Tag: children

“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 […]