition, healthy sleep, physical activity, and stress management. Thankfully, a community of amazing women agreed that we could do something about this and took up the charge by my side.

Through the work of Ruth, Max’s oncologist, Dr. Shen, and so many of their amazing colleagues at the hospital, we dove head first into creating programs that could help families across the country and the world. Today, inspired by a number of incredible women — chefs, dietitians, and doctors — who have offered their time and expertise, we offer cooking classes, fund private individualized nutritional consultations for families, send out “Fierce Foods Kits” filled with educational materials and healthy, kid-friendly products and fund an online support group for parents monitored by a wonderful professional anticancer dietitian. We also fund essential research on nutrition and cancer through the St. Baldrick’s Foundation, the largest non-governmental funder of childhood cancer research in the U.S. But, we could not have achieved a fraction of what we have without the women of worth who’ve supported us.

There are dozens of game-changing women I should name who have pushed, pulled, propped up, protected and supported MLP and the work we’ve done: Diana, Erin, Gina, Maggie, Adrianne, Dr. Shen, Julene, Tina, Blakely, Miriam, Tiffani, Kerri, Beecher, Robin, Kathi, Paula, Ashly, Bridget, Melissa, Jackie, Jamie, Cheri, Lu, Heather, Christy… These women have shown me that behind every woman of worth is a community of hope.

All of these women are powerful game-changers and, for me, no women are more inspiring, or have had a bigger impact on MLP, than the mothers of children who have fought and are fighting cancer. Their grace and strength set a standard that I try to meet through my work at MLP. The incredible community of cancer “Mommas” and “Momcologists” inspire my work day-in and day-out and, without this community of worth, our personal journey fighting cancer would have been even more difficult. Through them I have learned that there are tremendous gifts embedded in every struggle.

Two of these special women of worth, to whom I want to call special attention, are Kristine Wetzel of the McKenna Claire Foundation and Cindy Campbell of the Ty Louis Campbell Foundations. Both are moms of extraordinary children whose lives were stolen by aggressive and lethal pediatric brain cancers. Both started nonprofit organizations that fund research in cutting-edge brain cancer treatment. Both invest in hope through their own pain. Rather than “moving on,” whatever that means, they have decided to embrace the childhood cancer community and work to ensure a future in which no family will have to endure what they have. Together, we are all essential pieces of a much larger puzzle of hope. Together, we are forging new paths and making tremendous breakthroughs for our kids. We are intent on taking this overwhelmingly painful challenge and making it into something that helps others, something that matters and makes a difference.

We won’t let cancer just take and take and take, so we give. United, women of worth are building a community of hope. We will overcome these overwhelming odds, because our kids are worth it.

This post was brought to you by L’Oréal Paris Women of Worth, an initiative started in 2005 that honors 10 amazing volunteers combatting disease, poverty, sex trafficking and addiction with $10,000 grants each year. Go to WomenofWorth.com to read their stories.

We live in a time of international crisis and conflict: from the European financial crisis, which is robbing millions of young people of their future, to the conflict with Russia and finally to the bloody rise of ISIS.

All this is dominating the news coverage worldwide. But the Huffington Post does not only want to report about dramatic developments. The growing HuffPost network also wants to put people and organizations that help solve problems in the spotlight.

The Huffington Post is now active in 12 countries, after the Greek edition went live last month. But this is also only a preliminary number because the site keeps expanding to new countries. Shortly, our colleagues in India will be launching their site, and at the beginning of next year, the Huffington Post will also have an Arabic edition.

Our goal is a global network, with editors and thousands of bloggers who address topics which move people in their everyday lives. And this network continues to grow more and more.

The European editions of the Huffington Post are organizing interviews with well-known politicians. Just last week, HuffPost Germany had an interview with the speaker of the EU Parliament, Martin Schulz, which we arranged together with our European colleagues. In an interview with our British colleagues, the prominent EU politician spoke out clearly: “If the responsible politicians, especially the heads of state in the European Council, continue to say the success is national but the failure European, then we should not be surprised that the European Union has an image problem.”

A few days earlier, the president of Greece, Karolos Papoulias, strongly criticized representatives of the EU commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, saying, the Troika is acting “as if they are speaking to rocks and not people.” An interview by our Greek colleagues with the president will make you think.

In a long series of articles, the European editions of the Huffington Post are examining the effects that European austerity politics have. The lesson is clear: states are also not able to live above their means. But the current path will not lead to the desired result. And it’s not only livelihoods that are endangered, but also thousands of lives.

Such interviews and series are being coordinated through regular conferences between all international HuffPost editors-in-chief. The most interesting pieces are then translated by our American colleagues, and are in return picked up in other countries, like HuffPost Germany’s recent portrait of Vladimir Putin.

The international blog teams are also growing more and more together — and cooperating on joint projects. Recently, the filmmaker who chased leftist politician Gregor Gysi across the Bundestag explained in a blog post how he got into this risky project. The lesson he learned: he would do it over and over again. The stunt provoked a huge media response.

Apart from the topics conferences between the chief editors, those responsible for sections such as politics, lifestyle or social media meet regularly in international brainstormings. In sometimes only 30-minute video conferences, topics and cooperations are decided on and set into motion.

This international network is also of use to our guest contributors. Wolfgang Schäuble’s blog post about the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall appeared in many different Huffington Post editions, as did Jürgen Trittin’s post about dependency on Russian gas, which was even translated by our Japanese colleagues. Something similar happened with an article by Mikhail Gorbachev, who warned Huffington Post readers about the possibility of a new Cold War. All this helps ideas spread around the globe. And that is what we aspire to: a global news and discussion platform.

This blog post originally appeared in The Huffington Post Germany and was translated from German.