A Canadian (Liberal Party) senator, Celine Hervieux-Payette, is urging the Canadian government to make spanking, even the most innocuous swat on the backside, a criminal offence.

She would repeal Criminal Code section 43, which protects parents and teachers “using force by way of correction toward a pupil or child,” as long as that force is “reasonable under the circumstances.”

Anti-spanking radicals challenged that law all the way to the Supreme Court. But in 2004 that court upheld its constitutionality. Child abuse remains criminal, of course, but spanking is fine as long as it is a “genuine effort to educate the child, poses no reasonable risk of harm that is more than transitory and trifling, and is reasonable under the circumstances.”

Ms Hervieux-Payette is not satisfied with the current law, however. She wants to rid the world (or Canada, at least) of all violence. That’s a wonderful goal,… click here to read whole article and make comments

We hear a lot about family breakdown but not much that throws light on its true extent, or on the causes. A new study remedies that by describing the parental relationship in terms of either “belonging” or “rejection”.

According to the first US Index of Belonging and Rejection, published by the Family Research Council, less than 50 percent of American children reach adulthood having grown up in an intact family. By the time they have reached ages 15 to 17, 55 per cent of teens have parents who have rejected each other, either through non-marriage or separation/divorce. They are living either with a single birth parent, or in a step-family, or with cohabiting parents, or with neither parent -- for example, with adoptive or foster parents.

The report, by Patrick Fagan of FRC's Marriage and Religion Research Institute, uses data from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey. Figures on family… click here to read whole article and make comments

As part of a "Sustainable Life" guide to a "healthier, happier 2011" the Times has published a piece headed, "The Happy Marriage Is the 'Me' Marriage".

Really? Yes, really, says Tara Parker-Pope.

The notion that the best marriages are those that bring satisfaction to the individual may seem counterintuitive. After all, isn’t marriage supposed to be about putting the relationship first?

Too right it's counter-intuitive. And it doesn't help to decorate this idea with a beautiful metaphor:

Caryl Rusbult, a researcher at Vrije University in Amsterdam who died last January, called it the “Michelangelo effect,” referring to the manner in which close partners “sculpt” each other in ways that help each of them attain valued goals.

More forthrightly, Dr. Aron and Gary W. Lewandowski Jr., a professor at Monmouth University in New Jersey, talk about spouses using each other for "self-expansion".… click here to read whole article and make comments

Crown Princess Mary and Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark are parents again -- to twins, a boy and a girl, born January 8. That brings the tally of their children to four.

Mary Donaldson of Tasmania, Australia, married Prince Frederik in 2004; the following year Prince Christian was born and in 2006 Princess Isabella. At the time of her marriage Princess Mary said that she would like to have several children -- something she has reaffirmed more recently, saying:

"I'd like to have that experience again. That boundless freedom of childhood is so wonderful. The world is so different for a child, waking in the mornings, wide-eyed and ready to take it all in."

The birth of twins makes the couple's fertility more than double that of the Danish average of 1.74 children per woman.

Congratulations, Mary and Frederik!

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