"Should you get divorced in order to make your children better people?"

"What a good parent you are for asking, but, no, of course not: There are easier ways to get the benefits of being non-religious to you...

"Acting requires some intentionality on the part of the actor, some conscious effort to adopt a persona other than his or her own."

"Even adult actors who get criticized for 'playing themselves' are engaged in a series of more or less conscious decisions abou...

Polyamory on the march.

"It's all based on a really high degree of love and trust," says the wife. I love the look on the face of the moderator at 1:5...

"The Ultimate Amenity: Grandparents."

A NYT article about highly affluent couples who are spending their copious money to purchase housing for their own parents, so that their i...

Are "lockdown" drills traumatizing schoolkids?

Catherine Crawford used to think so. [R]epresentatives from the Department of Education unexpectedly showed up and announced that they would...

"Listen I don’t necessarily think having an armed guard outside every classroom is conducive to a positive learning environment."

Said Gov. Chris Christie when he was asked to respond to the NRA's proposal about school safety. Not that NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre said th...

The monster in Peggy Noonan's childhood closet was... Abraham Lincoln!

Writing about childhood fears (post-Newtown), she reveals : One night when the moon was bright and the wind was moving the trees, I looked f...

If we truly care deeply about the death of young children...

... what are the most effective things we can do? There's so much talk about gun control in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, but r...

"We have of course gotten used to mommy bloggers embarrassing their children..."

"... saying which child they like best or how much they drink while stuck at home doing art projects." Louis C.K. regularly embarr...

"Nine young and impoverished Afghan girls lost their lives..."

"... in a land-mine explosion Monday while they were collecting firewood in eastern Afghanistan."

"[P]eople who want to take care of people and can’t stand doing work that doesn’t relate to that should probably be parents."

"There are very few jobs that are truly just taking care of people. And most of them pay very poorly, if at all. So you may as well do ...

Quiet Santa.

For children with special needs.

"UW law professor Michael Scott has looked at the psychological profiles of the gunman in these mass shootings."

"By Scott’s count, there have been about 75 mass shootings in the United States since the University of Texas killings in the 1960s....

"An official with knowledge of a shooting at a Connecticut elementary school says 27 people are dead, including 18 children."

I'm afraid the intense news coverage of these shooting sprees leads to more of the same, but I can see in the comments that people will ...

"Psy Makes $8.1 Million By Ignoring Copyright Infringements Of Gangnam Style."

Okay , but $8.1 million isn't that much considering the magnitude of the success of the thing. On the other hand, it's the kind of t...

Russian children find a lion cub on the steppe and bring it to school.

"While waiting for police, children petted and played with the cub, named Barsik. One boy even tried to ride it like a horse while it m...

"Would you send your kid to a school where faceless dolls and pine-cones are the toys of choice?"

"A school where kids don't read proficiently until age 9 or 10 -- and where time spared goes to knitting and playing the recorder? ...

"I am such an overprotective parent that if I knew my child might get bitten, I would not have even let my daughter do this."

"But I felt safe. Everyone just imagines dolphins as smiling, non-biting animals with knobby teeth. You forget these are wild animals. ...

A "concerned sister" gets press petitioning Hasbro to put boys in commercials for Easy-Bake ovens.

"The toy has long been marketed to girls and made in gender specific colors like pink and purple. The calls for Easy-Bake to take on a ...

"In the name of equality, the French government has proposed doing away with homework in elementary and junior high school."

"French President Francois Hollande argues that homework penalizes children with difficult home situations, but even the people whom th...