This is a refreshing headline. Family time is important for good mental health, especially family dinners, which would be totally cramped by sports.
By SUE SHELLENBARGER
Mark Breier sees big benefits for his three sons in playing sports. But when his teenage son Travis, dreaming of a pro career, wanted to join an elite traveling basketball team in junior-high school, Mr. Breier said no. Read more…
My basic summary of this article? “Waaaaaaa!” -Parents
I have never been a fan of Time, so the recent news that the magazine is withdrawing a lot of free content from its online version did not cost me one wink of sleep. But this week’s cover story promoting the one-child family as the new American family model annoyed me — at least, what I read of it from other sources as well as the summary Time published online.
What’s at issue here is not how many children any particular couple have, which is their own business, but the suggestion that society as a whole has outgrown the need for more than one, or at least the ability to afford a bigger family. Read more…
by Colin Mason
Cyril Connolly once said that “there is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway.” Connelly is here suggesting that the distractions implicit in rearing a child will undercut an artist’s attempt to create, so children are to be avoided insofar as possible.
I have long believed that Connelly is wrong in opposing children to art. So I was pleasantly surprised, recently, to see my view validated by Frank Cottrell Boyce, a successful British screenwriter, novelist and actor. Boyce’s article, entitled “The Parent Trap: Art After Children” and appearing in Britain’s Guardian, makes the case that children, far from inhibiting or destroying an artist’s creativity, are actually a creative boon. He has this to say about fatherhood and art:
What is “me”, if not the sum of all my relationships and obligations? A customer, that’s what. The more you give, the more you are. Think of Chekhov, with his patients and his crowds of dependent relatives, whose living room became such a public space that he had to put up no smoking signs. His advice to young writers was “travel third class”. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s was to “buy carrots and turnips” … Read more…
When this was brought to my attention (look on the third page) all I could think is “You have got to be kidding…”
But because we are by now such a thoroughly (indeed absurdly) non-judgmental, morally neutral, nonsensically ‘tolerant’, hyper-inclusive, politically correct society there are bound to be those who insist that the National ‘Education’ Association simply must allow the Drag Queens among them to have their own caucus if they are also willing to countenance the NEA Christian Prayer Service Caucus, the Catholic Caucus, the Creation Science Educators Caucus, the Jewish Caucus, or the People of Faith Caucus; as they in fact do.
And because our culture has to a significant extent succumbed to nihilism, some will also dismissively declare, “So what? How much more cynical is that than the Bourbon Caucus or the (apparently) competing No Cocktail Left Behind caucus? Or does it sound any sillier than the Princess Caucus?” And the NEA does also consent to those as well, after all…
Some will even assert (mindlessly, if you ask me) that the NEA Drag Queen Caucus is adequately counterbalanced by their Ex-Gay Educators Caucus.
And even I can understand how the Lesbian & Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Caucus could be relevant to advocating the ‘rights’ of it’s members in the workplace.
But be honest with your self. Are any of those others in any way morally comparable to a Drag Queen Caucus? So now we are to be compelled to provide our children to cross-dressers so they can act out their ‘sexuality’ in front of a captive (and compliantly impressionable) audience?
For an organization that purports to be attending to the education and care of all of our young to indulge such a bent is beyond cynical. It’s just plain malicious.
Recently (Saturday, June 10th) there was an awesome webcast called Ending Abortion. It’s well worth checking out.
You can download any (or all) of the ten hour-long sessions as an MP3 to your computer or ipod and listen to each at your leisure.
by Walter R Schumm
Research showing the risks of lesbian and gay parenting is ignored in the race to make a political case.
There is an inherent risk that anyone who has anything to say about gay male or lesbian parenting, no matter how cautious, will be misunderstood at best and vilified at worst. Nevertheless, the mission of a university professor includes seeking new ways to look at old issues, to resist all forms of intimidation, and to ensure that multiple sides of controversial issues are considered. Since there are more voices promoting the virtues of parenting by people defining themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (GLBT), I will present here an alternative, possibly minority, view that focuses on some of the possible risks associated with gay and lesbian parenting. Read more…
Monday (July 5th) I listened to a broadcast on the Diane Rehm Show of an interview with James T. Patterson, author of Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over Black Family Life from LBJ to Obama. That title was already on my long (long…) wish-list of books I’d like to buy if I had a few thousand bucks to spare (and a few years of leisure time I could spend to read them) so of course I listened with interest. But if what I heard was any indication of the kind of self contradictory ‘logic’ to be found in his book, then it’s probably no longer one of the must-have titles on my list. (So don’t take this as a review of Professor Patterson’s book, which I haven’t read. This is just my reactions to some of the assertions he made in his interview.) Read more…
Having children: you’ve got to do it. If you don’t Charles Darwin will call you a loser or something. And there’s that whole Demographic Winter thing too. So, both for yourself and your society, you’ve got to have children.
But having children is hard.
I thought of something a friend once said about the Children’s Museum of Manhattan—“a nice place, but what it really needs is a bar”—and rued how, at that moment, the same thing could be said of my apartment. Two hundred and 40 seconds earlier, I’d been in a state of pair-bonded bliss; now I was guided by nerves, trawling the cabinets for alcohol. My emotional life looks a lot like this these days. I suspect it does for many parents—a high-amplitude, high-frequency sine curve along which we get the privilege of doing hourly surfs. Yet it’s something most of us choose. Indeed, it’s something most of us would say we’d be miserable without.
People today, however, delay having children. Having children is hard enough. Delaying the process only makes it harder. “Oh,” you will say, “but if I have children later, I’ll have more money. I’ll be able to buy them more stuff. I’ll be able to hire more and better child care. That’ll make it so much easier.”
Dream on.
As this article from New York magazine puts it:
Not only did they find that couples’ overall marital satisfaction went down if they had kids; they found that every successive generation was more put out by having them than the last—our current one most of all. Even more surprisingly, they found that parents’ dissatisfaction only grew the more money they had, even though they had the purchasing power to buy more child care. “And my hypothesis about why this is, in both cases, is the same,” says Twenge. “They become parents later in life. There’s a loss of freedom, a loss of autonomy. It’s totally different from going from your parents’ house to immediately having a baby. Now you know what you’re giving up.” Read more…
Finally, some good news from a family court:
A Wisconsin court has told a lesbian that legal adoption, not merely nurturing a child, determines parental rights.
A lesbian identified as Liz K. and her former partner Wendy M. adopted two children from Guatamala. The couple decided that since Liz was a practicing attorney and could add the children to her health insurance, she should be the legal adoptive parent.
But after the couple’s relationship ended, Liz’z former partner sued for parental rights, saying she had a relationship with the children also. Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel believes the court made the right decision in refusing to grant guardianship status to Wendy. Read more…
Part 1. in a series of responses to a question posed by a student.
No one contract can treat same sex couples and opposite sex couples identically.
(Warning: this post is long! But Worth the effort if I do say so myself!)
1. If you believed that it is not possible for the government to be neutral in the definition of marriage, would that change your view of the desirability of your proposal? Read more…
It’s so true. Many studies have proven the lasting value of family meals on children especially, including improved test scores and health, and decreasing the chances of drug and alcohol abuse.
by Sheila Liaugminas
I have few T-shirts with words or pictures on them, preferring simple solid colors instead. But there’s one I couldn’t resist, and my family loves it….the blue one with a drawing of a little house and a family sitting around a dinner table with the caption “Value Meal”. I wore it on Father’s Day evening at the family table in the rare instance that we were all together. The value of that goes deeper than we think we know…
A few years ago, Time magazine did a fine piece on ‘The Family Meal’ that so captured my attention, I’ve shared it in print and on radio time and again to reinforce the message. Read more…
W. Bradford Wilcox
I have a lot of respect for Pamela Paul. So it pains me to say that her new piece in The Atlantic, “Are Fathers Necessary?”, gets it wrong, and in two very big ways. The gist of her argument is that sociologists Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey are right in claiming that fathers play no essential role in the lives of their children. Or, in their words, ”based strictly on the published science, one could argue that two women parent better on average than a woman and a man…” Read more…
Thumbs up from me for this article.
Social science may suggest that kids drain their parents’ happiness, but there’s evidence that good parenting is less work and more fun than people think. Bryan Caplan makes the case for having more children.
By BRYAN CAPLAN
Amid the Father’s Day festivities, many of us are privately asking a Scroogely question: “Having kids—what’s in it for me?” An economic perspective on happiness, nature and nurture provides an answer: Parents’ sacrifice is much smaller than it looks, and much larger than it has to be. Read more…
New podcast! Drew Mariani interviews Dr J on his radio show about Fathers’ Day, the president’s speech commemorating same, homosexual parenting, and the oft-mentioned Pediatrics study championing lesbian parenting. Listen here.
We’ve been talking about this study a lot lately, and now there’s a podcast about it here. Dr J appears on Issues, Etc to discuss the shoddy science and the gratuitous potshots contained therein.
By Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse|Published Date: April 04, 2010 at The Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview.
Equal, but…
“Kids Do as Well with Same Sex Parents,” the headlines screamed. I crossed swords with Judith Stacey, one of the authors of this most recent study, at a debate at Bowling Green State a few years ago. I asked her point blank if she believed men and women were completely interchangeable as parents. In front of that very friendly audience, she said absolutely: the gender of parents doesn’t matter. And so she says now, in this new article the media loved. But midway through the article, her argument shifts from a “no difference” argument to my favorite definition of feminism: men and women are identical, except women are better. Her article ends with an intimation that I believe tells strongly against same sex marriage. Redefining marriage will create a cultural climate that will drive men out of the family, and lead to the belief that the only good man is a gay man. Read more…
Is Father’s Day going to become obsolete? I guess those for whom it is actually celebrated are a dying breed.
By Van Helsing
Father’s Day is coming up a week from Sunday. MSNBC has begun to honor it already — by proclaiming that fathers are needed only for their sperm: Read more…
You’ve all seen the headlines by now: “Children of lesbian parents do well.” These headlines are based on a new study published in the journal Pediatrics. I actually read the study, which is my custom before commenting. I also read the letters to the editor on this study.
Here are 8 reasons why this study does not prove anything about the functioning of the children of lesbians.
1. The sample is extremely small: 78 children of lesbian mothers and 93 children in the control group.
2. The sample of lesbian mothers is unlikely to be representative of the general population of lesbians. This is a sample of people who volunteered for the study, not a random sample. The most motivated and high-functioning people are the most likely to volunteer for a politically charged study.
3. The “results” are intrinsically unreliable. The results are nothing but the mothers’ reports of their childrens’ behavior and functioning. There is no cross-checking with objective outcomes, Read more…
The great Theodore Dalrymple takes on the issue of fatherlessness. Contrary to the promises of those who would redefine marriage out of existence, every indication is that mass fatherlessness leads to a world of Hobbesian horror, not of Kumbaya love and happiness. (Emphasis added).
The worst child abusers in the country have been successive British governments. They have done everything in their power, by means of social reform and fiscal policies, to promote the very circumstances in which child abuse and neglect are most likely to take place. Read more…
Good stuff to keep in mind for parents of teenagers. Heidi (one of our blog followers) being one, what do you think?
by Katie Hinderer
Last week’s post about attire and the male versus female mind has drawn a lot of comments. (I love hearing what you have to say, so keep the thoughts coming.) All the discussion got me thinking about where the solution can be found. I was toying with the role parents’ play when Carlos hit the nail on the head; saying girls “need strong fathers to say NO and strong mothers to explain why!!” Read more…
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