For many parents, raising a teenager is like fighting a long war, but years go by without any clear winner. Like a border conflict between neighboring countries, the parent-teen war is about boundaries: Where is the line between what I control and what you do?

    Both sides want peace, but neither feels it has any power to stop the conflict. In part, this is because neither is willing to admit any responsibility for starting it. From the parents' point of view, the only cause of their fight is their adolescents' complete unreasonableness. And of course, the teens see it in exactly the same way, except oppositely. Both feel trapped.

In this article, I'll describe three no-win situations that commonly arise between teens and parents and then suggest some ways out of the trap. The first no-win situation is quarrels over unimportant things. Examples include the color of the teen's hair, the cleanliness of the bedroom, the preferred style of clothing, the child's failure to eat a good breakfast before school, or his tendency to sleep until noon on the weekends. Second, blaming. The goal of a blaming battle is to make the other admit that his bad attitude is the reason why everything goes wrong. Third, needing to be right. It doesn't matter what the topic is —politics, the laws of physics, or the proper way to break an egg—the point of these arguments is to prove that you are right and the other person is wrong, for both wish to be considered an authority—someone who actually knows something—and therefore to command respect. Unfortunately, as long as parents and teens continue to assume that they know more than the other, they'll continue to fight these battles forever and never make any real progress.

    Bill Gates recently has predicted that online learning will make place-based colleges less significant, and five years from now, students will be able to find the best lectures in the world online. I applaud Mr. Gates. But what's taking us so long?

    As early as 1997, MIT(麻省理工) decided to post videos of all university lectures online, for free, for all people. But today, how many students have you met who mastered advanced mathematics or nuclear physics from an MIT online video? Unfortunately, the answer is not many. The problem is the poor quality of online education websites and the experience they provide to students. Those who go to the MIT website and watch courses online are surely very smart people, but it's not like playing a video game such as World of Warcraft. Only the most ardent students, those who are highly motivated, will devote themselves to studying these boring online videos.

    The real question is why we aren't spending more to develop better online education platforms. Where is the Avatar of education? Think about this. The market for Hollywood films per year is worth around 30 billion USD. Education in the world is a trillion-dollar-a-year market, hundreds of times bigger than Hollywood movies. Yet the most expensive digital learning system ever built cost well under 100 million dollars.

    Bill Gates' prediction is going to happen. There is no doubt about it. But it will only happen when we create high level educational content and experiences that engage and excite more than has ever been possible in the real world.

    Norman Garmezy, a development psychologist at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. A nine-year-old boy in particular stuck with him. He has an alcoholic mother and an absent father. But each day he would walk in to school with a smile on his face. He wanted to make sure that "no one would feel pity for him and no one would know his mother's incompetence.” The boy exhibited a quality Garmezy identified as “resilience”.

    Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. People who are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity (逆境) won't know how resilient they are. It's only when they're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, comes out. Some give in and some conquer.

    Garmezy's work opened the door to the study of the elements that could enable an individual's success despite the challenges they faced. His research indicated that some elements had to do with luck, but quite large set of elements was psychological, and had to do with how the children responded to the environment. The resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal lens of control(内控点)”. They believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the arrangers of their own fates.

    Ceorge Bonanno has been studying resilience for years at Columbia University's Teachers College. He found that some people are far better than others at dealing with adversity. This difference might come from perception(认知) whether they think of an event as traumatic(创伤), or as an opportunity to learn and grow. “Stressful” or “traumatic” events themselves don't have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. "Exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning,” Bonanno said. "It's only predictive if there's a negative response.” In other words, living through adversity doesn't guarantee that you'll suffer going forward.

The good news is that positive perception can be taught. "We can make ourselves more or less easily hurt by how we think about things," Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of adversity in different ways--to reframe it in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally “hot”—changes how they experience and react to the adversity.

Londoners are great readers. They buy vast numbers of newspapers and magazines and of books — especially paperbacks, which are still comparatively cheap in spite of ever-increasing rises in the costs of printing. They still continue to buy "proper" books, too, printed on good paper and bound（装订）between hard covers.

    There are many streets in London containing shops which specialize in book-selling. Perhaps the best known of these is Charring Cross Road in the very heart of London. Here bookshops of all sorts and sizes are to be found, from the celebrated one which boasts of being "the biggest bookshop in the world" to the tiny, dusty little places which seem to have been left over from Dickens' time. Some of these shops stock, or will obtain, any kind of book, but many of them specialize in second-hand books, in art books, in foreign books, in books on philosophy, politics or any other of the countless subjects about which books may be written. One shop in this area specializes only in books about ballet!

    Although it may be the most convenient place for Londoners to buy books, Charring Cross Road is not the cheapest. For the really cheap second-hand books, the collector must venture off the beaten track, to Farringdon Road, for example, in the East Central district of London. Here there is nothing so impressive as bookshops. The booksellers come along each morning and pour out their sacks of books onto small hand carts. And the collectors, some professionals and some amateurs, have been waiting for them. In places like this they can still, occasionally, pick up for a few pence an old one that may be worth many pounds.

    Shellharbour City Library provides a range of Library Special Needs Services for people who are unable to access our library service in the usual way. As long as you live in Shellharbour City, we'll provide a full range of library services and resources including:

    Large printed and ordinary printed books

    Talking books on tape and CD

    DVDs and music CDs

    Magazines

    Reference and information requests

    You will be asked to complete a “Statement of Need” application form which must be signed by a medical professional.

    Home delivery service

    Let us know what you like to read and we will choose the resources for you. Our staff will deliver the resources to your home for free. We also provide a service where we can choose the resources for you or someone instead of you choosing the things from the library. You can also choose the resources you need personally.

    Talking books and captioned videos

    The library can provide talking books for people who are unable to use printed books because of eye diseases. You don't have to miss out on reading any more when you can borrow talking books from the library. If you have limited hearing which prevents you from enjoying movies, we can provide captioned videos for you at no charge.

    Language besides English

    We can provide books in a range of languages besides English. If possible, we will request these items from the State Library of NSW. Australia.

    How to join

    Contact the Library Special Needs Coordinator to register or discuss if you are eligible (合适的) for any of the services we provide—9 am to 5 pm on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Call 4297-2522 for more information.

    A few weeks ago, a 71-year-old man pulled his car to the roadside in Northwest Portland and stopped. He rolled down the window, turned off the engine and stared at a house.

    The place, distinguished by three gables, is partially hidden by hedges and trees. Most people who pass by would never notice it. And if they did give it a glance, they'd probably think it's a nice house in a nice neighborhood. Nothing more.

    The house, in the 2500 block of Northwest Westover Road, is known as the Bessie & Louis Tarpley House. Built in 1907, it's listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

    The current owner is Barbee Lyon, 79.

    He and his first wife took possession in 1975. When they divorced, he bought out her share.

    A retired lawyer, Lyon learned Louis Tarpley, the home's first owner, had also been a Portland lawyer. Setbacks in Tarpley's life led to the house auction(拍卖) in the late 1920s.

    "I'm only the fifth owner of the home," Lyon said.

    A previous owner was Frank Masco.

    He and his wife, Esther, and their nine children had lived across town in a tiny house needing constant repairs. In the mid-1950s, the elder Masco wanted to move to a bigger house and one closer to work. A docker (码头工人), he was on-call 24 hours a day and had to quickly get to the Willamette River docks.

    He found a home on Westover Road. At the time, many people wanted to live in new construction in the suburbs. The Westover house was offered at a deep discount.

    And later the family moved on several times, finally living in Vancouver.

    One Sunday in July 2019, Charley Masco drove to Portland for an appointment at a computer store. When it ended, he traveled the familiar route to Westover Road, pulled over and looked at that home.

    He decided to do something bold. He got out of his car and walked up the steps and rang the doorbell. He waited. No response. Nervous, he thought it was a mistake to do this and considered turning around and walking back to his car.

Barbee Lyon opened the door and saw a stranger.

    "I'm not selling anything," Masco said quickly. "I just want you to know I once lived here."

    Lyon opened the door wide.

    "Come in."

    And for the first time since 1966, Masco stepped into his childhood home.

    Every room looked as Masco had remembered it: The built-in china hutch in the dining room, the hanging lights above the table and, in the kitchen, a massive wood-burning stove where his mother used to cook family meals. It was as if he had walked into his own museum.

    Lyon told Masco he'd never done major structural remodeling, which meant Masco knew his way around the home.

    It was as if he had never left.

    There, on the top floor, was the window he and his siblings quietly opened to sneak out at night and return before their parents knew they were gone. The loft where friends daydreamed about the future. The living room – no TV ever allowed – where the family gathered to share music, play cards or just talk with each other.

    Then they all walked to the basement.

    In the far corner, Masco saw his father's old wooden workbench. And above it, baby food jars. Masco had forgotten about them.

    He explained that his father had nailed lids from the jars to a rafter, filling the glass with different size screws, nuts and bolts, and then screwing the jars back into the lids to give him easy access while working.

    Masco thought about his father, his mother and three of his siblings who have died. He thought about his father, tinkering in the basement, while his mother was in the kitchen preparing dinner.

    He thought about the 71-year-old man he was and the boy he had once been.

    Kruse, Lyon's wife, reached up and unscrewed a jar. She handed it to Masco, believing it belonged to this stranger.

    Masco thanked her.

    He clutched the small bottle to his chest.

    "My dad," he said quietly. "This is my dad."