Parenting is always a tricky business, even in the best of circumstances. Parents frequently second-guess themselves about when to intervene and when to hold back. There may be less second-guessing in the Netherlands, where the children are rated on several scales as the happiest in the world. Is there a common cultural approach? Rina Mae Acosta and Michele Hutchison both married Dutch men and picked up some ideas raising their kids Dutch. Their book is The Happiest Kids in the World: How Dutch

Stories about drug addiction tend to have some common themes. One of them is that people often think that they will NOT get addicted. And they're usually wrong. Kyle Simpson was a happy college student, by his own description. But he got addicted to drugs and had to fight his way back to the life he'd known. He made a documentary about his experience, called simply "Junk." It screens on Tuesday (April 11) at Southern Oregon University.

The area around Clovis, New Mexico yielded many archaeological treasures over the years. That's why the earliest human inhabitants of North America are generally referred to as The Clovis People. But digs in Southeastern Oregon continue to turn up finds that pre-date Clovis sites. The University of Oregon has devoted faculty and students to digs in the region, including at the Rimrock Draw site.

Stephanie Sacks stops just short of profanity in expressing concern for what people eat. She's even got chef's uniforms embroidered with her book title: What the Fork are you Eating? Sacks is constantly amazed by the things people put in their bodies, and always ready with a list of good foods and beverages.

There's a level of curiosity about dangerous things, especially for kids. Like "what would happen if you went outside a spaceship without a suit?" Those are the very kinds of questions Cody Cassidy and Paul Doherty answer in their book And Then You're Dead . It's not as macabre as it may sound, and there's no danger in reading the book itself. We think.

April is here, and now come the warmer days of enjoying evenings outside, outdoor concerts and more. Well, we can HOPE, anyway. Offerings in the arts tend to expand in the warmer months. We track the arts scene in our First Friday Arts segment, a free-for-all featuring phone calls from around the region boosting arts events for the coming weeks.

Josh Gross has an addiction, and it's one we're only too happy to share. He loves music, and across a wide spectrum of genres and styles. Josh makes music, and writes about music for the Rogue Valley Messenger . And once a month, he visits the studio with "Rogue Sounds," a compilation of musical samples and news of coming band dates.

How'd you sleep last night? Did you get eight hours, or at least try? Try and fail to get enough sleep is a constant refrain in the world today. And maybe because we've tried to turn sleeping into something like shift work: pick a part of the day and SLEEP, boom. The body often does not cooperate. In the book Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World , author Benjamin Reiss gives a lesson in what sleep was like before coffee and alarm clocks.

The pink robes of the Buddhist nuns in Myanmar (Burma) grab the eyes instantly. The stories of the nuns grab many hearts as well. And those stories are told in "A Thousand Mothers," a documentary film shown this week at the Ashland Independent Film Festival.

Like it or not, the plants that surround us are often NOT the plants that would be here without people and their constant tinkering with the environment. Non-native species abound, and efforts to eradicate invasive species are ongoing. But not always with the use of pesticides. Mount Shasta residents and friends gather this weekend (April 8) for a second annual community weed pull, designed to get the invasives out and replace them with native plants .