Next week, the U.S. Senate is slated to take up a long-planned and unprecedented overhaul of the American health care system. In such an effort, I'm certain these lawmakers will overlook a huge but hidden cost of their massive national health care program, that being the indubitable spike in high blood pressure among those taxpayers who read newspaper articles about health care reform and then pace across the kitchen, fuming. To wit: My husband.

I hope Altace is one of the drugs the government plans to hand out like candy on Halloween when it imposes its new system to assure our good health.

There's a parenting proverb that says, "Prepare not the path for the child, but prepare the child for the path." I can't find the source of it, though I once had a lovely decorative tile with this phrase that I kept in my kitchen until my son broke it. At the time he apparently was on a path of destruction.

There's a lot of wisdom in that phrase, but in our culture, it seems we parents spend a good part of our time trying to smooth out the bumps in the road for our children, rather than help them develop their own sets of internal shock absorbers. Our fixation on our children's happiness has created a perverse and unnatural reality. We're raising up a generation that expects life to always be fair and predictable; and also not too painful and not too difficult.

It's not scientific, but it's telling nonetheless that 80 percent of those who took People magazine's online survey about reality-TV stars Jon and Kate Gosselin say the couple's current struggles aren't just the typical ups and downs of married life, but instead are reason for them to "step back and re-prioritize."

Updating you cave-dwellers, Jon and Kate Gosselin are The Learning Channel (TLC) parents of eight children - a set of 8-year-old twin daughters and sextuplets, age 5. Their raucous home life has been chronicled for four seasons as they adjusted to, and then mastered, their roles as parents of multiple multiples.

Along the way, the reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8" has offered voyeuristic glimpses into the Gosselins' marriage and extended-family relationships.

They say there's one in every family -- one who is different from the rest. There's the one who looks like dad's side or who has the only set of brown eyes or who uniquely displays a talent for music or art.

Usually, there's one child who's more athletic, or less; more academically inclined, or not at all; more outgoing or wouldn't say "boo" to a ghost.

Of my four children, Betsy is the different one. She's the only blonde. She's the only child who isn't easily distracted. She was the only 13-year-old who wanted a George Foreman Fat Reducing Grill for her birthday (because she was the only one who liked to cook).

Betsy is the one we dubbed "Little Miss Independent." Not only because she tried to scramble eggs on the kitchen floor

The folks in one northern Michigan community can rest easy because it's clear their high school computer teacher is on the ball. Last week in the computer lab, a student who completed his video production assignment killed time by surfing the Internet on a school computer. But the teacher (unnamed in news stories) caught a glimpse of the screen and put a stop to the student's consumption of vile and vulgar Internet content.

Just what despicable Web site was the young man viewing? Here's fair warning before you read on ... consider sending the children out of the room or at least shielding their eyes. He was reading Foxnews.com.

According to reports, when the student, a senior, was caught scanning headlines on Foxnews.com the teacher publicly berated and belittled him for reading the "wrong" news.

Thank goodness there are teachers like this all across America, protecting our children from the dangerous influences of the Internet.

Not.

Yesterday, Google's alert service let me know that a blogger had written a review of my parenting book "Bringing Up Geeks," released last summer by Penguin/Berkley. In case you haven't read it, the premise of the book is that we ought to raise geeky children for success in life, and not for popularity in the seventh grade. These goals generally are mutually exclusive.

The blogger liked my premise. She liked my acronym for "GEEKs" - Genuine, Enthusiastic, Empowered Kids. She liked my 10 foolproof rules for raising innocent, wholesome children, such as "Raise a Sheltered Kid" and "Raise a Kid Adults Like." She felt affirmed, encouraged and uplifted. All in all, a great review.

Yet I was troubled to find a paragraph in this blogger's review...

Our conversation paused just long enough to be sure the screech from the basement was a happy squeal, and not a painful wail. No tears. Score one for the moms.

"How did you do it?" my friend asks. "I only have two daughters, and I'm overwhelmed. You had four kids, and you seemed to have it all under control."

"I had help," I wink. "A great baby sitter who made it all possible." The young mom in my kitchen had been that great baby sitter some 15 years ago.

Missy says, "I learned so much from you; you'll never know."

By way of example, she recalls a time we chatted in the kitchen while my daughter Betsy shouted for me from the backyard. "You looked out the window, but we kept talking, until finally she yelled and cried so much you walked outside."

I've been told that if I'd been a parent in the 1950s, I probably would have spoken out against Elvis Presley's pelvic thrust as a dance move. The theory is that teens of every generation will find their own ways to rebel against the cultural norm, and that parents from one generation to the next always object with questions such as “What is this world coming to?”

Perhaps. But that doesn't stop me from asking the question, “What IS this world coming to?”

These days I'm becoming increasingly convinced I should have walked the earth in prehistoric times. Clearly, I'm a dinosaur, especially when it comes to parenting and culture.

A few years ago, author Rebecca Hagelin appeared on Fox News' “O'Reilly Factor” to promote her first parenting book, “Home Invasion.” During the interview, an incredulous Mr. O'Reilly challenged Mrs. Hagelin, asking how she reacts to teens who rebel against standards in the home about media.

Mrs. Hagelin calmly explained that when children and teens understand their parents' standards and values, they tend not to rebel much - or at least, that's been her experience. Mr. O'Reilly summarized, “Well, then, you're just lucky, that's all.”

I've no doubt that Mrs. Hagelin is lucky, in the way that we all feel blessed with the embarrassment of riches that parenthood brings. But it wasn't luck that created a household in which she and her husband could expect that their children follow guidelines about media consumption; it was skill.

A couple of weeks ago, in observance of International Women's Day, the Vatican made headlines by proposing it was not birth control, abortion or the freedom to work outside the home that had most liberated women, but rather the invention of the washing machine.

According to L'Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Holy See, the ability to efficiently launder our family's clothing unlocked our cultural shackles.

A lot of folks scoffed at this, claiming it once again affirms the patriarchal Catholic Church is out of touch with 21st-century womanhood. I didn't necessarily feel that way, but then again I have four children. Without my front loader, I’d be a fixture at the riverbank.