Overprotective parents inhibit more than their kids' freedom: they may also slow brain growth in an area linked to mental illness.

Children whose parents are overprotective or neglectful are believed to be more susceptible to psychiatric disorders – which in turn are associated with defects in part of the prefrontal cortex.

To investigate the link, Kosuke Narita of Gunma University, Japan, scanned the brains of 50 people in their 20s and asked them to fill out a survey about their relationship with their parents during their first 16 years.

The researchers used a survey called the Parental Bonding Instrument (pdf), an internationally recognised way of measuring children's relationships with their parents. It asks participants to rate their parents on statements like "Did not want me to grow up", "tried to control everything I did" and "tried to make me feel dependent on her/him". ...

Stephen Wood, who studies adolescent development at the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre in Australia, says the brain abnormalities cannot necessarily be blamed on children's relationship with their parents. He points out that the subjects studied may have been born with the abnormalities and as a result didn't bond well with their parents, rather than vice versa.

Wood also takes issue with the study team's decision to exclude individuals with low socioeconomic status and uneducated parents – two factors known to contribute to poor performance in cognitive tests. "The effect they found may be real, but why worry about parenting if there are other factors that are so much larger?" he says.

Labels: Japan, parenting

posted by Eve at 10:30 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Most nights, Matt Bullen's 7-year-old son sleeps at home with his mom and dad, except for the nights when he sleeps at his dad's girlfriend's house. The arrangement works well because his mom's boyfriend lives there, too. Actually, his mom's boyfriend is married to his dad's girlfriend. Confused? Don't worry, that's just par for the course in polyamorist households. ...

"I don't think it's any different than raising [kids] in a monogamous family," says Robyn Trask, Managing Director of Loving More, a polyamorous magazine and nonprofit organization based in Colorado. "You just have to really talk and communicate with your kids, which is important anyway." Trask raised three kids in a polyamorous household. When her oldest son was 10, she broke the news to him that she and his father had other lovers, expecting it to be a difficult conversation. To her surprise, he rolled with it.

"I explained that we had an open relationship, and that that didn't mean [his father and I] didn't love each other very much," she says. "I asked him how he felt about it, and he said, 'That's kind of cool.'" Now 22, her son identifies as poly and currently has two girlfriends.

For Trask's kids, growing up poly meant they had a large network of aunt- and uncle-like figures to call on. "We have more adults that we can lean on, who can be there for us," says Trask. "That kind of extended family, where there's an intimacy, is really nice."

The unusual family setup does have its drawbacks. Poly kids have to deal with judgmental peers, hiding their true family structure from friends, and the sudden absence of parental figures they have come to love and trust (if their biological parents break up with the boyfriend or girlfriend du jour).

Labels: children, culture, family structure, parenting, polyamory

posted by Eve at 8:34 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center were looking for ways to eliminate diseases that can be inherited through maternal DNA. They developed, as the magazine Nature reported last summer, a kind of swap in which defective DNA from the egg is removed and replaced with genetic material from another female’s egg. The researchers say the procedure is also likely to work on humans.

The result would be a baby with three biological parents — or “fractional parents,” as Adam Kolber, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, calls them.

He mentioned the idea over lunch at The Times, and it provided plenty of grist for debate among law junkies: Could a baby one day have 100 parents? Could anyone who contributes DNA claim visitation rights? How much DNA is enough? Can a child born outside the United States to foreigners who have DNA from an American citizen claim U.S. citizenship? ...

Since the 1960s, there has been a shift toward recognizing people’s intent in creating familial relationships, as reflected in the rise of no-fault divorce, prenuptial agreements and civil unions. But when it comes to deciding parenthood, courts remain deeply influenced by biology, even when it clashes with intent.

This concern is playing out now in A.G.R. v. D.R.H. & S.H., the biggest surrogacy case in New Jersey since Baby M’s. A woman served as a surrogate for her brother and his male spouse, giving birth to twins conceived with the spouse’s sperm and donor eggs. She signed a contract agreeing that her brother would adopt the children, but the trial court, saying it was following the Baby M decision, ruled that the spouse and the surrogate mother are the legal parents. The surrogate’s brother was given no parental rights.

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, parenting, surrogate motherhood

posted by Eve at 12:34 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

In a recent newsletter, the National Organization for Marriage cites a new government study as evidence that gay marriage will hurt kids, because the research finds that kids suffer less abuse with married biological parents than with a single parent, a parent living with an unmarried partner, or a parent and step-parent.

They got it half right. Having two married biological parents is good for kids, and better than the alternatives the study examined. We here at IGF are all for it. But that doesn't make having, say, an unmarried mom and mom better than having a married mom and mom. As a correspondent points out:

Does NOM never, ever learn? These same figures indicate that for either two-adult family structure (both biological parents, or one biological and one step-parent) the chance of abuse to the child goes down drastically IF THE COUPLE GETS MARRIED. For the first kind of family, the risk drops 80 percent. For the second kind of family, the risk drops nearly 60 percent. Even for single biological parents, the child's risk drops by about 15 percent if that single parent finds and marries someone.

Labels: cohabitation, gay marriage, gay parenting, Jonathan Rauch, Maggie Gallagher, Marriage, NOM, parenting, remarriage, single parenting

posted by Eve at 1:47 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Jay Sekora isn’t actively looking for an additional relationship, but he admits to occasionally checking a dating site to see who’s out there. Sekora’s girlfriend, Mare, who does not want her last name used here for professional reasons, said she is not pursuing anyone, either, but is “open and welcoming to what might come along.” In the three-plus years they have been together, a few other people have come along, like the woman whom Sekora, a 43-year-old systems administrator from Quincy, met online and dated briefly until she moved away. There was also a male-male couple that Mare and Sekora, who identifies as bisexual, dated for several months as a couple. Other than that, it has been the two of them. Well, sort of. ...

It’s complicated, as the poly catch phrase goes. It’s also still surprisingly closeted. Nonetheless, Valerie White, executive director of Sexual Freedom Legal Defense and Education Fund in Sharon, says we are ahead of the curve in Massachusetts, particularly compared with the South, where teachers have lost their jobs and parents have lost their children for being poly. But she notes there is no push in the poly movement to legalize these relationships, largely because there’s no infrastructure for it. “It was easy to legalize gay marriage. All you had to do was change bride and groom to person A and person B. But we don’t know what multi-partnered marriage looks like,” White says.

“The gay struggle is a larger struggle, and as poly people we don’t have to be political,” says Amoroso, who, like many poly people, does see the need for a clearer legal recognition of relationships that aren’t marriages. (If one of his partners were to fall ill, for example, he would want legal visitation rights.) ...

Then there are the kids, who in this case, according to Alan, understand as much about their parents’ lifestyle as they want to. The two boys have attended several Boston Pride Parades, and they know and interact with their parents’ partners as they would with any other close adult friends. But the Wexelblats have not yet explained the specifics of their lifestyle to their sons. “Kids deal well with things they think are normal,” says Alan. “To the degree that we can help them be comfortable with this, then they will treat it as normal. That’s the theory, anyway.”

That theory is starting to get support from research. In 2006, Elisabeth Sheff, an assistant professor of sociology at Georgia State University who had been collecting data on poly families since 1996, launched the first long-term study of children raised in such families. While her findings are not yet conclusive, Sheff says her initial generalization is that kids raised in poly families have access to many resources, such as help with homework, rides when needed, and the additional emotional support and attention that comes from having other, nonparental adults in their lives. Sheff adds, however, that “kids in poly families also sometimes feel extremely upset when their parents’ partners leave, if it means the end of the relationship between the kid and the ex-partner.” She says that poly families often pass as mundane, blended families from divorce and remarriage and therefore easily fly below the radar.

Labels: culture, parenting, polyamory

posted by Eve at 10:33 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A new report by the British think-tank Demos has hit the headlines, with its claim that ‘Parents are the principal architects of a fairer society’. Based on research from the Millennium Cohort Study, the report argues that how children are parented has a more significant impact upon their future life chances than just about anything else, including poverty and the social class into which they are born (1).

You might wonder whether the world really needs another report blaming particular parenting styles for every evident problem in late capitalist society. Across the British political spectrum, policy continually seeks to clobber parents over the head with the assertion that the future of Britain rests or falls according to whether they feed their children too many sweets or read to them for the requisite number of minutes at bedtime.

So when Jen Lexmond and Richard Reeves, authors of the Demos report, respond to concerns about interference by the ‘nanny state’ by arguing that ‘if there is one area where government intervention is justified, it is in precisely the area of life signalled by the term “nannying” – the development of children’s capabilities’, they are pushing at doors opened by New Labour, and held open by the Tories. Nothing new there.

However, Lexmond and Reeves at least try to go beyond the emotional blackmail that informs most parenting policy, which simply asserts that if you don’t adopt the right kind of parenting behaviours with your children they will die of obesity or end up on the social scrapheap, with no qualifications and a million mental disorders. Their report, Building Character, is an attempt to wrestle with the problem of how we bring up children with a sense of self and agency, who can achieve things in life and develop a responsibility to people and projects outside of themselves.

This is an important question, and one that preoccupies parents as much as policy-wonks. I have often found myself ploughing through the latest piece of official parenting advice and wondering to what end it all leads. The idea that rearing children is just about maximising their ‘happiness’, or stopping them from becoming fat, or enabling them to take a few calculated risks, might all make some sense on a personal, daily level, but it seems thoroughly inadequate in terms of a generational project.

When we say ‘children are the future’, we don’t just mean that they will outlive us, but that they will be the ones running society and making history. To that extent, it really is not enough that they are happy or that they have high self-esteem – they have to be able to cope with adversity and think outside of themselves, in order to shape the world around them. This is where character comes into play, and where adults’ role in helping to ‘build character’ is crucially important.

Unfortunately, while Demos’ enthusiasm for addressing this issue is refreshing, its narrow focus on parenting styles and outcomes among young children means that the report ends up peddling the same old mixture of common sense and nonsense.

Labels: children, culture, parenting, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 4:10 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

TRADITIONAL family supporters raised the alarm yesterday after Government research claimed that lesbians made the best parents.

Campaigners said that research paid for with taxpayers’ money to pander to same-sex couples only succeeded in marginalising fathers to the detriment of society.

The National Academy for Parenting Practitioners struck a blow to the heart of the conventional family after it said the latest research showed that children prospered when raised by two women. ...

But the research showed that children brought up by lesbians had higher aspirations to become ­doctors or lawyers and were more confident to fight for social justice.

Speaking last week, director of the research Stephen Scott said: “Lesbians make better parents than a man and a woman.” Campaigners Fathers4Justice attacked the study for failing to promote the role of fathers and laid blame for a pending “unprecedented social ­crisis” at the Government’s door.

Labels: culture, family structure, Fathers, gay parenting, lesbians, parenting, professional associations, Scotland

posted by Eve at 3:07 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...It is striking, then, how comparatively rarely children are mentioned as an argument in favor of gay marriage. The issue is framed as a debate over equality and justice, of personal freedom and the relation of church and state, not about what is good for kids.

That’s partly because, until relatively recently, we didn’t know much about the children of same-sex couples. The earliest studies, dating to the 1970s, were based on small samples and could include only families who stepped forward to be counted. But about 20 years ago, the Census Bureau added a category for unwed partners, which included many gay partners, providing more demographic data. Not every gay couple that is married, or aspiring to marry, has children, but an increasing number do: approximately 1 in 5 male same-sex couples and 1 in 3 female same-sex couples are raising children, up from 1 in 20 male couples and 1 in 5 female couples in 1990.

This growth, coupled with the passage of time, means there is a large cohort of children who are now old enough to yield solid data. And the portrait emerging tells us something about the effects of gay parenting. It also contains lessons for all parents. ...

In most ways, the accumulated research shows, children of same-sex parents are not markedly different from those of heterosexual parents. They show no increased incidence of psychiatric disorders, are just as popular at school and have just as many friends. While girls raised by lesbian mothers seem slightly more likely to have more sexual partners, and boys slightly more likely to have fewer, than those raised by heterosexual mothers, neither sex is more likely to suffer from gender confusion nor to identify themselves as gay.

More enlightening than the similarities, however, are the differences, the most striking of which is that these children tend to be less conventional and more flexible when it comes to gender roles and assumptions than those raised in more traditional families. ...

Heterosexual couples might want to pay attention to these results. While the gay-marriage debate is playing out on the public stage, a more private debate is taking place in kitchens and bedrooms over who does what in a heterosexual marriage (takes out the trash, spends more time with the kids, feels free to head out with their friends for a beer). The philosophical underpinnings of both conversations — gay marriage and equality in parenting — are similar, in that both focus on equality for adults (in the case of heterosexuals, mostly wives). But even if parents who seek parity do so for their own sanity and in pursuit of their own ideals, might it not also be better for their children?

Labels: culture, gay parenting, gay/straight differences, gender, gender differences, heterosexual couples, parenting

posted by Eve at 12:15 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Want to be a happy married couple? Consider having kids. A new study found that having children boosts happiness. And the more, literally, the merrier.

But unmarried couples shouldn't expect to find greater happiness through child-raising. The study, published in the Oct. 14 online edition of the Journal of Happiness Studies, suggests that having children has little or no effect on boosting happiness among couples who aren't hitched:

* The findings contradict previous research that suggested that having more offspring doesn't lead to greater happiness and might even make people less satisfied with their lives.

Labels: cohabitation, Marriage, parenting

posted by Eve at 11:46 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Angela Carter once said that "paternal parentage is often clouded in a way that maternity is not." She was talking about Wise Children, her novel concerned with the slippery, unknowable nature of paternity.

The essential mechanics of reproduction have always put women at an advantage in any question over parentage. We know the truth, whatever it may be, about our offspring; men just have to take our word for it. But in the time since Wise Children was published, this imbalance has shifted. For some women, the idea of maternity is suddenly not so assured.

Last month, Carolyn Savage from Ohio handed over her baby to its biological parents. She had been implanted with the wrong embryo after a mix-up at a fertility clinic. This came after a number of other IVF errors. In June, a couple from Cardiff were told that their last remaining frozen embryo had been mistakenly implanted in another woman, who had since had it aborted. In the same month, it was revealed that a white Northern Irish couple had given birth to a mixed-race baby, after being given the wrong sperm. And the instances go on. A Californian woman was awarded $1m in 2004 after a fertility specialist gave her the wrong embryo and hid the mistake until the baby was 10 months old. A white New Yorker gave birth to a black baby in 1998, sparking a complex, two-year legal wrangle between the two couples for visitation rights.

In vitro fertilisation is a booming industry. Around 12,500 babies a year are born in the UK as a result of IVF. More than 36,000 women a year attend the UK's 136 clinics for treatment. That's a lot of embryos in a lot of petri dishes in a lot of freezers. You can see how the occasional mistake happens: all it would take is a technician's moment of inattention, the phone ringing, a colleague asking a question, and – just like that – the wrong petri dish is plucked from the shelf and a terrible, private tragedy is set in motion.

The number of cases which come to light is small but it begs the question: just how many of these slip-ups go undetected? ...

One fertility counsellor – who does not want to be named – says that she deals with an increasing number of people who fear that the clinic may have made a mistake. "It's an issue for a lot of couples, particularly the women. Mothers need to be sure of that bond and it's not uncommon to experience doubt."

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, gender differences, IVF, motherhood, parenting

posted by Eve at 7:59 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

... I read a paper the other day which makes an interesting contribution here. It’s from the American Sociological Review, February 2007 and is by Laura Hamilton, Simon Cheng Brian Powell. (I’ve linked you to the table of contents the article is not on-line. If anyone wants a copy, you can e-mail me.)

The authors wanted to examine the importance of biological ties for parental investment. They begin by offering several different theoretical approaches and consider what outcomes might be expected under each of these theories. Among those considered are those grounded in evolutionary theory, some of which suggest that people are more likely to promote the well-being of genetic kin than of non-genetic kin.

It’s hard to measure commitment of parents to their children directly–what is the unit of commitment? So the authors concentrate on indicators of parental investment. They look at four types of parent resources–economic, cultural, interactional and social capital. And they look at families with two biologically related parents, two adoptive parents, and various single-parent and step-parent families. (The latter are sometimes referred to as ”alternative families.) Perhaps most importantly, they control for factors like wealth of the family. (This is critical because adoptive families tend to be higher income families, and so if you didn’t control for this, the fact that they spend more money on kids won’t tell you much.)

The authors find that adoptive families show as much and sometimes greater levels of investment in their kids than do the two genetically-related parent families. I am not going to say that this makes them better families (although do recall that the investments measured are not merely financial ones) but it certainly undermines the contention that in the absence of biological ties, parents invest less in their kids.

It is possible that this investment by adoptive families is the result of efforts to compensate for a social context that favors parents who are biologically related. In other words, it’s precisely because people think biologically related parents are better that adoptive parents put in extra effort. That might have interesting implications which I don’t think are discussed in this study.

Labels: adoption, Julie Shapiro, parenting

posted by Eve at 7:56 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

It used to irk Melissa Calapini when her 3-year-old daughter, Haley, hung around her father while he fixed his cars. Ms. Calapini thought there were more enriching things the little girl could be doing with her time.

But since the couple attended a parenting course — to save their relationship, which had become overwhelmed by arguments about rearing their children — Ms. Calapini has had a change of heart. Now she encourages the father-daughter car talk.

“Daddy’s bonding time with his girls is working on cars,” said Ms. Calapini, of Olivehurst, Calif. “He has his own way of communicating with them, and that’s O.K.”

As much as mothers want their partners to be involved with their children, experts say they often unintentionally discourage men from doing so. Because mothering is their realm, some women micromanage fathers and expect them to do things their way, said Marsha Kline Pruett, a professor at the Smith College School for Social Work at Smith College and a co-author of the new book “Partnership Parenting,” with her husband, the child psychiatrist Dr. Kyle Pruett (Da Capo Press).

Yet a mother’s support of the father turns out to be a critical factor in his involvement with their children, experts say — even when a couple is divorced.

“In the last 20 years, everyone’s been talking about how important it is for fathers to be involved,” said Sara S. McLanahan, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton. “But now the idea is that the better the couple gets along, the better it is for the child.”

Her research, part of a project based at Princeton and called the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, found that when couples scored high on positive relationship traits like willingness to compromise, expressing affection or love for their partner, encouraging or helping partners to do things that were important to them, and having an absence of insults and criticism, the father was significantly more likely to be engaged with his children.

Uninvolved fathers have long been accused of lacking motivation. But research shows that many societal obstacles conspire against them. Even as more fathers are changing diapers, dropping the children off at school and coaching soccer, they are often pushed aside in ways large and small.

Labels: Fathers, motherhood, parenting, poverty

posted by Eve at 7:49 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...There are a number of different tests you might use to determine who the parents of a child are. Each has strengths and weaknesses, which are discussed elsewhere on the blog. Part of the challenge is that the question arises in so many different situations. ART in particular gives us a whole range of new complications, but there are plenty even without that. ...

Now if you go back over the blog, I think you’ll find instances in which every one of these tests has been deployed. And of course, you can mix and match them. Some people have multiple factors going for them–they intend to have children, they are genetically related to children they give birth to and they act as the children’s parents. Those tend to be easy cases.

The hard cases come when you have competing contestants, or where one person wants to cut another out, as in the new Montana case. One person claims one basis for parenthood, and someone else claims a different one. Or there are cases when no one wants to claim parenthood and we need to find someone. (Not long ago I wrote about a case where a man who had functioned as a father for 13 years sought to sever his relationship with the child by asserting that it turned out he lacked the genetic connection something he apparently knew all along, but never mind that.) How to decide these?

Cases like this seem to me to suggest we have some sort of hierarchy. So, for example, to reach the result the court did in the case I just mentioned (he’s still the father) it had to say that function (and the relationships constructed based on that function) trump biology (by which test he was not the father.) Again, you can look back and find many instances in which one test seems to overcome another.

And I guess this is my present question. Is there some hierarchy and if so, what is it? Actually, I suppose I really mean should there be a hierarchy and if so, what should it be? After all, I’m more concerned with what the law ought to be than with what it is in any particular place (it varies so very widely.)

Labels: adoption, Artificial Reproductive Technology, de facto parenting, donor conception, Julie Shapiro, parenting

posted by Eve at 4:41 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Disappointments in Arizona, Florida, Arkansas, and California have affected gay men and lesbians around the country. Although in some states our ability to form loving, caring relationships is presumed to be subjected to a vote by fellow citizens, a growing number of gay men nationwide are having children and proving to be great parents.

Can recent ballot measures present obstacles to this trend? Not according to John Weltman, president and owner of the country’s oldest gay owned and gay focused surrogacy agency. Based on first hand experience, Weltman is optimistic about both the level of public acceptance of gay families, and the availability and affordability of surrogacy as a safe, legal and rewarding parenting option for gay men. ProudParenting asked John Weltman [pictured below] a few questions about how gay surrogacy is affected by recent political and economic trends, and the possibility of seeing more gay dads at the playground. We included a poll, to let you weigh in.

PP: John - we've read about you in the New York Times, Newsweek, and Details magazine. You are everywhere we look, getting your message out, and you recently told the newswire service AFP that Circle has grown significantly in 12 years. You also expect to double in the next two and half years. The number of new gay parents seems to be rising at a remarkable rate when we consider that the economy is getting more unmanageable. Do you expect the gayby boom to plateau at any point soon?

JW: I don't - in fact, I expect the gay surrogacy boom to continue to grow quite substantially in the next 10 to 20 years. I think what we are experiencing at Circle is the result of several trends resulting in more gay parents, and a larger share of these men who are choosing surrogacy as the method to achieve this goal. I think the world has just begun to accept gay relationships and gay parenting, and the rise in gay men choosing to become parents is in part a reflection of the growing numbers of men coming out and reaching a certain age and level of financial security. As this becomes true in more and more places, I think the desire of gay men to become parents is likely to grow further. However, a recent statistic I saw states that about 15% of gay men were becoming parents, still a much lower percentage than their heterosexual and even lesbian counterparts. This, I fear, reflects the simple fact that it is much harder for men to achieve parenthood. In addition with states like Arkansas cutting off gay adoption and certain international countries stopping adoption altogether, adoption is becoming even harder still. So what we are experiencing is the result of growing public awareness and acceptance of surrogacy as a viable method for gay men to become parents, when the alternatives are becoming decreasingly available. Beyond the obvious advantage of having a biological link with your children, surrogacy today is often faster than adoption, it is extremely reliable and essentially 100% safe legally. It doesn't involve the risk of a birth mother changing her mind, or the need to persuade the entire electorate that you are fit to be a parent. Our clients express a strong sense of empowerment and satisfaction that surrogacy allows them to “take their fate in their own hands,” especially when they are working with a gay-owned and gay-focused agency like ours. ...

PP: The New York Times recently published a story about single dads by choice, and we know Circle has worked with single men as clients throughout its 13 years of existence. The Time's piece reported an increase in the number of gay single fathers working with surrogates. Because so many gay men are single, do you believe the ratio of single gay dads will ever equal the number of gay male couples who choose surrogacy?

JW: While I do not think that the ratio will ever be the same, since obviously it is harder to raise a child on your own, we have seen a growth in the number of applications from single guys. I think that more single gay men are feeling confident and financially secure enough to start the process alone. However we have always had about 20% of our practice devoted to single dads.

Labels: gay marriage, parenting, single parenting, surrogate motherhood

posted by Eve at 4:28 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Labels: adultery, culture, Marriage, parenting, polyamory

posted by Eve at 4:09 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...The critical question is one of consent: who owns the story of a child? British author Julie Myerson has had to face this question twice, and has been savaged both times for claiming she does. First she wrote a popular column for The Guardian, Living With Teenagers, under a pseudonym but based on her children. Once their identities were uncovered, the teasing began: her son was nicknamed "Mr. Three Hairs" after a piece about her kids sprouting pubic hairs. The column was stopped.

Undeterred, Myerson went on to write a darker, more dramatic and awful book about her teenage son's drug use, Lost Child, just released in the U.S. In it she claims that her son Jake became addicted to skunk, a particularly potent form of marijuana. She was forced to kick him out of the family home when he was only 17, she writes, after he lied, stole, got a girl pregnant (his parents paid for the abortion), and hit his mother so hard that he perforated her eardrum. The subtitle is A Mother's Story.

For this, Myerson has become one of the most vilified women in Britain. Her son says he feels betrayed, and told one reporter he wants to change his last name to Karna, after a Hindu warrior who was rejected by his mother. Although he read the draft and told Myerson he understood why she felt compelled to write it, he claims he consulted lawyers to try to halt publication. He insists his drug use is casual and that his parents are naive.

It's awkward, messy, and ugly.

Myerson is optimistic that what she did will be good for her son—and others, who will learn of the dangers of skunk. She told me it was an intervention, a form of public shaming: "It made him face himself, big time."

Labels: children, culture, parenting

posted by Eve at 3:49 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Parenthood is pushing mothers and fathers in opposite directions on political issues associated with social welfare, from health care to education, according to new research from North Carolina State University.

“Parenthood seems to heighten the political ‘gender gap,’ with women becoming more liberal and men more conservative when it comes to government spending on social welfare issues,” says Dr. Steven Greene, an associate professor of political science at NC State and co-author of the study. Greene and Dr. Laurel Elder of Hartwick College used data on the 2008 presidential election from the American National Election Studies to evaluate the voting behavior of men and women who have children at home. Parents who have grown children were not part of the study. ...

Greene and Elder had previously looked at similar data for elections going back through 1980, and their new research shows that the trend is strengthening for men with children to become more conservative, while the trend for moms to become more liberal is holding steady.

Labels: gender differences, parenting

posted by Eve at 2:15 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Many DoubleX readers seem incensed by Katie Roiphe’s story, "My Newborn is Like a Narcotic." But Roiphe is absolutely right that the intense love between mothers and newborns is a very neglected subject in both literature and philosophy and yes, also feminist writing. (Compare it to the enormous literature on the profundity of sexual and erotic love.) So it might be helpful to see what the science has to say about Katie’s experience, and to think about what the science means.

I write about this at length in my new book, The Philosophical Baby. In short, the scientific literature shows that the mechanisms behind our love of babies is remarkably similar to the mechanisms involved in sexual love. There are clear hormonal and chemical changes that come with pregnancy, labor, and birth, which affect the way we feel, just as there are with sex. In natural labor and the period following, the body produces large amounts of both oxytocin and endorphins (in fact, they use oxytocin to induce labor). It’s too simple to call oxytocin the “bonding” chemical, but there is a lot of evidence that it plays a role in close attachment, trust, and love. If you give people a whiff of oxytocin they’re more likely to cooperate in a game. Endorphins are the natural chemicals that are mimicked by drugs like opium and morphine. (I remember thinking as I held my own first newborn and the flood of warmth and happiness overcame me, “Gee, if this is what opium is like, I’m sure glad I never tried it.”)

Labels: children, culture, motherhood, parenting

posted by Eve at 5:40 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...When the baby was four weeks old, I had to do a reading at Barnes and Noble. I had written the introduction to Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife, and I was scheduled to do a reading with Talese. On the night of the reading, I left the baby with someone I trust completely and absolutely. I managed to put on a dress and look something like the person who gave readings who I used to be. But when I walked out onto the street, I felt like I was missing a limb. Even though Talese was riveting by any objective standard, my concentration faltered. During the reading I thought about the baby. As people asked questions, I calculated how long the taxi ride home would take. Afterward, there were people who wanted to buy one of my books. The manager of the bookstore held out a pen, and I apologized and told him that I couldn’t sign books, that I had to run home. The manager looked a little bewildered. This was, after all, a book signing at which the authors traditionally sign books.

On the escalator I panicked slightly because the person in front of me wasn’t moving, and I couldn’t pass her to get out of the store quickly enough. During the taxi ride down the FDR highway, I looked out at the water and cried. It was insane, sentimental, out of proportion, and I was aware that it was insane, sentimental, and out of proportion. But only when the baby was back in my arms did I feel OK again.

I remember visiting one of my closest friends on her maternity leave last summer. We sat on a wooden bench in her garden and drank iced coffees, and gazed at her second baby. She is a writer, and we talked about how the women writers we most admired had no children, or have had one child, at the absolute most, but never two. (Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen had no children; Mary McCarthy, Rebecca West, Joan Didion, and Janet Malcolm all had one.) My friend looked down at her newborn and her tiny eyelashes. She could entertain this conversation in an academic way, but as she adjusted the baby's hat I could see how far removed it was from anything that mattered to her. Here, sitting in the garden, looking at the eyelashes, would you trade the baby for the possibility of writing The House of Mirth? You would not.

People often compare having a new baby to the early days of a love affair, which is true as far as it goes, but one’s physical fixation on, and craving for, a newborn is much stronger and more intense that that. How often in a love affair can you literally find yourself in tears because you were away from a man for three hours?

Labels: children, culture, motherhood, parenting

posted by Eve at 5:34 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Education policy makers will find more cause for embarrassment in "NurtureShock." Drop-out programs don't work. Neither do anti-drug programs. The most popular of them, D.A.R.E (Drug Abuse Resistance ­Education), developed in 1983 by the Los Angeles ­Police Department, has become a more familiar sight in ­American schools than algebra class. By 2000, 80% of American school districts were using D.A.R.E. materials in some form. Now, after extensive study, comes the news: The program has no long-term, and only mild short-term, effects. Oh, and those tests that school districts use to determine giftedness in young ­children? They're just about useless. According to Mr. Bronson and Ms. Merryman, early IQ tests predict later ­achievement less than half the time. Between ages 3 and 10, about two-thirds of children will experience a rise or drop of 15 points or more.

You might assume from these examples that the ­authors want to make a point about our national ­gullibility in the face of faddish science. Unfortunately, they deconstruct yesterday's wisdom at the same time that they embrace today's—even when research is on the order of "do-we-really-need-a-$50,000-study-to-tell-us-this?" or of dubious practical value. Kids lie, they ­inform us. In fact, 4-year-olds lie once every hour. Still, Mr. Bronson and Ms. Merryman are impressed by ­research showing that "lying is an advanced skill," ­supposedly demonstrating both social and cognitive sophistication. ...

Given how often last year's science has become ­today's boondoggle, Mr. Bronson and Ms. Merryman's analysis would have benefited from a dose of ­skepticism. Yes, social science has become more ­rigorously empirical in recent decades. A lot of the findings described in "NurtureShock" might even be true. But that doesn't mean that we have the remotest idea how to translate such findings into constructive parental behavior or effective public programs.

Labels: adolescence, childhood, children, parenting

posted by Eve at 5:13 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Here is an experiment you don’t want to try at home.

Show a toy — a doll, say, or a model boat — to a toddler and explain that it it’s something special you’ve had since you were little. Ask the child to be “very careful” with it. Hand over the toy, which appears to be in fine condition, except that you’ve secretly rigged it to break spectacularly as soon as the child handles it.

When your precious toy falls apart, express regret by mildly saying, “Oh, my.” Then sit still and observe the child.

The point is not to permanently traumatize anyone — the researchers who performed this experiment quickly followed it with a ritual absolving the child of blame. But first, for 60 seconds after the toy broke, the psychologists recorded every reaction as the toddlers squirmed, avoided the experimenter’s gaze, hunched their shoulders, hugged themselves and covered their faces with their hands.

It was part of a long-term study at the University of Iowa to isolate the effects of two distinct mechanisms that help children become considerate, conscientious adults. One mechanism, measured in other experiments testing toddlers’ ability to resist temptations, is called effortful self-control — how well you can think ahead and deliberately suppress impulsive behavior that hurts yourself and others.

The other mechanism is less rational and is especially valuable for children and adults with poor self-control. It’s the feeling measured in that broken-toy experiment: guilt, or what children diagnose as a “sinking feeling in the tummy.” ...

In Dr. Kochanska’s latest studies, published in the August issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, she and colleagues found that 2-year-olds who showed more chagrin during the broken-toy experiment went on to have fewer behavioral problems over the next five years. That was true even for the ones who scored low on tests measuring their ability to focus on tasks and suppress strong desires to act impulsively.

Labels: childhood, children, culture, parenting

posted by Eve at 4:30 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...A survey out today from the Pew Research Center finds two-thirds of Americans 16 and older see an age divide in every one of the eight areas listed. Among the biggest gaps:

•Technology: 73% call tech use "very different."

•Music: 69% say tastes are "very different."

•Moral values: 80% call them "very" or "somewhat" different; 80% said the same for work ethic.

But can these kinds of differences be called a real generation gap? That depends, demographers say. ...

The Pew survey of 1,815 people in July and August found that although differences were clear, respondents didn't believe they created much trouble in their own families or in society overall. Just 26% say there are strong conflicts between generations. ...

As president of Generation Why, a consulting firm, he says misunderstandings in the workplace come from different expectations. "They may have skills and are techno-savvy and book-smart and streetwise, but they don't understand what the big deal is if they're five minutes late," he says of young people today. About half of those surveyed (53%) call the generations "very different" in the respect they show others.

"The classic thing is they show up on Day One and want to tell you how to change your business," says Bruce Tulgan, 42, founder of Rainmaker Thinking, a research and management training firm in New Haven, Conn., and author of the 2009 book Not Everyone Gets a Trophy: How to Manage Generation Y.

"It leads older people to think they have a radically different work ethic, but Gen Yers said 'I thought you want me to care about this place.' "

Galston says such attitudes aren't just about work but rather about hierarchy. "These young people have grown up in very flat, horizontal relationships. So, the idea of deferring to someone older, simply because that person is there, is not part of their makeup."

Labels: culture, parenting

posted by Eve at 3:08 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...AOL Health: What do you think your husband gets out of it?

Block: He always tells me two things. One, for him it's about the freedom too. He hasn't had a girlfriend since that first one [we had together]. But he likes the idea of going to a basketball game or a bar and buying some girl a drink and hanging out and not feeling like I'm going to walk in and say, "What the hell is going on here?" It's fun to be attracted to other people. It's fun to feel sexy, after having me barking at him about chores. It's nice to have some pretty girls not yelling at him and see him as a person, not as a husband or a father, but as a person. That feels nice, that feels good. It's that and he feels like a success. When he and I were having troubles, he felt like he was a failure. He wondered what was wrong with him that our marriage wasn't deliriously happy? Now he feels like a success. Because I have everything and he has everything and everybody's happy. A happy, healthy marriage, family and household -- that can be a grand measure of success. ...

AOL Health: You have a daughter who is 10 years old. How much of the nuances of your marriage does she understand?

Block: I don't know. We answer all of her questions and we don't lie to her. My girlfriend is still my best friend, so it's not like she wouldn't be around. She has asked me some very pointed questions, which makes me think she's putting the pieces together. One day she asked me if three people can get married. She asked me if I love Jemma [my girlfriend] as much as I love Daddy. She said to me in the middle of dinner, "I'm really lucky because some people only have one parent and I have three." I said, "Why, do you consider all of us parents?" She said, "Sometimes Jemma makes me dinner and sometimes she picks me up from school. When Daddy cooks dinner, he says to set four places at the table. So we're a family." Kids see the truth and the happy family. That's what they see. If they see screaming and yelling and you keep saying, "No, Mommy loves Daddy," I don't think they buy it. ...

AOL Health: Have you raised her to be aware of alternative marriages and relationships?

Block: Yeah, definitely. I think that's the other thing. We have friends who are gay and lesbian. We talk about adopted families and extended families. We talk all the time about how people can choose to love who they want. Now the law doesn't always recognize those choices and she knows that too. She'll ask us questions, like we have friends who are a lesbian couple who were over one day and they were talking about other parents at the school and Emily asked, "Why do they not want [their children] to play with your daughter?" And I said, "Some people have a problem with two women being married." Her child response was, "That's just stupid." I said "Right, exactly." It's really that simple. We as a family think that it's stupid when people pass judgment on other people for choices that won't [hurt] them. It's plain old biology, you can't be mad at someone who has skin that's a different color, so why the heck would you be mad at someone who falls in love with someone of the same sex? We make it very like, "It is what it is."

AOL Health: Do you feel like you have been away from your husband or your daughter too much because of dating other people?

Block: No. Because, to be honest, before my girlfriend, it was all on trips I would have been on anyway. Since my girlfriend, we're all together. We're either all having dinner, or all hanging out. If I have to go to a review, I review a lot of art shows and concerts and things like that, someone would be going with me and most of the time it's her because my husband doesn't care for being dumped in a room to socialize with strangers. If anything, my work takes me away. I do travel writing. That takes me away, and sometimes I know all three of them would like to strangle me for that.

Labels: family structure, parenting, polyamory

posted by Eve at 2:00 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Many parents don't quite get this theory. Last summer in the New York Times, Tina Kelley reported how camp officials and counselors are besieged by nervous, high-maintenance parents, calling about bunk placement, private lessons and special cereals and vitamins for their children. It is not uncommon, according to the article, for parents to smuggle cellphones to their sons or daughters against the rules of a camp. Clearly, some parents don't know how to let go.

Much of this has to do with the modern mania for minimizing risk. A Girl Scout leader in California recalls how, as a child, she broke her arm on two separate occasions. Now, because parents become outraged and litigious at the crunch of bones, the Girl Scout camps where she works forbid even the climbing of trees.

Parents, however, deserve some sympathy. They are making adjustments of their own. At first, the absence of children at camp seems like a reminder of married life before children arrived -- a time of dates, movies and unmonitored friskiness. But soon it dawns that the absence of children is not a reminder but a preview -- the glimpse of a time when children no longer come home. In an empty house, it quickly becomes clear how much of a couple's conversation weaves around their children -- how much of their own lives has become an investment in the lives they produced. ...

So this is the independence we seek for our children -- to turn our closest relationships into acquaintances. Of course, I knew this getting into parenthood. But the reality remains shocking. For a time, small hands take your own -- children look upward, and you fill their entire universe. They remain, to you, the most important things in the world. To them, over time, you become one important thing among many. And then an occasional visit or phone call. And then a memory, fond or otherwise.

Labels: childhood, parenting

posted by Eve at 3:03 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Please pardon this long post. The case, Shineovich v. Kemp, is important enough to merit it. (And I'm a parentage law geek....Just skim the parts that seem too geeky....Or leave me a question in a comment).

When the District of Columbia parentage law I've worked on for two years takes effect next week, lesbian couples having children here will have the greatest protection available anywhere for the families they plan. More on that when the time comes.

But today an opinion from the Oregon Court of Appeals produces the right result for the children of lesbian couples conceived through donor insemination there. If the biological mom's partner consents to the insemination, she is also the parent of the resulting child. (This is the result we'll have in DC under the new statute, but, again, more on that next week.) There may be a catch...but that comes later in this post.

Labels: donor conception, parenting

posted by Eve at 12:17 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

More female than male same-sex couples have chosen to marry since Swedish homosexuals were granted the legal right to marry on May 1st, 2009.

Thirty-seven female couples have tied the knot since May, compared to 11 male couples, according to figures from Statistics Sweden (SCB).

In addition, the number of children of same-sex couples registered as under Sweden's domestic partnership law has increased tenfold over the last decade.

At the end of the 1990s, fewer than 70 children lived with parents who were registered domestic partners. In 2008, 749 children lived with same-sex couples who were registered partners.

A large majority of these children have two mothers, with 706 living with female same-sex couples, compared to 43 who have two fathers.

Labels: Europe, gay marriage, gender differences, parenting, Sweden

posted by Eve at 12:06 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Labels: committed relationships, divorce, donor conception, family structure, gay marriage, parenting, remarriage

posted by Eve at 2:58 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

An anonymous lesbian couple have won the right to in vitro fertilization (IVF) paid for by the National Health Service (NHS) after a legal battle with their local health trust, which initially refused them the service because they were of the same sex and the child would by fatherless.

The health trust withdrew their objection to funding the treatment for the lesbians, which was based on U.K. regulations that recognize the child's need for a father, because of a new regulation which takes effect in October that says couples will only need to demonstrate "supportive parenting" when requesting IVF.

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, Fathers, parenting

posted by Eve at 2:40 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Trask likes the extended family that polyamory provides. She has three children -- 22, 18, 13 -- and her first husband's girlfriend also had children who spent holidays together.

"These are important relationships," she said. "The children grew up together."

Some polys support legalizing civil unions or incorporating their "clusters" as a corporation to gain health care and joint property rights. But Trask said her biggest concern is raising awareness so polys do not lose their children or jobs.

"We want it to be OK when you have two dads or two moms -- or whatever configuration -- at parent teacher conferences, and they don't freak out on you." ...

According to expert Deborah Anapol, polyamory has been accepted by many cultures. In Hawaii, where she lives today, there is even a word for the extra partner -- "punalua."

"We talk like we invented it, but it's been around a long time," said Anapol, who counsels couples and families, and is writing a new book on the topic, "Understanding Polyamory in the 21st Century."

Labels: parenting, polyamory

posted by Eve at 2:11 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

If you Google the phrase "America's worst mom," the first hit is Lenore Skenazy '81, who in 2008 let her nine-year-old son, Izzy, take the subway in Manhattan by himself. Skenazy wrote about the decision in her column for the New York Sun -- and then found herself on the Today show, parrying criticism from a clinical psychologist. After she let Izzy ride the Long Island Rail Road alone this year -- and a conductor who noticed him called the police -- she drew on the experiences for a book about her parenting philosophy. Emily Bazelon '93, '00JD, an editor at the web magazines Slate and DoubleX, interviewed Skenazy.

Y: Why did you call your book Free-Range Kids?

S: We are so consumed with making sure kids are safe that we are keeping them cooped up like chickens. We're preventing them from enjoying their lives. Of course, people ask me what a free-range kid tastes like. ...

Y: One reason parents are loath to take small risks with their children, I think, is that when a child gets hurt, the assumption is that the parents are to blame.

S: Yes, yes, the guilt and the blame! The child of a friend of mine broke her arm on a swing. Other parents asked, "Why weren't you there?" In fact, my friend was pushing her daughter on the swing. Her child fell because sometimes bad things just happen, and it's no one's fault. But we don't believe in accidents anymore.

Labels: childhood, culture, motherhood, parenting

posted by Eve at 12:18 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Wendy Duren thought she did everything right.

She broke off relationships with men who didn't want to settle down. She refused to get pregnant out of wedlock. She prayed for a child.

Duren's yearning for motherhood was so palpable that her former fiancé once offered to father a child with her. But he warned her that he wasn't ready for marriage.

"I get bored in relationships after a couple of years," he told her, she recalls.

Those events could have caused some women to give up their dreams of motherhood. But Duren, a pharmaceutical saleswoman, didn't need a man to be a mom. At 37 years old, she decided to adopt. ...

Marriage and motherhood -- it's the dream that begins in childhood for many women. Yet more African-American women are deciding to adopt instead of waiting for a husband, says Mardie Caldwell, founder of Lifetime Adoption, an adoption referral and support group in Penn Valley, California.

"We're seeing more and more single African-American women who are not finding men," Caldwell says. "There's a lack of qualified black men to get into relationships with."

The numbers are grim. According to the 2006 U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, 45 percent of African-American women have never been married, compared with 23 percent of white women.

Yet the decision to adopt isn't just driven by the paucity of eligible African-American men, others say.

Toni Oliver, founder and CEO of Roots Adoption Agency in Atlanta, Georgia, says her agency sees more single African-American women adopting because of infertility issues. ...

Some single African-American women deal with another challenge: criticism for bringing another African-American child into a single-parent household.

Kaydra Fleming, a 37-year-old social worker in Arlington, Texas, is the mother of Zoey, an adopted eight-month-old girl whose biological mother was young and poor.

"Zoey was going to be born to a single black mother anyway," Fleming says. "At least she's being raised by a single black parent who was ready financially and emotionally to take care of her."

Yet there are some single African-American women who are not emotionally ready to adopt an African-American child who is too dark, some adoption agency officials say.

Fair-skinned or biracial children stand a better chance of being adopted by single black women than darker-skinned children, some adoption officials say.

"They'll say, 'I want a baby to look like a Snickers bar, not dark chocolate,' " Caldwell, founder of Lifetime Adoption, says about some prospective parents.

"I had a family who turned a baby down because it was too dark," she says. "They said the baby wouldn't look good in family photographs."

Labels: adoption, motherhood, parenting, race, single parenting

posted by Eve at 9:40 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Single mothers moving out of public assistance, and low-income families searching for affordable child care, will applaud the $4 billion increase in stimulus funds for programs like Head Start, Early Head Start, and Child Care Development Block Grants, which support state programs for subsidized care. But it's far from certain whether the children who actually receive these services will be better off, and that's Penelope Leach's particular concern.

This British child development expert, the best-selling author of Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five, has earned an international reputation for helping readers consider their offspring's point of view on matters like infant sleep disturbances and potty training. This new volume also offers a child-centered perspective, but Leach has moved out of the nursery and stands ready to make her mark on an entrenched ideological debate that asks whether nonmaternal child care helps or harms young children.

Actually, she thinks that's the wrong question to initiate a discussion on a contentious subject. Readers must first consider, she says, "what kind of care, where, by whom, for which children, from what age, for what hours, paid for by whom, and with what results?" ...

Still, she wants readers to come to grips with an unpleasant truth: Much of American day care is just plain "bad." Given the available options, infants in particular are better off at home with their mother, a family member, or a nanny. Working mothers of very young children express greater satisfaction with in-home care, in part because caregiver/infant ratios remain too high in most affordable group programs. That problem can delay the developmental milestones of underprivileged children already at risk because of family instability.

This is especially relevant for American families. About 12 percent of three-month-olds here are placed in day care, and another 24 percent are in family day care, where small groups of children are cared for in private homes. Though British child care practices track most closely with our own, fewer than one percent of three-month-olds attend day care in Great Britain, and just one percent are brought to family day care. Comparisons between American and other Western European practices are even more striking.

Labels: day care, family policy, motherhood, parenting, poverty

posted by Eve at 9:29 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Prior to this experience, when pondering the meaning of fatherhood, I would have thought of showing my children affection, forming their character, teaching them their parts of speech, instructing them in the faith, or playing games of all sorts. I have been able to do these things and more with my son. My daughter will not likely have the opportunity to see me smile at her, hear my words of affection, or feel me holding her. Anencephaly doesn’t generally allow for such sensations.

I have come to the conclusion that what it means to be a father to Vivian is this: I am there with her, suffering with her, even if she cannot know me.

Labels: Fathers, parenting, religion

posted by Eve at 9:27 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...I raised two kids whom I love and am endlessly proud of, but there were and are places along the way that I felt helpless and a complete failure.

I’ve spent thousands of hours helping parents and teens work through all those problems that families with teenagers inevitably face.

Because of my current ministry, I’ve reviewed painful family histories and interviewed desperate parents looking for anything that would help them somehow reclaim a teenager that was lost, failing or in destructive rebellion.

For whatever reasons, God has put me in the world of teenagers and their families. I never asked for this, but it’s been my assignment.

So on this Father’s Day Weekend, I want to ask some of the questions I’ve never (well, almost never) asked the parents of teenagers. These questions aren’t subtle or academic. They are “gut-level.” They’re real.

Is this advice disguised as rhetoric? A bit, yes. I don’t claim to know much about parenting teenagers. I think the questions have their own wisdom.

(By the way, I know that these questions don’t apply to every parent, and I’m aware that some of you have a philosophy of raising kids that answers all of these issues. I’m also aware that some of you did all the right things, just like the books say, and now you’re wondering why it didn’t work.)

1. Why so much freedom, money, cars, privacy, free time, video games and electronic devices?

Labels: adolescence, culture, Fathers, parenting, religion

posted by Eve at 1:06 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

With Father’s Day almost upon us, expect a host of media stories on men and
family life. Some will do a good job of capturing the changes and continuities
associated with fatherhood in contemporary America. But other reporters and
writers will generalize from their own unrepresentative networks of friends and
family members, try to baptize the latest family trend, or assume that our
society is heading ceaselessly in a progressive direction. So be on the lookout
this week for stories, op-eds, and essays that include these five myths on
contemporary fatherhood and family life.

Labels: cohabitation, culture, divorce, Fathers, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, W. Bradford Wilcox

posted by Imapp Staff at 4:40 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The princess industry has been booming in the past few years -- not just the Disney dolls and scratchy toy-store ball gowns that are a rite of passage in most American girlhoods, but a brazen new breed of princess products that target a far wider age range and tap into less seemly attitudes. The hot-pink, leopard-print princess backpacks, T-shirts, purses and bedspreads that girls are now buying (or, rather, their parents are buying for them) have little to do with indulging sweet princess fantasies and everything to do with catering to over-indulged princess egos.

Take the popular tween retailer Justice. At malls nationwide, it carries multiple "Princess" tops and accessories that look a lot more like Paris Hilton's attire than Snow White's. No surprise that part of its marketing slogan is "Love yourself."

For only $44 at Nordstrom, you can dress your toddler in a tank top that declares her to be a "Juicy Couture Princess" -- that is, someone whose parents can afford to buy designer shirts that will end up stained with ketchup or jelly. And until recently, numerous Saks stores maintained Club Libby Lu, a spa for 5- to 13-year-old girls offering princess makeovers with tube tops and miniskirts that left girls looking more like Real Housewives than Cinderella. The ailing retailer closed the tween operation in May, but it grossed $60 million in 2008.

Call it trickle-down narcissism. Today, even as the economic crisis continues, many middle-class parents aspire to give their daughters the best of everything, "the best" meaning the most expensive. A quick tour around suburbia will show princess-themed bedrooms (the rhinestoned-and-feathered kind, not the cartoon-character kind) and ostentatious birthday parties, as well as pedigreed dogs being toted in designer bags by 10-year-olds. Maintaining a diva daughter has become one more way to one-up the Joneses.

Labels: childhood, culture, parenting

posted by Eve at 8:45 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...As the daughter of parents who, for better or worse, never discussed what it meant that my sister and I were mixed race (except to regularly tell us that we were “beautiful” and “special”), I am captivated by parents who want to talk and learn about how being mixed race might be a big deal for their kids, and even further, white parents who can admit that - even though they came forth from their own bodies - their children will have experiences that they themselves can never understand.

Labels: parenting

posted by Eve at 8:33 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

One morning last September, Melanie Leavey's six-year-old daughter, Savannah, insisted on wearing a Halloween cat costume instead of normal clothes. She wore it all day long, and the next too. Eventually, she agreed to take off the costume so it could be washed, but the minute it was laundered, she pulled it on again. Weeks passed, then months. It wasn't until February, almost six months later, that Savannah finally decided to put the cat costume to rest.

But at no point did her mother try to make Savannah stop wearing it, says Ms. Leavey, who lives in Burlington, Ont., with her husband Brandt, Savannah and Sebastian, age 4.

Getting Savannah dressed in the morning had long been a battle. "I tried all the mainstream parenting guru advice, but nothing worked," she says.

So, Ms. Leavey began to practise consensual living, a set of principles designed to help family members understand each other's feelings and meet one another's needs.

Ever since her daughter got the chance to assert her autonomy in her clothing choices, Ms. Leavey says, helping her get dressed in the morning has been "a piece of cake."

In the consensual living model, father doesn't know best. Neither does mom. Instead, parents and children are equal partners in family life, according to the principles laid out at consensual-living.com.

Founded in 2006 by a group of families in North Carolina, consensual living is gaining ground in alternative parenting communities and online, including a Yahoo group with about 900 members.

Devotees study books such as Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn and Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, and they consider parenting based on punishment and reward structures to be "coercive."

In contrast, "consensual" parenting is non-hierarchical.

Labels: parenting

posted by Eve at 5:21 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT