Category: Family
The Cost of Nurture
Christians and even some non-Christian philosophers regularly strive to ‘remember death,’ but few of us seem willing to remember our birth. Only a few paragraphs into Augustine’s Confessions, he recalls the grace of God given to him by his own...
The American Style in Traditionalist Parenting
Paula S. Fass. The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. $19.95, 352 pp. Perhaps more than anything else, Paula S. Fass’s learned and engaging...
Suffer the Little Children
It is a hard thing not to love one’s children. It is not hard to resent them, to see them as miscreants or burdens, to think them selfish and base, to find their concupiscence by turns infuriating and repugnant. Neither...
A Legacy of Letters: Living and Dying Well in the Lives of My Great-Grandparents
A tiny Bella, wearing a striped sweater and a mostly toothless grin. My parents, glowingly happy with their new baby. My three great-grandparents, seemingly ageless.
Markets and the Strangulation of the American Family
Maxine Eichner was a lawyer with a new baby girl. At work, she felt pressured to keep up with the long work hours of her peers, but in her heart, she longed to be home with her baby. One day,...
Tethered Still
I am a mother and a theologian. These two facts belong together, inextricable as they are for me and my experience of them. I was pregnant with my first child as I began my doctoral work; I carried her to...
Cats and Sixty Foot Whales: Reflections on Children’s Books
The most expensive preschools in America bear a pine-scented resemblance to those senna-tinted photographs of a world before plastics, albeit with no unseemly hint of poverty. Within the world of Waldorf, Montessori and Wild Forest schools the hand dominates the...
Love in the Time of Jordan Peterson
The decline of marriage in the United States has become a cause for hand wringing, especially among our ruling class of centrist pundits who man the battlestations of our nation’s indispensable middle-brow newspapers. The emerging conventional wisdom? The current, well...
The Burden of Parenting: In Praise of Christian Simplicity
North America, in many places, is in the throes of a decadence which it cannot justify, but which it will not live without. For decades, North America has consumed more than its share of resources, and now, for a variety...
Time to Flourish: On the Center for Public Justice’s New Paid Family Leave Report
If there is anything that the recent political sturm und drang about family separation at the border has emphasized, it is the undeniable sanctity of the family—at least in the political imaginary. The idea that the state might separate children...