Children

Wednesday

Jenna Stocker

The tragedy of corporate America’s anti-child messaging

My brothers and I grew up in a very active household. We were always busy with sports, schoolwork, and chores, and there was a constant revolving door of friends and teammates. Both of my parents worked full-time as business owners and as our informal chauffeurs. Along with thousands of meals to be prepared, loads of laundry to be done, fights to break up, and the occasional window to be replaced, ours was a house that was never quiet, especially when my brothers tapped their illegal fireworks stash. To an outsider, it might have looked like being in the middle of a domesticated Lord of the Flies. But there was a purpose to the madness and chaos. We learned conflict management, independence, fire safety, and the value of hard work and cooperation.

newborn

Sunday

Birdie Hall

The radical alternative to a hospital birth

Giving birth hurts. A lot. Like any other major physical feat, it’s risky, but it’s not the inherently dangerous medical event some have come to believe. Plenty of women know this. Many are skeptical of the need to give birth in a hospital. But some are taking things further, deciding to forgo medical care entirely and give birth at home totally unassisted. Free birth, or unassisted birth as it’s called by most birth workers, is an intentionally unassisted birth: no professional, no midwife, no nurse, no doctor. For hardcore freebirthers, even having a doula present for your birth means you’re not doing it properly. Thanks to Instagram and one very compelling podcast called The Free Birth Society, the movement is growing.

birth

Wednesday

Teresa Mull

Nick Cannon and the art of the baby daddy

It seems that every time I read the Daily Mail, singer/actor/television host Nick Cannon is welcoming another child. “Nick Cannon shares adorable snaps of his newborn daughter while preparing for the birth of his 11th child,” a DM headline reported on Tuesday. Every time he meets his latest baby, Cannon seems blown away by the miracle that is life. And every time I see a photo of his latest child, I am blown away by the insanity that is Nick Cannon’s life. Is he a model baby daddy or a phony skeeze? Cannon’s football team of offspring is the product of — intimacies? (“relationship” seems like a stretch) — with six women. “In 2021,” reports Insider, “Cannon had four children with three different women in less than a year.

california
Gilbert T. Sewall

Woke California bans boys and girls toy sections

Last week, signing a batch of pet bills to end the legislative session, Gov. Gavin Newsom made California the first state in the nation to require gender-neutral retailing. The law, which will take effect in three years, is limited to toys and 'childcare products' sold by big companies. It will never be enforced, since in essence it's already happening. Target dropped boys and girls toy sections in 2015, and for years retailers have been moving away from gender-specific labels. But the law’s emptiness is immaterial. The point is not to weed out a bias or fix a pressing wrong. The act is a victory for LGBT advocates who claim that sellers pressure children to conform to gender stereotypes and stigmatize non-conformers.

Tuesday

Matt McDonald

Thinking about baby names

How many of you know a baby called Margot? I’ve encountered three in the last couple of months. They all looked more or less the same too. Presumably it’s twenty years too late to blame The Royal Tenenbaums — so perhaps Ms. Robbie is responsible? There’s a lot I love about America, and in many respects this country has improved on the systems and traditions of my own — but one adjustment I cannot get behind is the frequency with which you guys deploy last names as first names. Many want to show appreciation for their favorite president, hence the number of kids called Reagan and Jefferson — and the lack of ones called Biden and Trump. But there’s something bleakly corporate about the result.

names

Monday

Bethany Mandel

The lost boys of Covid

Millions of American children are about to enter their fourth year of Covid-impacted schooling. In vast swaths of the United States, a child now entering second grade has never had anything resembling a normal school experience. No child entering kindergarten has a memory of life before the pandemic. A rising junior in high school has never had a normal high school experience. Over two years into the pandemic, we know that the effects of “long Covid” are basically nonexistent in kids. Following the release of a study published in the Lancet, Alasdair Munro, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in the United Kingdom, tweeted, “A new, large study on long covid in children using Danish registry data has some very reassuring findings.

school

Thursday

Bridget Phetasy

Greetings from the Newborn Bubble

I’m writing this from a place outside time, day, night or sleep. It’s a place filled with magic, milk and boobs on constant display. I’m writing from the Newborn Bubble. My baby, Matilda, was born a month ago and my brain is mush. So if this column ends up being little more than disjointed images and memories, incomplete sentences and trains of thought that get started but never leave the station, know that I am in a postpartum daze. I’ve started to write this piece literally dozens of times: my current view is a baby who passed out looking at her high contrast card. Her onesie is stained with spit-up. Is she breathing? My current view is a sleeping baby in a dock-a-tot, it’s 10:33 a.m. I should be sleeping because she is — but I can’t. Is she breathing?

newborn

Monday

Bobby Miller

Time for a constitutional amendment on abortion

Over the past fifty years, America has allowed a grave atrocity to persist. The magnitude of the callous disregard for human life constituted by abortion is unconscionable. Now, at long last, we can now begin the work of rectification. With the Supreme Court's rejection of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, countless innocent lives have been spared. America can now rejoin the ranks of nearly every other developed democracy, placing basic, democratically enacted limitations on when in a pregnancy an abortion may occur. Instead of a debate shrouded in legal jargon, we can finally have the necessary conversation about whether this is an acceptable practice in a civilized society.

constitution abortion

Monday

Bridget Phetasy

In the valley of the shadow of birth

I was five weeks pregnant when I found out. At that point, it’s nothing more than a little gestational sac of potential. My ob-gyn informed me it wasn’t technically viable and, given my age and history — I’d had an ectopic pregnancy in 2019—not to get my hopes up. “How do I make it stick?” I asked. “Honey, if I knew the answer to that I’d be a billionaire with a private island,” she said. “Yes, yes of course.” I felt stupid. It was seeing that sac for the first time that I felt the stirrings of a longing in my heart that terrified me. It still terrifies me. In fact, it has always terrified me. Still in shock and trying to guard my heart, I kept repeating psychotically, nervously, “Well, we’ll see!

pregnancy

Monday

Jane Stannus

Parents rise up against mandatory Covid vaccines for kids

The Washington State Board of Health has convened an advisory group to examine the possibility of including Covid vaccines in the mandatory immunization schedule for children in public K-12 schools and daycares. Unsurprisingly, many parents and concerned citizens — both vaccinated and unvaccinated — are strongly opposed. Public interest converged on the issue ahead of a health board meeting held January 12, at which the immunization advisory group gave a preliminary briefing. Over 3,500 pages’ worth of comments from the public were posted on the Board’s website ahead of the meeting. The letters provided valuable insight into common opinion on mandatory Covid shots for children.

vaccines

Thursday

Bridget Phetasy

Pregnant at the end of the world

We hear lot of talk these days about anti-natalism: the ethical view that procreation is morally wrong. Young women and men are choosing not to have kids and, in extreme instances, choosing sterilization in their late teens. “I got my uterus thrown out voluntarily at 19!” a young woman boasts on an internet forum devoted to this topic. Climate anxiety often tops the list of reasons cited by contributors. Call them the “baby doomers.” When I went down the rabbit hole to read what these young folks are saying, they sounded exactly like me in my twenties. My climate anxiety peaked in the early 2000s (thanks, Al Gore). The inconvenient truth is that I loudly told anyone who would listen that I was never having children.

children pregnant
gadgets
Roger Scruton

Our gadgets are misleading us

Human beings are wanderers who roam the world in search of adventure. And this love of adventure creates a need for home: homecoming makes wandering worthwhile. Hence human beings have devised instruments that help them to navigate, so as to guide them to their destination and — most importantly — to guide them back again, to the place where they are at home. The sextant was one of the most beautiful examples of this: an instrument for steering by the stars, which you held to your eye, and which reminded you of the vastness of the space across which you peered and the littleness of your own ambitions. Our ancestors who steered by the sextant never doubted the fixed background to human life, the unchanging heavens by which they navigated.

Wednesday

Bethany Mandel

Just say no to vaccine mandates for kids

I live in Montgomery County, Maryland. It’s one of those places where you see lawn signs proclaiming “In this house, we believe in science.” Naturally, our Democratic leaders have consistently ignored science over the last year, at least when it comes to COVID mitigation. Here in Montgomery County, our return to normalcy is currently being held hostage in exchange for near-universal vaccination of our least at-risk residents. If you believe that local governments are in a hurry to surrender “emergency” powers, I have a bridge over the Potomac to sell you. Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, has dropped our indoor mask mandate. But we still have a locally mandated one in place. Our county leaders reckon that they know better.

Wednesday

Bill Zeiser

Why do parents support the mask regime?

I feel for Emily Dreyfuss. Really I do. Like millions of us, she is navigating parenthood in the midst of a pandemic. I feel even more for her son Huxley, the central figure of a piece she recently wrote for the Atlantic. Huxley is having difficulty negotiating the kindergarten social scene from behind the face mask mandated by his school. Dreyfuss writes that her son “couldn’t tell his new classmates apart; he had trouble hearing them; he wasn’t sure whether they could hear him; and he became especially disoriented around lunchtime, he said, because that was when all the kids took their masks off. Suddenly they looked like entirely new people.” The normally affable boy developed anxiety from all of that confusion.

mask

Thursday

Grayson Quay

Biden’s tax credit won’t convince women to have more kids

President Biden’s proposed federal budget includes a permanent expansion of the child tax credit that would cost $556 billion by 2025. Putting between $250 and $300 in the pockets of almost every American family every month sounds like a dream come true, both for those eager to alleviate child poverty and for pro-natalists. The latter group, though, should temper its enthusiasm. As my colleague Matt Purple argued in the American Conservative earlier this year, sending checks to parents would probably put a huge dent in child poverty. It might even be worth doing for that reason. But as country after country has learned, it won’t necessarily bring births back above replacement rate. For that, we’ll need a change in culture.

antiracist baby children

Sunday

Ben Sixsmith

When child abuse was avant-garde

Last month the New Yorker published an essay about a grotesque experiment that took place in West Germany in the 1970s, in which young boys who had been taken from, or abandoned by, their parents were placed with known pedophiles. It was no accident. It was quite deliberate. The powerful sexologist Helmet Kentler believed that pedophilic guardianship would foster an open and unashamed attitude towards sex that would preclude the development of fascistic attitudes. As the New Yorker says: ’Kentler’s goal was to develop a child-rearing philosophy for a new kind of German man. Sexual liberation, he wrote, was the best way to “prevent another Auschwitz.”’ A sensible reader could guess what happened to the boys.

pedophilia child abuse

Wednesday

Diederik van Hoogstraten

Stop using toddlers as pawns in the COVID war games

Maddie, my three-year-old daughter, is home this week because one of her classmates tested COVID positive. You read that right. It’s July 2021, but our toddler, who is at virtually no risk of transmitting or getting sick from COVID, is forced by the ruling class to be out of school, as are her 23 tiny classmates. So while I try to do work as I listen to Maddie talk to her imaginary friends, I’d like to pose a question to those making and enforcing policy in Sacramento and Los Angeles. When is it enough? The folks now telling our beloved Montessori school to shut down the offending class do not seem to be the brightest among us — what with their unwillingness to grasp and apply basic science — so I’ll define the ‘it’.

toddlers covid

Friday

Karol Markowicz

Why are we making kids under 12 mask up?

Yesterday, the American Academy of Pediatrics released an embarrassment of a statement urging kids under 12, who can’t yet get the vaccine, to keep wearing their masks. AAP president Lee Savio Beers said in the statement, ‘Children under age 12 are not yet eligible for the vaccine, so it’s smart to be cautious and careful, especially when they are playing with friends, accompanying their parents to the grocery store, attending school or camp, and in any other situation in which they are around groups of people, some of whom may not be fully vaccinated.’ Notice there is no reference to a study or any data that supports the assertion that masks on children are at all useful. There aren’t any.

mask

Saturday

Karol Markowicz

Please don’t take your kids to Vegas

Every year, my husband and I take a trip alone, without our three children, often heading to that paradise in the desert: Las Vegas. Vegas fits our needs for many reasons. The weather is always perfect, so we spend our day having drinks and lounging by the pool. We spa. We enjoy dining out and Vegas has terrific restaurants. We’re both poker players and Vegas has an abundance of poker rooms. I dress way up, in outfits I might not wear back home (I have some high, white leather boots that only get worn in Vegas) but that don’t cause a stir in Vegas at all. Most importantly, the atmosphere of the city is very grown up. For parents on a break from their kids, it’s exactly what we need. But in the last few years, we’ve noticed a troubling trend.

las vegas

Tuesday

David Shabtai, MD

Dispelling the myth of the vaccine-autism controversy

Vaccines didn't cause Rachel’s autism. Or Sam’s, or Daniel’s, or anybody else’s for that matter. The reason is simple. Vaccines don’t and can’t cause autism. Peter Hotez ought to know. A certified pediatrician, he's one of the world’s leading vaccine scientists, developing vaccines against ‘neglected tropical diseases.’ He’s also the father of Rachel, an autistic and intellectually challenged young woman. There is no vaccine controversy, just as there is no shape-of-the-earth controversy. Anybody who understands the scientific method knows that there is no link whatsoever between vaccines and autism, just as they know that they can walk as far as they’d like around the world without falling off the edge.

vaccines autism