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, […]
Read MoreProgressives 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 […]
Read MorePediatricians 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 […]
Read MoreFor 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 […]
Read MoreTwenty-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 […]
Read MoreWhen 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. […]
Read MoreLong 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 […]
Read MoreOften 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 […]
Read MoreThe bread-winning father? For progressive thinkers, he’s an irrelevant anachronism—a laughable stereotype straight out of Ozzie and Harriet. Perhaps these progressive thinkers are not paying much attention to the well-being of children around the world. For children have suffered wherever bread-winning fathers have disappeared. The latest evidence that children pay the price when bread-winning fathers […]
Read MoreEducation has established itself as a god term in progressive circles. Name any problem whatever—from global warming to grade-school bullying—and progressives will begin to genuflect and burn incense before the shrines of education, certain that academe can save us. Their solo fide progressive credo blocks from view the way that educational attainment actually depends on […]
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