One afternoon in Ithaca, N.Y., my kids were playing on the swing sets in the park when a little tike wearing a football jersey ran into my daughter’s path. I lunged for the swing — I jerked the chain so abruptly that I feared whiplash — and shared a “wow, that was close” exchange with the kid’s mom.

“How old is he?” I asked. The lady looked at me with no trace of irony as she placed her kid on the swing and said, “His name is Jill, and she’s three.” 

As I tried to match the pronouns and antecedents, she explained that she belonged to a group of parents who rebelled against gender stereotypes, allowing their children to decide their genders after they’d been exposed to both options. I’d learned of this in a philosophy class at NYU. My professor argued that children are born with “sex” but taught “gender.” They claimed children unwittingly learn certain gender signifiers that dictate their behavior. Little boys, they claim, don’t naturally want to play with trucks, and little girls aren’t naturally drawn to dolls, if unsullied by eager parents who try to indoctrinate their children with heterosexist ideas about “gender.” According to my professor, gender roles cause people to live according to the very limited ideas of others. The ultimate goal, of course, is androgyny, where no differences between males and females exist.         

“I’m going to raise her as gender-neutrally as possible and let him decide which gender she prefers at the age of eight.”  (Oh, eight . . . that’s when my son dug up our yard one square foot at a time, because he was convinced he’d find buried treasure.)

The pronoun confusion alone is enough to cause rational parents to abandon this gender neutrality. However, the Swedes have come up with an original solution. At the taxpayer-funded school called Egalia, the teachers encourage little boys to play with kitchen sets and the little girls to play with trucks.  But they have taken it even a step further, by eliminating the words “he” and “she,” replacing those words with “friend.”

Why worry about the deviant sexual philosophies of liberals in New York and Sweden? Because it’s also coming to a neighborhood near you. This Good Morning America segment, for example, about an Ohio boy named Jack, who preferred to be called Jackie:

When Jackie was just ten years old, she went to her mom, crying. “I’m a girl and I can’t do this anymore,” Jackie said. Without hesitation, Jennifer said, “It’s gonna be okay.” There was no judgment or disappointment. Jackie’s family abandoned the pronoun “he.” At first, they only let her wear girls clothing at home, but eventually allowed her to live as a girl full-time, at school and elsewhere. When asked, Jackie’s father John says he has two daughters.

The Huffington Post lauds the parents’ decision in its article about the child, which begins, “Turns out there are parents in the news who do the right thing.” In fact, only his grandfather showed concern about allowing the boy to indulge in his feminine side. “I can not accept that a nine- or ten-year-old can make decisions for himself that will be life lasting,” he told GMA.

When I was at the park in Ithaca, I made small talk with the mom and searched for clues to her child’s actual gender. But polite conversation was hard to come by, as I realized we’ve reached a point in society where we actually have to defend the immutability of gender and sex. With so much being challenged, I was a little surprised — when the kids kept swinging back and forth — that gravity still worked.

At least for now.

I met a man in Nashville when I was 20 years old and fell in love immediately. By the second date, I knew I’d marry him if he asked me.  Within a few short weeks, he did just that — so spontaneously he didn’t even have a ring. Three months later, we were in France, buying flowers off the street from a vendor and getting married in the upstairs room of a restaurant.  We barely knew each other, and some of the ceremony was in French. We either got married or agreed to be Amway sales reps.

Our spontaneity, of course, was a recipe for disaster.  And, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau, I fit the mold. Southerners tend to get married — and divorced — more than their Northeastern counterparts. I even dropped out of college after getting married, which pretty much makes me a walking stereotype (though I am currently wearing shoes and not pregnant).

“There tend to be higher divorce rates in states where women marry young,” D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer for the Pew Research Center told CNN Living. “Education also may play a role. In general, less educated women marry at younger ages than college-educated women, and less educated couples have higher divorce rates.”

The report reveals:

Southern men and women had higher rates of divorce in 2009 than their counterparts in other parts of the country: 10.2 per 1,000 for men and 11.1 per 1,000 for women. . . . By comparison, men and women in the Northeast had the lowest rates of divorce, 7.2 and 7.5 per 1,000, which is also lower than the national divorce rate of 9.2 for men and 9.7 for women.

So, what is it about Southerners that makes us more likely to say both “I do” and “I quit”?

Christianity, of course.  At least that’s what Naomi Cahn, law professor at the George Washington University Law School, believes. Her reasoning goes like this: Christians stigmatize losing one’s virginity outside of marriage, which means people marry early before they succumb to pre-marital sex, attain a college education, and benefit from a good salary. 

“There’s a moral crisis in red states that’s produced by higher divorce rates and the disparity between parental values and behavior of young adults. There is enormous tension between moral values and actual practices,” she told CNN.

So, is she right? If the South could rid itself of that pesky “old time religion,” would we divorce less frequently?

Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, provides some helpful facts. He reports that “Americans who attend religious services several times a month were about 35 percent less likely to divorce than those with no religious affiliation.”

In other words, people who attend church regularly are less likely to get divorced. 

That means Christianity isn’t the problem; it’s the solution. In fact, Dr. Pat Fagan, director of the Center for Research on Marriage and Religion and senior fellow at the Marriage and Religion Research Institute in Washington, D.C., says that regular church attendance has many social benefits, including:

Lower divorce rates:

Lower cohabitation rates;

Lower rates of out-of-wedlock births;

Lower levels of teen sexual activity

But the question lingers. Why is there a higher rate of divorce in the South? Answers are speculative at best, but southerners are generally poorer and less educated; and they have a strong tradition of marrying young. All of these factors put strain on marriages.

Of course, I pretty much represent a culmination of all of the worst “marriage decisions” a Southerner could possibly make. So what happened after I married the guy my mother called a “rank stranger?” Well, fifteen years later, we’re still going strong. (He actually writes for NRO.) Although we’ve lived in the Northeast, we’re back in the rural South and raising three kids. 

And, yes, we drag them to church every Sunday morning and Wednesday night. 

— Nancy French lives in the mule capital of the world (Columbia, Tenn.) and wrote about northern perceptions of southerners in her book “Red State of Mind.”

An e-mail: 

I think your new Home Front blog is simply terrific! I share the sentiments you posted of a reader a few days ago that the revival of family would go a long way towards addressing some of the problems we’re experiencing in our country today. It is also nice to see bloggers address reality — like today’s post by Suzanne Venker — on mothers’ work/life balance challenges. I’m a mother of two toddlers with a full-time job outside the home, too. Like a dog chasing its tail, I struggle daily for this elusive “balance” which I never seem capable of grasping. Nice to know that there are others out there who see through the fiction women have been spoon-fed for years. Calling awareness to such issues helps give others the courage to give voice to what they know in their hearts to be true. 

The New York Times recently had a series about how much you should tell your children — and when — about “life before kids.” Perhaps a “starter marriage,” a punk phase, or a drug charge?

While these topics could make for some potentially difficult conversations, it might be fun to come clean about your political past. Of course, voting for Mondale is not (quite) as bad as getting arrested, though you might be surprised at how much fun it is to tell your children about how your political views have changed over the years. This week, for example, a college minister visited our home, talking about the challenges of college, liberal professors, and how students can keep their faith intact.

“I was a feminist when I was at my small Christian college,” I told him.  “But when I got to New York University, I saw the face of true feminism.”

My twelve-year-old daughter’s eyes lit up.  Her mother — a conservative writer, a Republican stalwart, a tea-party speaker — was a liberal?

Did you used to drive a VW Bug with a Ralph Nader bumper sticker? Did you like Dukakis in spite of Willie Horton?  Did you find Reagan too suspiciously optimistic until the Iranian hostage crisis?

Then, it might be the right time to open up. Not only will they probably find it amusing, it will be a fun way to teach your kids about life, decision making, and how to change positions when you realize you’re wrong.

Just be prepared. The next time you advise them to clean their room, they might respond, “Why would I listen to you? You voted for Ross Perot!”

“There’s no such thing as work-life balance,” former CEO of General Electric Jack Welch once said. “There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.”

Sounds shocking to the naked ear, doesn’t it? That’s because it flies in the face of everything American women have been taught to believe. The concept of balance is the Holy Grail of modern motherhood. 

Don’t misunderstand. I appreciate the concept of balance, and I suspect my life looks very much like a stereotypical modern woman’s: I have a little bit of this — part-time, home-based self-employment — and a little bit of that: two school-aged children. But my life is not representative of the kind of balance we hear so much about in the media. Flip through any woman’s magazine, or tune in to any popular talk show, and you’ll quickly learn that balance means one thing only: pursuing full-time work with baby and toddler in tow. 

This concept was put to the test two weeks ago when Judge Loretta A. Preska presided over a class-action lawsuit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Bloomberg LP. The plaintiffs argued that Bloomberg discriminates against mothers who take pregnancy leave; but Preska ruled that Bloomberg, in fact, did not illegally discriminate against women. “The law does not mandate ‘work-life balance,’” she said, “however unhealthy that may be for family life.” 

You can guess the feminist response: “I don’t know if it’s too harsh to call the judge ignorant,” said Sonia Ossorio, executive director of the New York chapter of the National Organization of Women, “but she certainly has a fundamental misunderstanding of how discrimination plays out for working mothers. She hardly hides her contempt for women with kids who have ambition and want top-paying jobs.” 

For years feminists have insisted that the answer to The Problem — the ongoing conflict between young children and demanding careers — is for husbands and employers to take the blame. Raising babies while being effective employees is perfectly doable, they say, if husbands share half the housework and child care (or do what’s called a “double shift,” or “second shift,” like working mothers supposedly do) and if employers rearrange the way they do business in order to accommodate this new system in which employees are only semi-invested in their jobs. Voila! The Problem is solved!

No it’s not.

What we never talk about is where this feminist utopia leaves employers. Employers can not — they must not — be responsible for helping parents manage their family lives. If employers can afford to offer part-time employment, fine. If they can afford to allow their employees to take off an endless string of days and still make money in the meantime, more power to ’em. But come on: such businesses are few and far between. Employers are in business to make money. They may be sympathetic to the The Problem, but they cannot solve it. 

What the last two class-action discrimination suits — the most recent one against Bloomberg LP and the earlier one against Wal-Mart — have proven is that feminists have created a mess in the marketplace. It’s a silent disaster that millions of employers and employees deal with every day.

— Suzanne Venker is co-author, with Phyllis Schlafly, of The Flipside of Feminism. 

For all you parents out there trying to make sure you halve the chocolate bar right in the middle:

Perceived favoritism on the part of a mother can cause long-term psychological effects on all her children well into adulthood, according to new research. Gerontologist Karl Pillemer from Cornell University looked at 275 mothers and their 671 adult children and found that in families with a perceived sense of favoritism, children were more likely to exhibit depressive symptoms as adults. Interesting, this applied to both the favored children and non-favored children. The study found that it’s not the type of treatment each child receives that matters so much as being raised in an environment where a sense of unequal treatment is present.

In other words, the Cornell study says that it doesn’t matter if the kid is the black sheep or the shining star — the negative effects of perceived favoritism last for many years after the children are out of the family home.

With a study as optimistic as that, you might as well go ahead and buy two chocolate bars.

Apparently the good old-fashioned brown-bag lunch is an environmental disaster.  The New York Times reports that schools with an “eco-friendly lunch policy” now dictate the container in which you can put your child’s lunch. 

Many retailers and schools are advocating waste-free options for back-to-school shoppers this year, especially when it comes to lunch. School lists call for Tupperware instead of Ziplocs, neoprene lunch bags instead of brown paper ones, and aluminum water bottles, not the throwaway plastic versions.

Since when did brown bags become earth’s enemy? I thought that was the politically correct choice at the grocery store. It’s getting harder to keep environmentalists’ schizophrenic policies in order.  The Times goes on to quote one (clearly bored) mother’s ethical dilemma:

“Ziplocs are the biggest misstep,” said Julie Corbett, a mother in Oakland, Calif., whose two girls attend a school with an eco-friendly lunch policy. In school years past, she said, many a morning came unhinged when the girls were sent to school with disposable sandwich bags.

“That’s when the kids have meltdowns, because they don’t want to be shamed at school,” Ms. Corbett said. “It’s a big deal.”

Whittier College professor Judith Wagner’s been biting her nails down to the quick as she struggles to find the answer to the knotty issue presented when a kid requests two sandwiches for lunch. You see, many eco-friendly containers don’t accommodate this request:

“Parents will say things like, ‘Well, I want her to have a choice, and if I put in a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich and a ham sandwich, she has a choice,’ ” Professor Wagner said. “And each one comes in its own separate plastic bag.”

What comes next, she said, is a hard call. “Do you go back to the parents and say, ‘Gosh, can you rethink the plastic bags and all this food?’ Or do you talk to the children, and you make the children feel guilty because they’re throwing this all away?”

The horror! Plastic bags or an eco-friendly container? Ham sandwiches or peanut-butter sandwiches?  Eco-friendly or eco-destroying! Guilt or guilt-free? 

Kidding aside, these eco-friendly lunch policies do little more than complicate a parent’s job of feeding her children and create just another disincentive to parents’ packing their kids’ lunch. Add this new eco-issue to the many other disincentives — like breakfast, lunch, and dinner being offered to their children on the school lunch line — parents are often left asking “Why bother?” Not only are parents being told what to put in their children’s lunches to satisfy the food nannies, they’re now being told how to pack the meals to satisfy the environmentalists.

What’s next?  Wait, don’t answer that!

— Julie Gunlock is a mother of three hungry boys and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.

After an epic journey to Whole Foods with five children, Jennifer Fulwiler is at peace with never doing that again. 

A taste of her report:

My first hint that this was going to be very different from my usual suburban shopping experience was when I started pulling kids out of the car, only to realize that there were no cart return stations nearby—none in the entire parking lot, in fact. This was a problem. Getting the kids through that parking lot made me feel like I was playing a real-life version of that old Atari game Frogger, except with a malfunctioning joystick that made the frogs whine and bolt in random directions instead of doing what I wanted them to do.

Rich Lowry continues the Wilcox marriage conversation from earlier this week. He writes:

Our pop culture tends to celebrate what one sociologist calls “the carousel of intimate relationships” that adults are constantly hopping on and off. Although Modern Family has replaced Leave It to Beaver as the TV-sitcom paradigm of American family life, children have more trouble in complex households formed by people unrelated by birth or marriage. “Children in stepfamilies,” according to the study, “are more likely to experience school failure, delinquency, teenage pregnancy, and incarceration than children growing up in intact, married families.”

Children turn out to benefit from the structure, rituals, and identity that come with a lasting marriage between their parents. And the very act of committing to the norms of marriage makes adults better marital partners and parents. One of the more affecting pieces of data in this study is that fathers committed to marriage are more likely to hug their children than fathers who aren’t. One of the more disturbing is that children in cohabiting households are more likely to be abused than children in either intact, married families or single-parent families.

The advantages of marriage run much deeper than merely having two adults in the house. It is an irreplaceable source of social capital. As we move away from it and social scientists study the consequences, we learn more about why it was such a timeless institution — once upon a time.

An e-mail: 

Kathryn –

Just saw your Corner post on the Home Front and checked it out – I LOVE IT!  I’m a politico of sorts, but the “Home Front” issues are my true passion.  I really think that a revival in our Nation’s families are one of THE most important factors to getting this country turned around.  And even though I’m not that old (25), the impact of technology and social networking on kids and teenagers scares me!  I love Nancy’s point in her post Thursday morning – parents just need to turn the devices off!  One thing’s for sure, I’m going to do my best to keep my kids off Facebook till they go to college!

Will be following the Home Front closely – thanks!

Do let us know what you are looking for in a Home Front blog!

A new report from the U.S. Census Bureau concludes that divorce rates are up in the Bible Belt. The unspoken subtext is that if Christians can’t make marriage work, then no-one can. But there are a number of things to keep in mind when reading such stories, not the least of which is that marriage is generally in improving shape. (The overall divorce rate in America has been declining slowly since 1985.)

We should unpack the statistics a little lest we come to the wrong conclusions. It is true that the South has had higher divorce rates than the North for some time, but this is not because it’s the Bible Belt, but instead it has more married couples to begin with. And unfortunately, more marriages means more opportunity for divorce. Secondly, there are more young marriages (18-20 years of age), and more couples living in poverty in the South, both factors that are associated with increased risk of divorce.

With this in mind, it would perhaps be more appropriate to describe the South as the “Mobile-Home Belt” than the Bible Belt — the former is a sure-fire indicator of divorce, the second not so much. In fact, it has been shown that couples who take their faith seriously have a 35 percent lower risk of divorce than those who do not practice a religious faith.

A quick snapshot of my conversation with financial consultant Gregory S. Jeffrey about his new book, Enough Is Never Enough: Overcoming Worries About Money: 

How the heck does one’s attitude toward money reveal the life of his soul? Bit much you claim there, isn’t it?

Only if you begin with the assumption that money and the spiritual life are two separate, distinct worlds. In fact, they are intimately intertwined. We just don’t see it or don’t want to see it.

In the Gospel of Matthew, 25 of 28 chapters make a direct or indirect reference to material possessions or the use of money and power, a total of 38 passages. For example, when Jesus called him, Peter dropped his nets and left the security of his job as a fisherman. That was an economic decision that revealed a trust in divine Providence. With Peter as just one example, I think it’s fair to say one’s attitude toward money reveals something about one’s interior spiritual life.

…

Do we really need to be generous? How about making ends meet? How about a mini-vacation with the kids?

You’ve combined three issues, so let’s tease them apart, using my own childhood to illustrate a couple of points. First, “making ends meet” refers to our moral obligation to pay bills justly incurred. My parents took this obligation very seriously, which meant a very modest lifestyle, one that has gone decidedly out of fashion. We need some soul searching in this regard.

As for a vacation with the kids, that is a good thing once you’ve met your basic obligations. So is a nice cold beer after cutting the lawn. My point: God wants us to enjoy life, and I intend on taking him up on the offer. But enjoyment has to be set in the context of the third issue: generosity. Neither of my parents had a high-school education, but they had a deep trust and faith. As a kid in the ’60s, I saw my parents write a check to the church every Sunday morning. It wasn’t much, but it was a lesson by example for my brothers and me. I’ll take that memory over a ride in a teacup any day.

Much of our views about family life is shaped by our own mothers — even if the goal is do the opposite of what our mothers did. Was your mother a happy mom? A happy wife? A happy woman? Whether the answer is yes or no, it is sure to be the reason you believe the way you do about marriage, kids, and work — whatever that may be. For Gloria Steinem, just as for so many of the well-known feminists of our time, the answer to the questions above are a resounding no. 

Last week HBO aired a two-hour special on the life of Gloria Steinem entitled Gloria: In Her Own Words. The documentary highlights the feminist revolution Gloria Steinem helped launch.

I must first say this about Steinem: She’s very beautiful (as a thirty-something woman, she bears a striking resemblance to Angelina Jolie) and very honest. Indeed, Ms. Steinem seems like an authentic person who sincerely believes in what she stands for — and there’s no question about what she stands for. The feminist movement is her number-one mission in life, the baby she never had. And she insists it’s a revolution that’s far from over. “The point is that we go forward. We’re nowhere near where we need to be.”

If we’re nowhere near where Ms. Steinem thinks we ought to be, America is in a lot more trouble than I thought — because Steinem’s worldview is mind-numbingly destructive.

Just what is her worldview? She sees the world as inherently unfair to women. She believes having children should not be a deep part of a woman’s identity. She thinks getting married makes a woman a “semi-nonperson.” She believes abortion is a basic right, “like freedom of speech or freedom of assembly.” She promotes day care and believes, or believed at one time anyway, that children suffer from too much Mommy. 

But the most telling part of the documentary came when Steinem was asked what feminism is. “Feminism starts out being very simple,” she says. “It starts out being the instinct of a little child who says ‘it’s not fair’ and ‘you are not the boss of me,’ and it ends up being a worldview that questions hierarchy altogether.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Feminism is indeed the worldview of a person who never grew up. Most of the well-known feminists of our time have struggled in this regard because their childhoods were severely lacking. Steinem was raised by a mentally unstable mother who was unable to care for Gloria. “I was a neglected child,” says Steinem. “I didn’t think I existed. I was fearful of becoming [my mother].”

That’s informative enough. But here’s the real kicker: “…and being a social activist can be a drug that keeps you from going back and looking at yourself. You keep trying to fill up this emptiness.”

In other words, instead of “filling the emptiness” in a constructive fashion, she set out to change the world. It was simply easier to point the blame elsewhere — to say, as she did in the 1970s, “I wasn’t crazy. The system was crazy.”

Betty Friedan offered a similar explanation in a later edition of The Feminine Mystique. After explaining her hatred for her mother, Friedan writes, ”It was easier for me to start the women’s movement than it was to change my own personal life.”

Indeed, gaining perspective on the the most significant social movement of our time has never been easier. The modern feminist movement was never about equality for women. Its mission is singular: to fundamentally transform the United States of America to make life more suitable for feminists.

Remember: “We’re nowhere near where we need to be.”

— Suzanne Venker is co-author, with Phyllis Schlafly, of The Flipside of Feminism. 

The Median age of first marriages has been rising slowly and steadily for more than ten years. Today it’s 26 for women and 28 for men — the highest it’s been since the Census started collecting such numbers.

But is it wise to wait until the second half of your twenties to get married, or even into your thirties? This is a question many people are asking today.

There is no great wealth of research on this question, but there is some good data that can be helpful to young men and women and their parents as they navigate this part of their life-course. Two of the best sources are Norval Glenn (UT, Austin, recently deceased) and Paul Amato (Penn State).

In his recent study, which draws from five different American data sets, Professor Glenn explains,

The greatest…likelihood of being in an intact marriage of the highest quality is among those who married at age 22-25.

He explains that marriages formed at ages later than this fared very well in survival, but “rather poorly” in quality.

However, importantly, Glenn explains that it would be “premature to conclude that the optimal time for first marriage for most persons is ages 22-25” because other critical factors impact risk of divorce and marital happiness as well.

Age at marriage doesn’t stand alone as a benefit or harm. The most significant additional factors related to marital longevity and quality are:

• avoiding premarital cohabitation
• socio-economics
• having parents who are not divorced
• greater educational attainment
• general maturity and personal commitment to the idea of marital longevity
• having healthy marriage attitudes and behaviors modeled by both sets of parents
• involvement in a healthy church/faith setting that takes marriage seriously
• completed meaningful premarital counseling

Given this qualification, Professor Glenn concludes his article by stating,

The findings of this study do indicate that for most persons, little or nothing in the way of marital success is likely to be gained by deliberately delaying marriage beyond the mid-twenties.

Paul Amato explains that marrying at a “young age is one of the best predictors of divorce.”

Of course, we must ask what he means by “young.” Amato is referring to those marrying in their teens. He explains,

Once people enter their early to mid-twenties, the risk of divorce is attenuated [reduced]. Indeed, people who postpone marriage until their thirties face a dwindling supply of potential partners – a situation that may increase the likelihood of forming unions with partners who are not good marriage material. In other words, marrying “too late” may increase the risk of having a troubled relationship.

W. Bradford Wilcox (U of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project) concurs with these two findings from his own analysis of the National Survey of Family growth data, explaining, “Couples who marry in their mid-twenties tend to do best, when you combine a consideration of quality and stability.”

Wilcox adds, “But I think couples can marry somewhat earlier than this IF they are embedded in a supportive church community that gives them direction, support and healthy role models.”

Mark Regnerus (UT, Austin), who wrote the popular cover story for Christianity Today (August 2009), “The Case for Early Marriage,” jokingly explains that marrying later is almost sure to guarantee life-long marriage: “getting hitched at 80 is probably the best way to guarantee that you’ll stay married the rest of your life!”

Regnerus says he would push the number a bit lower than other sociologists, “to 22’ish, because the data suggests it’s not a major risk of divorce over the next 10 years.” However, he admits that not divorcing is not the same as having both quality and stability.

And Regnerus explains that “earlier” marriage in the 22-age window increases the likelihood of couples marrying as virgins, which is an important factor in marital stability and happiness.

These conclusions indicate that we are not doing much to increase our own dreams of marital success by waiting on marriage. And who really is ever ready for marriage? In many ways, marriage is the transformative institution that makes us ready for being someone’s husband or wife. Ask anyone married thirty years or more if that is not true.

— Glenn T. Stanton is the director of Family Formation Studies at Focus on the Family and a research fellow at the Institute of Marriage and Family. He is also author of the recent book Secure Daughters, Confident Sons: How Parents Guide Their Children into Authentic Masculinity and Femininity.

Joel Bakan, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, has two teenagers who sometimes ignore him.  I know this because his recent New York Times op-ed called “The Kids Are Not All Right” begins this way:

When I sit with my two teenagers, and they are a million miles away, absorbed by the titillating roil of online social life, the addictive pull of video games and virtual worlds, as they stare endlessly at video clips and digital pictures of themselves and their friends, it feels like something is wrong.

Most parents have been on the outskirts of their kids’ awareness when they are too absorbed in one thing (a video game, their appearance, other people’s approval) and not absorbed enough in another (homework, church, the conversation at the dinner table).  But Bakan takes a normal parenting moment and extrapolates it into a full-fledged battle between children and…  wait for it… wait for it… corporations.

Yes, the “bad guy” in his example is some sort of corporate giant waiting to drive his kids’ minds to distraction.  He writes about the history of child abuse in mines, mills and factories in the 19^th century, and the eventual child-labor laws.  And then, he makes a giant leap from the dusty coal shafts to an excess of Twitter or World of Warcraft:

A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study reports that children spend more hours engaging with various electronic media — TV, games, videos and other online entertainments — than they spend in school. Much of what children watch involves violent, sexual imagery, and yet children’s media remain largely unregulated. Attempts to curb excesses — like California’s ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors — have been struck down by courts as free speech violations.

However, Bakan concludes on a hopeful note.  He writes that “our current failure to provide stronger protection of children in the face of corporate-caused harm reveals a sickness in our societal soul. The good news is that we can — and should — work as citizens, through democratic channels and institutions, to bring about change.”

Guess what, professor? There’s even better news than you think!

You can control your own kids’ addiction to their iPhones and iPads by using a simple function called the “on/off” switch.  You can limit their ability to “stare endlessly” at video clips by giving them a pre-set daily amount of internet time.  You can even — gasp! — ask them to do a “Facebook fast” for a week to reignite the relationship with dear old dad.

Instead of looking to government regulation to assist you in protecting your kids’ childhoods, you can look directly at your kids, smile, and say, “Okay, guys.  I love you, and things are going to change.”

If they resist, you don’t have a “corporation” problem, you have a family problem.

We hear a lot of negative stories about school meals and the need to improve their nutritional content. The First Lady championed the Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 — a monstrosity of a bill that authorize $4.5 billion to improve school meals within ten years. The bill was signed by the president in December 2010. In January 2011, the USDA released a proposed rule that would set new nutritional standards for all food offered in schools. The USDA received over 130,000 comments, which were distilled into a 150-page document, now under review. The final rule is due before the end of the year.

While that rather tiresome bureaucratic process has lumbered on, a tiny bit of evidence has emerged showing all of that congressional and White House meddling might not have been necessary.

In a move that leaves one wondering why all these folks in Washington didn’t do a little survey of their own before authorizing billions of dollars to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, the School Nutrition Association (SNA) just released a survey of 1,294 school foodservice directors showing that school cafeterias nationwide are serving some pretty darn healthy meals. 

Here are a few cheerful highlights from the SNA’s press release:

• Nationwide, nearly every school district offers fresh fruits and vegetables (98%)

• Whole grain foods have become readily accessible (97%)

• 89% of school districts offer salad bars or pre-packaged salads

• About two-thirds provide vegetarian meals (63%)

• Virtually all districts offer fat-free or 1% milk (98%)

School nutrition programs are also working to bring more locally sourced foods into schools, with nearly half (48%) of respondents offering locally sourced fruits and vegetables (up from 37% in 2009). School districts are working to help connect and educate students on the foods grown in their region, with 32% involved in farm to school initiatives and another 41% interested in or planning to implement these initiatives. Results also reveal the trend toward school gardens, with 21% of districts confirming to have a school garden and another 37% interested in or planning to implement these programs. . . .

The report also found that at least 94% of districts prepare some of their entrees or sides from scratch. Of those that prepare items from scratch, more than 64% prepare at least a quarter of their entrees from scratch and more than 71% prepare at least a quarter of their side dishes from scratch – both results indicating an increase from 2009.

This survey shows that foodservice directors are trying hard to improve the nutrition content of the meals served to kids in schools. It didn’t require federal action — rather, just a little public outcry and media attention on the matter. 

Now, these same directors might be forced throw out the improvements they’ve made if they are inconsistent with the about-to-be-released federal regulations. That’s too bad. We should leave it to the individual school districts and these foodservice directors to make the improvements. After all, they have the best sense of the school children’s regional food preferences and traditions. 

But of course, there’s a way to avoid all these issues: Pack your kid a lunch. After all, parents have the best sense of their child’s preferences and food traditions. Let the bureaucrats blather on about whole wheat and leafy greens. I’ll stick to a little brown sack and a good ‘ole PB&J for my kids.

— Julie Gunlock is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.

This post from actor Michael Moriarty contains a remarkable amount of pain but also intense gratitude. He writes, in part:

The same diabolical calls for abortion that ensued upon Trig’s conception were echoed in the perversely feminist labels the Progressives plastered on Sarah Palin for being the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate. The thicker the flying mud aimed at Sarah Palin, the nobler, stronger and more beautiful she becomes in my eyes. If the rest of America knew what I know about being the survivor of abortion, they’d feel about Sarah Palin as I do.

Sarah Palin — former governor of Alaska and vice-presidential nominee — is obviously a political figure, but her much more powerful role may be as a cultural one. 

Nancy, among others (see Janet Morana here), has written about the recent  “The Two-Minus-One-Pregnancy” piece in The New York Times Magazine. Here is Betsy Hart talking about it and her “annoying” twin brothers: 

“Jenny’s decision to reduce twins to a single fetus was never really in doubt. The idea of managing two infants at this point in her life terrified her. She and her husband already had grade-school-age children, and she took pride in being a good mother. She felt that twins would soak up everything she had to give, leaving nothing for her older children. … Jenny desperately wanted another child, but not at the risk of becoming a second-rate parent. ‘This is bad, but it’s not anywhere as bad as neglecting your child or not giving everything you can to the children you have,’” Jenny was quoted as saying.

Really?

The essay recounts that while still somewhat ethically troublesome in the medical community and certainly more so — for now — in the population at large, “selective reductions” from twin pregnancies are on the rise in part because of the growing use of in-vitro fertilization, which often produces multiples. And more parents producing pregnancies on their own terms may be leading some to believe that life itself — theirs and their children’s — should be on their own terms, too. As Jenny put it, “somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”

I suppose this phenomenon is even less about the individual players involved than it is about a self-obsessed and, ironically, child-obsessed culture that in the very process of providing choices about life itself has minimized the awe we ought to have toward it.

Myself, I almost couldn’t finish the essay. I thought of my mother and my annoying older twin brothers. Two of my best friends now. I considered the four children born within 31/2 years to a young couple unprepared for those children in almost every way the world counts as significant. I felt her and my dad’s overwhelming love for us.

Most of all, I marveled at the sad irony of an increasingly sophisticated and advanced culture in which the gift of life itself is in some ways ever more precarious.

Video from a wide-ranging conversation last week about that study which reveals cohabitation on the rise, with Jonathan Rauch moderating.

Jennifer Fulwiler writes a case for hiring a little help around the house if you can: 

We have washing machines and dishwashers to help us with household tasks, and medicine to keep our children healthy. Those things are great blessings that make life easier. But we shouldn’t discount the real challenges that come with living in isolation. For a woman who stays home to hire someone to act as an extra pair of hands around the house isn’t a selfish move that indicates that she’s not fully bought in to raising her kids, as it’s sometimes perceived; in fact, getting a little down time to recharge her own batteries is a necessary condition for being able to serve as well as possible.