Starting Daycare, Needing Antibiotics

Few issues worry public-health officials more than the emergence of ever more pathogens resistant to antibiotics. Not surprisingly, epidemiologists have identified overuse of antibiotics as a cause of the problem. But physicians are especially likely to rely on antibiotics in what circumstances? Study after study has identified children who have contracted an illness while in […]

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Weathering the Great Recession: The Family Difference

Few indeed were the Americans not keenly aware of the financial distress consequent to the Great Recession beginning in late 2007 and lasting until mid-2009. Almost all American households suffered some loss as a result of this economic typhoon. However, in a newly completed study, researchers at Columbia and the University of Michigan convincingly establish […]

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Families Atrophy, Bureaucracies Grow, Academics Exploit

When progressive activists launched their crusade to dismantle the natural family, few social scientists voiced concerns. Instead, most joined the choirs singing paeons to the gods of radical individualism, luminous deities promising endless happiness and autonomy to men and women who shed the oppressive restraints of marriage and family life. Savvy social scientists were even, […]

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Putting Children at Risk—Chinese Labor Bosses, American Divorce Lawyers

Progressives always style themselves as champions of children. Yet these defenders of children often evince a curious insouciance about a social circumstance—namely, parental absence—known to put children at risk.  A new study establishing that children suffer when they lose contact with parents comes out of China, where many hard-pressed rural parents have in recent years […]

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Mom’s Job, Baby’s Formula

Pediatricians have understood for some time that breastfeeding delivers remarkable benefits—nutritional, immunological, developmental—to infants. But these benefits have counted for little among the feminist activists pushing ever more women into full-time employment, and away from wedlock. Just how fully the feminist agenda jeopardizes babies needing breastfeeding shows up distinctly in a new study of infant-feeding […]

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Parents Split, Junior Flunks

For all of their effusive pro-child rhetoric, progressives remain astonishingly blind to the real consequences for children of their marriage-subverting principles. But those consequences come into sobering focus in a new Spanish study concluding that children who experience a parental separation are disturbingly likely to fail in school.   In sketching out the context for […]

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Zola’s Scandalous Views on Family

Twenty-first-century progressives revere the 19th-century French novelist Émile Zola as one of their own—a daring writer whose often shockingly explicit writing challenged conventional sexual and moral proprieties. But a new study of Zola’s last years reveals that it is actually progressives who might find themselves most scandalized by some of the views the novelist expressed […]

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Home Cooking: The Nutritional Benefits of Culinary Inefficiency

When 20th-century feminist utopian Charlotte Perkins Gilman looked at home cooking, she saw only a primitive tangle of inefficiencies.  It is far more efficient, she opined, to have professionals prepare meals using modern culinary equipment suitable for quantity production. What Gilman failed to see, however, were the considerable benefits that come with home-cooked family meals. […]

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American-Style Individualism in Japan: The Family Cost

Long known as a land of Confucian social solidarity, Japan has felt the influence of American-style individualism in recent decades, an influence corrosive of marriage and family life. Indeed, in a recently published study, social psychologist Yuji Ogihara of Kyoto University and the University of California, Los Angeles, measures the increasing strength of such individualism […]

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Sterile Fantasies

Often under the influence of professors, a growing number of university students around the world decide to delay parenthood and family life. Do the students who make such decisions realize the biological challenges they may face as a consequence of such delays? A new Danish study reveals that many university students remain woefully ignorant of […]

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