Tag: children

A child’s doll exerts a gravitational pull on every member of her family.

Actor and writer Rob Delaney shares his family’s experience with every parent’s nightmare: a very sick child.

At the Scripps Spelling Bee, no one asks for whom the bell tolls. It’s glaringly, if painfully obvious.

“Rebirth therapy” was meant to help a troubled girl start over, but it ended her life instead.

A new mother struggles to make sense of intergenerational trauma, biological memory and the guilty privilege of passing as white even though she is Jewish.

The 20th anniversary of the Amber Alert sent the writer on a two-year journey to cover a murder in the Navajo Nation.

Meaghan O’Connell on the joy, the triumph, and the prison of breastfeeding.

Some parents don’t want their kids to know how much money they have. They also don’t want their kids to become opera singers.

Promethea’s education was the most important thing in her mother’s life. Then a mysterious benefactor made it his business as well.

A toddler teaches her grandfather about the deep emotional structure of babies and adults, the perfect yoga pose for a complete meltdown, and the imperative to boogie.

The beloved creator of Ramona Quimby and Henry Huggins enters her second century.

The dynamics of what constitutes the American family is rapidly changing.

In his book Brick by Brick, David Robertson outlines the early successes and failures of the Denmark-based LEGO Group.

Eight stories about modern-day child care, from 24/7 facilities to Montessori wonderlands.

James Salter’s Light Years (1975) is a generous, intimate portrayal of a family that bends and splinters under the weight of its own differences and desires. This book exacerbated anxieties about marriage that I didn’t even know I had; thankfully, the novel’s emotional devastation is delivered in seductive, glorious prose. In the passage below, a sort […]

“I know what’s the best choice for me, but I am honestly not sure what’s the best choice for him. How is a mother ever supposed to know that?”

Stories about not having children.

Rewriting the false narrative of childlessness.

A powerful personal story.

Sabine Heinlein grew up in a family where everyone was treated as equals. It didn’t work out like they hoped.

“Sacha Coupet, a professor of law at Loyola University Chicago, who used to work as a guardian ad litem and as a psychologist, worries that the Adoption and Safe Families Act, by promoting ‘adoption as the normative ideal,’ has made it easier to avoid ‘dealing with the enormously complex root causes of child neglect and […]

“I’d gone to Bolivia because some NGOs and activists there have been trying—seemingly against all good sense—to lower the legal working age from 14 to six years old. And this was not the doing of mine owners or far-right politicians seeking cheap labor like one might expect. Instead the idea has been floated by a […]

“Who should get to keep a child: the parents who nurse and tend him, or the parents who brought him into the world?”

The writer confronts her inability to have children and explores how humans’ behavior with reproduction compares with other animals: Like ours, the animal world is full of paradoxical examples of gentleness, brutality, and suffering, often performed in the service of reproduction. Female black widow spiders sometimes devour their partners after a complex and delicate mating […]