According to this Wall Street Journal piece, American anthropologist Elinor Ochs and her colleagues at UCLA have turned their sights from studying family life in such places as Samoa and the Peruvian Amazon, to Southern California’s middle class.

They studied family life up close and personal (“in vivo”), rather than in a lab setting—though I’m not sure how the latter would be accomplished—in order to determine how families with two working parents balance their various cares and responsibilities.

The UCLA team recorded video for a week of nearly every moment at home in the lives of 32 Southern California families. […] Each family was filmed by two cameras and watched all day by at least three observers.

As a mom of several, I couldn’t help chuckling at this line:

“The researchers noted that the presence of the observers may have altered some of the families' behavior.”

Gee,… click here to read whole article and make comments

FROM THE IONA BLOG

Jon Hamm is the actor who plays Don Draper, the central character in the cult TV series, Madmen, which is about a Manhattan advertising firm in the 1960s. Hamm has been living with his partner for the last fifteen years and is in no mood to marry. It turns out a big reason for this is that his parents divorced when he was only two.

Explaining why he isn’t married and doesn’t have any plans to marry, he said in an interview: “I don’t have a particularly defined example of marriage in my life.”

He added: “My parents got divorced when I was two and never remarried. So it doesn’t mean anything to me.”

He concluded: “I don’t mean to say that it shouldn’t mean things to other people. I’m not judging it one way or another.  

“It’s just my experience.  I don’t… click here to read whole article and make comments

What is the future of marriage? The question arises not only because of the revolutionary concept of same-sex marriage, but because of the evolutionary path marriage has followed in mainstream society since at least the mid-twentieth century. This subject was explored in depth by Bryce J Christensen in a recent article, “Only ourselves to blame”, on this website.

For some years, now, researchers at the Institute for American Values have been pointing out that, while the great majority of people still highly value marriage, the meaning of marriage has undergone a profound change. There has been a marked shift away from the institutional concept of marriage, which is focused on the begetting and rearing of children, to the soulmate concept, which is focused on the happiness of the couple and has no essential connection to children.

David and Amber Lapp, a young married couple who have been doing qualitative research for the… click here to read whole article and make comments

Here is a great story from Australia - via New Zealand. It happened two years ago. One of twin babies born at only 27 weeks gestation was declared dead after doctors at Sydney Hospital fought for 20 minutes to save his life. They passed the baby to his mother, Kate Ogg, and she placed him on her bare chest to say goodbye. What happened next amazed everyone.

"We didn't want him to hear us crying while he was dying, we wanted him to hear our voices so we started talking to him quietly, telling him his name and that he had a sister," Mrs Ogg said.

"Next thing he's gasping more regularly and starting to move and cry."

After Jamie started gasping more regularly and took breast milk off Mrs Ogg's fingers, she and husband David had to persuade the doctor to come back… click here to read whole article and make comments

Having recently celebrated a milestone 25th anniversary of marriage with my husband, I find that stories like this tend to catch the eye and gladden the heart.

The namesake frontman of [rock group] Bon Jovi has been married to his high school sweetheart, Dorothea, since they wed … in 1989. Jon and Dorothea had been on and off as a couple for a decade prior to that. But, aside from a brief pre-marital dalliance with actress Diane Lane, the rocker hasn't been publicly linked to any other sweeties besides his first crush.

Given the serial divorce track record of celebrity folk in general (where else would one see the ghastly term “Starter Marriage”?), it’s at once refreshing and inspiring to witness marital longevity in that quarter. Not only this, but Mr. and Mrs. Bon Jovi have much more than a “starter” family. They have a numerically-impressive (by… click here to read whole article and make comments

Swedish family policies are lauded for enabling women to go to work as well as have children. Sweden has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe. What you can do with your children once you have them, however, is not altogether a matter of choice.

You can put them in a free kindergarten, costing $20,000 per child a year, from the time they are one year old, but if you wanted to look after them yourself at home you would be pretty much on your own. Homecare allowances are small and few and far between.

And if you want to educate your child at home, you are in real trouble. Home-schooling is banned in the Scandinavian utopia and families who defy the ban are feeling the full force of the law. Several families have gone into exile in neighbouring countries (which allow home-schooling) as a result, and a handful living on the… click here to read whole article and make comments

The challenge of dealing with bad behaviour among young people remains on the British government’s agenda following last summers riots, and lectures to the parents cannot be relied on to produce the necessary reform. Family life is always in the too hard basket for governments -- except when they want to give marriage and adoption rights to same-sex partners, but I digress.

Not surprisingly, then, the latest development is a report recommending that the crack-down on unruly behaviour should begin in nursery schools, because children at risk of going off the rails can be spotted at the age of two. Nurseries should identify toddlers showing early signs of aggression and give them special tuition on acceptable behaviour, says Charlie Taylor, headmaster of a special school and the government’s behaviour tsar.

Like me you may be thinking, But aren’t there studies showing that being placed in daycare by the age of… click here to read whole article and make comments

American mom, Jennifer Fulwiser, writes about the enduring appeal of princesses to little girls, and how the effort to steer her own three towards My First Semiconductor kit, even if she could bring herself to make it, seems doomed. Here's an excerpt:

I was a prime candidate for a girl whose self esteem would be hurt by pop culture princess fairy tales, especially since I grew up back when cartoonists were utterly unconcerned with portraying realistic images of women. These fictional ladies had tiny waists, slender necks, dainty noses, thick, flowing hair, and they always ended up with a handsome prince in the end. In other words, they were the exact opposite of those of us whose physical appearances inspired nicknames based on giant woodland ape-men. So you would think that Cinderella and her ilk would have taken any sense of self worth I had, shattered it into a… click here to read whole article and make comments

“I don’t want to go to jail, I don’t want to go to jail,” cried the young offender on being told the police were on their way. No chance of that; he was only 8 years old.

He was noticed by two newspapermen driving to work in New Zealand’s capital city at 5am on Monday morning, reports the NZ Herald. At first they thought it was a drunken driver weaving his way dangerously along the street, but when he turned a corner they were shocked to see a young boy in pyjamas, hunched over the steering wheel and almost standing on the pedals. The vehicle was a 4WD Range Rover.

The men cornered him in a carpark and the child’s first words were, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just want to go home.” He thought he could drive himself back there! That wasn’t so smart, but the reporter was surprised… click here to read whole article and make comments

Thus ran the UK Telegraph headline for March 4. However, it was MercatorNet’s own esteemed editor, Michael Cook, who launched the shocking proposal of a couple of ethicists into the blogosphere with posts in BioEdge (Feb. 25) and MercatorNet (Feb. 28).

“Killing babies is no different from abortion.” Never were truer words spoken: groups seeking legal protection for prenatal life have been saying it (though with syntax reversed) for decades. The really scary part is that now “experts” are using the argument, not to curb or stop abortion, but to normalize infanticide.

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued. 

I am at a loss to explain why Oxford-linked medical ethicists are any more “morally relevant” than the average newborn baby. My… click here to read whole article and make comments