Many of today’s kids seem to be flunking the daily moral tests of life.

James, a teacher-friend of mine, lamented recently how “morally challenged” his high school students seem to be. “They don’t think twice about lying or slamming someone’s reputation. Cheating on tests is no big deal. They only worry if they’ll get caught.”

Recent headlines and the latest studies paint a dismal picture of cheating, bullying, sexual experimentation, on-line exhibitionism and “cyber-stalking.” College students show declining levels of empathy—a quality viewed as the foundation of ethical behavior. And the problems start early. A quick snapshot of the playground culture captures younger children who bully their way to the top of the slide or push past a crying child to reach the swings first, classic examples of self-absorption and lack of compassion.

What—or who—is to blame?

Fingers point to a… click here to read whole article and make comments

A curious and tragic disconnect marks India’s attitude to its female population. One third of the seats in the Indian Parliament are now occupied by women, but the practice of female feticide and female infanticide remains widespread.

According to a documentary film published by Journeyman Pictures on YouTube this month, infanticide is very common in the impoverished southern state of Tamil Nadu, where a Catholic missionary order set up a Mercy Home in 1987 to rescue the babies.

The heart-rending -- but hopeful -- film includes interviews with two village women, one of whom, Parvati, had her first daughter taken from her by her husband and killed. He also took her second daughter at 40 days old and said he had given her away. Parvati has never seen her since.

Aborting unborn girls is also common since the use of ultrasound for detecting the… click here to read whole article and make comments

September 27 was CASA Family Dinner Day in the United States and a report from the research centre confirms the important role of family dinners in keeping teenagers connected to their parents and free of substance abuse.

CASA stands for the National Centre on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. This is its tenth Family Day and its sixth report highlighting the benefits of family dinners for children growing up -- in this case, 12- to 17-year-olds. CASA founder and chairman, Joseph A Califano Jr, says:

This year’s study demonstrates that the magic that happens at family dinners isn’t the food on the table, but the conversations around it. Three in four teens report that they talk to their parents about what’s going on in their lives during dinner; and eight in 10 parents agree that by having family dinner they learn more about what’s going on in… click here to read whole article and make comments

Looking for a quick post today I came across this plea for help in the Private Lives department of The Guardian (UK).

Is it possible to get to your late 30s and still not know what you want to do with your life? My son is unemployed, living in a bedsit and seems to have no ambitions or goals, just drinking and smoking dope.

Any relationships he has had never seem to work out and he has gone from one dead-end job to another. He is bright, but we cannot work out why he is so unhappy. Read more...

What advice would Family Edge readers offer?

Just remember the Guardian's warning:

When leaving a message on this page, please be sensitive to the fact that you are responding to a real person in the grip of a real-life dilemma, who… click here to read whole article and make comments

For some years, now, I have been intrigued by the term “child poverty”, which seems to have arisen over the past 15-20 years. It seems to me that all children are poor, in that they (usually) have no income of their own but rely on their parents for what they need. Would it not make more sense to talk about family poverty?

On the other hand, maybe child poverty is a way of directing attention to families below the poverty line, as opposed to individuals. In any case, a new background paper from the Heritage Foundation points out, for those really concerned about child poverty, that the “greatest weapon” against it in America (and countries like it, presumably) is marriage.

It is pretty obvious, really. If children do not have their father in the home they are missing not only one of their main emotional supports but the parent who… click here to read whole article and make comments

A couple of weeks ago my local newspaper thought it newsworthy that men are getting Brazilian waxes. Now an Australian paper reports that girls as young as 14 are being accepted for what it euphemistically calls “intimate beauty treatments”.

Apparently their “boyfriends” are demanding it. And, thanks to the sexual liberation won for them by their mothers and grandmothers generations, the girls are saying yes.

Worst of all, it seems that some mothers are going along with their daughters to make it clear that they have permission. One shop owner in Brisbane says:

''Mostly it is girls around 16 but we do occasionally get younger girls in, but they must have a parent with them,'' the store manager said.

Do you get these 'parents'? One, their daughter wants to get what child and youth advocates point out is a “porn star” treatment. Two, this is… click here to read whole article and make comments

More Americans are poor, but fewer of them are suffering the effects of crime, an intriguing fact for social scientists.

The US Census Bureau reported this week that the poverty rate (the US has had an official measure since 1960) hit 14.3 per cent last year. That represents 4.8 million more people who fell below the threshold based on $22,000 annual income for a family of four. Among working Americans the rate was also the highest it has been -- 12.9 per cent -- since 1965, reports the Christian Science Monitor.

There is no mystery about that, of course; the recession and job loss would account for it. In fact, some economists say that the climbing unemployment rate should have produced even higher poverty figures.

The real mystery -- given the long assumed link between poverty and crime -- is that… click here to read whole article and make comments

The latest ammunition in the same-sex marriage wars is a New York Times report about research showing that “a majority of Americans now say their definition of family includes same-sex couples with children, as well as married gay and lesbian couples”.

At the same time, most Americans do not consider unmarried cohabiting couples, either heterosexual or same-sex, to be a family — unless they have children.

This is the burden of a new book by Brian Powell, a sociologist at Indiana University, Bloomington, who surveyed public opinion on the subject in 2003, 2006 and this year. But I would not get overexcited about it because this year’s sample of 830 people seems quite small in a population of over 300 million, and maybe the earlier samples were also.

In any case, when it came to actual approval of same-sex marriage there was not a majority… click here to read whole article and make comments

Fulfilling an election promise, the UK’s new Conservative-led government has announced approval for the first 16 free schools to be created by parents, teachers and charities. Almost half of them will have a religious ethos.

Two are Jewish, one is Sikh, one Hindu, one Church of England and two others will have a "Christian ethos", reports the Guardian.

There have long been Anglican and Catholic (and probably other Christian denominational) schools in Britain, some of them independent but others largely funded by the state, and it is interesting to see that, when given the freedom and public support, parents and communities are opting for schools with a religious character.

Previous recent governments have had similar policies but few new schools have actually resulted from them. Education Secretary Michael Gove wants things to happen more quickly. He has hinted that as many as 700… click here to read whole article and make comments

There is an interesting alignment of seemingly quite different stars in China: Christian-inspired abstinence education and official population policy.

America’s Focus on the Family has won the ear of the Yunnan provincial ministry of education and is training teachers to educate Chinese teenagers about abstaining from sex before marriage, reports the Washington Post. The Chinese government wants young people to delay marriage and having a child, but delaying sex is another matter, especially as the country becomes more urbanised and susceptible to global trends.

Of course, there is competition for the huge China sex-ed “market”:

China, however, has proved a tough market to crack. Premarital sex has become common in its developed cities. Even in the more rural areas, experts say, sexual mores are changing at a rapid pace. Condom companies are vying to capture a lucrative share of China's population of 1.3 billion. The United… click here to read whole article and make comments