“I don’t know what I’ve done wrong,” the patient told me.

She was an intelligent and articulate woman in her early 40s who came to see me for depression and anxiety. In discussing the stresses she faced, it was clear that her teenage son had been front and center for many years.

When he was growing up, she explained, he fought frequently with other children, had few close friends, and had a reputation for being mean. She always hoped he would change, but now that he was almost 17, she had a sinking feeling.

I asked her what she meant by mean. “I hate to admit it, but he is unkind and unsympathetic to people,” she said, as I recall. He was rude and defiant at home, and often verbally abusive to family members.

Along the way, she had him evaluated by many child psychiatrists, with several extensive neuropsychological tests. The results were always the same: he tested in the intellectually superior range, with no evidence of any learning disability or mental illness. Naturally, she wondered if she and her husband were somehow remiss as parents. ...

But that left open a fundamental question: If the young man did not suffer from any demonstrable psychiatric disorder, just what was his problem?

My answer may sound heretical, coming from a psychiatrist. After all, our bent is to see misbehavior as psychopathology that needs treatment; there is no such thing as a bad person, just a sick one.

But maybe this young man was just not a nice person.

Labels: children, culture, parenting

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"When I was little, my mother had a talk with me about having a 'public face,' because not everyone would understand our family," says Koe Sozuteki, a 20-year-old woman who grew up in a large poly household in Seattle. "That was a hard conversation to have in elementary school."

Sozuteki has a bio mom, a bio dad, a stepmom, three other poly moms, "several other matriarchal women in the community who I think of as moms," and an uncle. She also has a brother and half a dozen poly siblings—children she grew up with but is not related to by blood.

Sozuteki was teased in school about her family, she says, and she didn't get much support from teachers. ...

So in addition to more traditional activities for families with young children— canoeing, puppet-making classes, drum circles, and Frisbee golf—Polycamp now offers workshops for grown-ups. "We added some adults-only stuff," explains Quintus, "things like life-drawing classes, a snuggle party, an adults-only variety show, a bondage workshop."

Speaking as a parent myself—a sex- positive, kink-positive parent—um... a bondage workshop? At a family camp? With kids running around?

"The adults-only workshops are held indoors, in specific cabins and shelters," Quintus explains to me. "Kid-friendly activities are scheduled at the same time, so the kids are occupied whenever there's an adults-only workshop or activity going on. We have chaperones; we have rules." ...

"Children want to love and be loved," says Quintus. "Children grasp the concept easily. As they've gotten older, we've explained that ours is not the traditional form that most relationships take. We're not ashamed of our lifestyle. We're open with family and friends. But they had a right to know that their family is unique."

Sozuteki says she's happy and that she's grateful to have been "born into a tribe of intimate friends."

After a long period of celibacy, Sozuteki's bio mom is now involved in a quad.

"When I turned 7, my mother became celibate because she wanted to focus on me," Sozuteki explains. "I was having a hard time when people my bio parents were dating came into my life and then left my life when things didn't work out."

Sozuteki identifies as poly—her first relationship, she notes, was a quad—but her closest sibling, her brother, is in a monogamous relationship. She currently works at the Center for Sex Positive Culture, is studying to become a sex educator, and coined a widely embraced term in the poly community: "polycule."

Labels: children, culture, parenting, polyamory

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The last three men nominated to the Supreme Court have all been married and, among them, have seven children. The last three women — Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Harriet Miers (who withdrew) — have all been single and without children.

This little pattern makes the court a good symbol of the American job market. Women and men with similar qualifications — age, education, experience — are much more likely to be treated similarly today than in the past. The pay gap between them, while still not zero, has shrunk to just a few percentage points.

Yet once you look beyond the tidy comparisons of supposedly identical men and women, the picture is much less sunny. There are still only 15 Fortune 500 companies with a female chief executive. Men dominate the next rungs of management in most fields, too. Over all, full-time female workers make a whopping 23 percent less on average than full-time male workers.

What’s going on? Men and women are not identical, of course. Many more women take time off from work. Many more women work part time at some point in their careers. Many more women can’t get to work early or stay late. ...

The best hope for making progress against today’s gender inequality probably involves some combination of legal and cultural changes, which happens to be the same combination that beat back the old sexism. We’ll have to get beyond the Mommy Wars and instead create rewarding career paths even for parents — fathers, too — who take months or years off. We’ll have to get more creative about part-time and flexible work, too.

If you want a preview, you can look at the few professions in which large numbers of highly skilled women have been able to force change. Obstetrics used to be a field that required doctors to be on duty at all hours. Today, group practices allow obstetricians to share the 3 a.m. deliveries and, in the process, have a life outside of work. Optometry and veterinary medicine have their own versions of this story.

Labels: children, culture, economics, gender, gender differences, motherhood, parenting, work/family policy

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Colby Brin, 31, and his mother are best friends.

They chat on their cell phones several times a week, debating politics and sports. They catch up over pasta and salad at their favorite Italian joint tucked in New York's Upper East Side. They consider themselves travel enthusiasts and once explored Paris, France, together.

Just like any thoughtful best friend, who can be nosy at times, his mother relentlessly seeks the perfect woman for him. She sets him up on dates. She brags about him to friends who have daughters his age. This month, the 63-year-old launched "Date My Single Kid," an online dating site to expand the scope of potential suitors for her son.

"We aren't trying to start a scientific matchmaker service like eHarmony," says Geri Brin. "We are doing it like a mother would do it. You know what your child wants. I know what Colby wants 100 percent."

Embarrassing? Overbearing? Annoying?

Some critics of matchmaking parents may think so, but Colby Brin lauds his mother's active participation in his dating life. He estimates she set him up on at least 30 dates before her site went live. Some dates went well. Others lacked a spark, like a girl from an art gallery he dated recently.

Labels: culture, dating, parenting

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...No one has done more to disprove Hall's stereotype than Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology and sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Falbo began investigating the only-child experience in the 1970s, both in the U.S. and in China, drawing on the experience of tens of thousands of subjects. Twenty-five years ago, she and colleague Denise Polit conducted a meta-analysis of 115 studies of only children from 1925 onward that considered developmental outcomes of adjustment, character, sociability, achievement and intelligence.

Generally, those studies showed that singletons aren't measurably different from other kids — except that they, along with firstborns and people who have only one sibling, score higher in measures of intelligence and achievement. Of course, part of the reason we assume only children are spoiled is that whatever parents have to give, the only child gets it all. The argument Judith Blake makes in Family Size and Achievement as to why onlies are higher achievers across socioeconomic lines can be stated simply: there's no "dilution of resources," as she terms it, between siblings. No matter their income or occupation, parents of only children have more time, energy and money to invest in their kid. ...

"Most people are saying, I can't divide myself anymore," says social psychologist Susan Newman. Before technology made the office a 24-hour presence, we actually spent less time actively parenting, she explains. "We no longer send a child out to play for three hours and have those three hours to ourselves," she says. "Now you take them to the next practice, the next class. We've been consumed by our children. But we're moving back slowly to parents wanting to have a life too. And people are realizing that's simply easier with one."

Labels: childhood, children, culture, family size, parenting

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...When the institution of something once called “fatherhood” falls apart, this is what happens. We leave each child to “define” the relationship of him or herself to the person who is his or her biological father. The children must “decide” what that person “means” to them. They should “think about the parameters” of what they want. They should “speak up.”

Probably some of them can manage this task quite well, at least on the outside. The 11 and 12 year olds quoted in the guide sound eerily mature, like people twice their age. The people in high school or college quoted in the guide sound like they are forty. Their parents make a lot of money (in this sample) and they’re impressively articulate and sound mature. Compared to the thick, complex negotiations of their childhood, the “real world” might not be so hard for them.

But what of the others? Two-thirds of the donor offspring in their sample are girls or women.[liv] Where are the boys? Where are the fumbling young people, the ones who are too confused to log onto a web survey, or too angry at their parents to take a survey their parents tell them to take? Where are the ones who got in trouble at school that day and are the last kids their moms would want to be studied by some researcher? Where are the ones who just aren’t gifted with emotional intelligence, who aren’t skilled at negotiating ambivalence and speaking up about their own needs in the face of their parents’ tender feelings, who have no clue how to explore and accept the limits of undefined relationships? When we ask children and young people to behave like little adults, what happens to the ones who can’t rise to the challenge? And what happens to the ones that do?

Labels: adolescence, children, donor conception, Fathers, gay parenting, lesbians, My Daddy's Name Is Donor, parenting

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Consider Marie, Lola and Grace, fictional nannies all.

Marie sleeps with the husband of the family that’s hired her, kidnaps her charge and passes out drunk. Lola works two jobs to support five children back in the Philippines, furiously networks with other nannies and offers advice to a couple who are still mastering modern parenthood. Grace, a teenager who leaves Trinidad for New York, confronts her employers’ condescension while making friends, finding romance and learning the ropes about America from an established coterie of nannies.

Years after “The Nanny Diaries,” the satirical 2002 best seller that hit a cultural nerve, the nanny novel lives on, showcasing complex and imperfect nannies whose personal stories intersect with thorny larger questions about race, class, immigration and parenthood. ...

“It’s sort of the dark magic of the global economy — if you have a well-paying job here, you’re making 10 times what you make there,” Ms. Simpson said of the foreign women who look after American children. “Of course we want our children to be loved, but there is an economic reality on both sides.”

Labels: children, culture, economics, motherhood, parenting, race

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...A few generations ago, people weren’t stopping to contemplate whether having a child would make them happy. Having children was simply what you did. And we are lucky, today, to have choices about these matters. But the abundance of choices—whether to have kids, when, how many—may be one of the reasons parents are less happy.

That was at least partly the conclusion of psychologists W. Keith Campbell and Jean Twenge, who, in 2003, did a meta-analysis of 97 children-and-marital-satisfaction studies stretching back to the seventies. Not only did they find that couples’ overall marital satisfaction went down if they had kids; they found that every successive generation was more put out by having them than the last—our current one most of all. Even more surprisingly, they found that parents’ dissatisfaction only grew the more money they had, even though they had the purchasing power to buy more child care. “And my hypothesis about why this is, in both cases, is the same,” says Twenge. “They become parents later in life. There’s a loss of freedom, a loss of autonomy. It’s totally different from going from your parents’ house to immediately having a baby. Now you know what you’re giving up.” (Or, as a fellow psychologist told Gilbert when he finally got around to having a child: “They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.”)

It wouldn’t be a particularly bold inference to say that the longer we put off having kids, the greater our expectations. “There’s all this buildup—as soon as I get this done, I’m going to have a baby, and it’s going to be a great reward!” says Ada Calhoun, the author of Instinctive Parenting and founding editor-in-chief of Babble, the online parenting site. “And then you’re like, ‘Wait, this is my reward? This nineteen-year grind?’ ”

When people wait to have children, they’re also bringing different sensibilities to the enterprise. They’ve spent their adult lives as professionals, believing there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things; now they’re applying the same logic to the family-expansion business, and they’re surrounded by a marketplace that only affirms and reinforces this idea. “And what’s confusing about that,” says Alex Barzvi, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU medical school, “is that there are a lot of things that parents can do to nurture social and cognitive development. There are right and wrong ways to discipline a child. But you can’t fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others and constantly concluding you’re doing the wrong thing.”

Yet that’s precisely what modern parents do. “It was especially bad in the beginning,” said a woman who recently attended a parents’ group led by Barzvi at the 92nd Street Y. “When I’d hear other moms saying, ‘Oh, so-and-so sleeps for twelve hours and naps for three,’ I’d think, Oh, shit, I screwed up the sleep training.” Her parents—immigrants from huge families—couldn’t exactly relate to her distress. “They had no academic reference books for sleeping,” she says. (She’s read three.) “To my parents, it is what it is.”

So how do they explain your anguish? I ask.

“They just think that Americans are a little too complicated about everything.”

One hates to invoke Scandinavia in stories about child-rearing, but it can’t be an accident that the one superbly designed study that said, unambiguously, that having kids makes you happier was done with Danish subjects. The researcher, Hans-Peter Kohler, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says he originally studied this question because he was intrigued by the declining fertility rates in Europe. One of the things he noticed is that countries with stronger welfare systems produce more children—and happier parents.

Labels: children, culture, Denmark, economics, motherhood, parenting

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I'm wondering if a parent's happiness is overrated. I've been trying to make sense of the evidence. Will Wilkinson offered us a critique of GMU economist Brian Caplan's argument for additional children as a means of self-satisfaction, which I think was spot on given evidence that parents report lower happiness than non-parents. But then there are those who claim that children increase happiness when they are born into two-parent homes where they are wanted. And there are also those who claim we have to look at twins, because maybe it's inherent psychological factors causing the happiness, which in turn causes the baby-making.

Any parent will tell you children are difficult, and they wear you out, and they likely will just break your heart in the end. And who knows -- maybe when we believe we are feeling deep joy from parenthood (usually over a glass of wine, after all the little stinkers are finally in bed), we are simply sentimentalizing the whole ordeal to keep ourselves from rooting out our unused passports from the sock drawer and dashing off to Europe, never to be heard from again. Or perhaps we just feel too guilty to admit that, while we couldn't bear losing them now that we have them, we very well could have been delightfully satisfied had we never met them.

And here's where I wonder if we ought to re-examine our commitment to happiness. It seems to me that there's possibly some merit -- if we persevere and have the sense to learn from it -- in the other-orientation that is (good) parenting. It's fine to go through life happy, in other words, but I suspect we also want to go through life without becoming big fat self-absorbed jackasses. Children really help in that regard.

Labels: children, culture, parenting

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...But while it may be our natural, god-given right to freak out about the sex lives of adolescents -- and though it does seem as if unfettered access to the likes of Lady Gaga's disco stick, Ludacris's sex room and the wilds of the Internet have helped take burgeoning sexuality to a whole new level -- it appears that young people today really aren't any more promiscuous than we were. In fact, in the aggregate they're actually less so, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.

This survey of more than 2,700 teenagers across the country found that 43 percent of boys and 42 percent of girls between ages 15 and 19 say they have had sex, a figure that's more or less unchanged since 2002 and compares with 55 percent of boys and 51 percent of girls in 1988. The new data, from 2006 to 2008, also showed that contraceptive use has remained steady in recent years, with 87 percent of boys and 79 percent of girls reporting that they employed some form of birth control the first time they had sex.

"The good news is that we've been able to at least hold the line on the number of kids still deciding to wait on becoming sexually active," says Kathy Woodward, medical director of the Adolescent Health Center at Children's National Medical Center. "For those of us who believe in prevention and education, we'd like to nudge that number higher, but at least we're staying the course, especially when you consider all of the media influences out there." ...

For one thing, accept that it's going to be a challenge, says Christopher Daddis, an assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University who researched how 222 teenagers talked to their parents about dating and sex for a recent study in the Journal of Adolescence. He found that girls tend to disclose more about crushes, relationships and other dating topics than boys, that both sexes prefer to share such information with their mothers rather than their fathers, and that they were equally reticent to discuss sex, per se, with either parent. Younger teens had a higher level of communication than older adolescents on all topics, and those who reported a greater level of trust with their parents also opened up more about sex -- especially girls.

Labels: adolescence, contraception, culture, parenting, pregnancy, premarital sex, sex, STDs, teenage pregnancy

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Half of all U.S. children won't live with their father for part of their childhood. But just because "non-resident" dads don't live with their kids doesn't mean they're not involved with them.

"There are fathers that are very involved. There are some that are not. We have this image of the non-resident dad, and for some, that's the deadbeat dad," says Valarie King, a sociologist and demographer at Pennsylvania State University who just completed work on a five-year grant studying non-resident fathers.

Decades ago, non-resident fathers were largely divorced, but King and other researchers say many non-resident dads today were in a non-marital relationship that didn't last. Divorced fathers have been shown to be more involved, on average, than those who were never married to the child's mother, King says.

Such research findings (some yet unpublished) — along with changing attitudes and custody laws — are creating a new picture of today's non-resident dads.

"People don't realize how much things have changed, but if we look at the numbers, we see big increases in fathers' contact with children and big increases in fathers' payment of child support," says Paul Amato, also a Penn State sociologist and demographer.

And, just as fathers in two-parent families are more involved than a generation ago, "we're seeing a parallel trend among non-resident fathers," he says. ...

Cowan says the "best predictor of whether a father is going to be involved with his kids is his relationship with the mom. "They don't have to love each other or like each other, but they do need to co-parent and collaborate."

Others agree; the more time non-resident fathers spend with their kids, the better the relationship between the parents, finds a study co-authored by Marcia Carlson, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was presented to the Population Association of America in April.

Labels: child support, culture, divorce, Fathers, men, parenting

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A middle-income, two-parent family will spend $222,360, on average, to raise a baby born in 2009, according to a government estimate (PDF) released today.

Yes, a number like that screams false precision. Still, some of the broad outlines that go into the estimate are pretty interesting:

* Housing is the most expensive part of raising a kid. It accounts for 31 percent of the cost, followed by childcare and education (17 percent) and food (16 percent).

* The annual cost rises a bit as the child gets older — from less than $12,000 per year for a baby to more than $13,000 for a teenager.
* Among urban areas, the Northeast is the most expensive region to raise a child, and the South is the cheapest. Rural areas, which are lumped into a single category, are even cheaper.
* The cost per child for a two-child family is 25 percent lower than the cost per child for a one-child family.

Labels: children, culture, economics, family size, parenting

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My friend and George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan has been working on a book on "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" and offers a précis of his argument in today's Wall Street Journal. I've been pretty critical of Bryan's argument in the past and I see no reason in this piece to let up.

Angus (aka Kevin Grier) at Kids Prefer Cheese I think sums up Caplan's case pretty well:

1. In happiness research, the big negative hit comes from having one child. Once you've passed that, the extra unhappiness from having more is fairly small.

2. Parents have little to no influence on how their children turn out, so you can relax, not bother to read to your extra kids or make costly "investments" on their behalf.

3. The more kids you have, the more grandkids you might get and everyone knows grandkids are *awesome*!

I have problems with each of these lines of arguments, but let me concentrate here on happiness research. Bryan really struggles with the fact that children tend to have a negative effect on self-reported happiness. (Most economists are dismissive of survey evidence, but, to his credit, Bryan isn't.) He tries to minimize the damage this finding does to his argument by pointing out that the negative effect is small for the first kid, and even smaller for additional kids. But it remains that if one is trying to maximize happiness, no kids appears to be the best bet and fewer is better than more.

Of course, self-reported happiness is just one dubiously reliable piece of evidence about the effect of kids on well-being. The trouble with Bryan's strategy in the WSJ essay is that he resorts to even less reliable survey evidence to support his position.

Labels: children, culture, economics, parenting

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One of the more surprising trends in marriage during the past 20 years is the fact that most couples no longer view children as essential to a happy relationship.

A few years ago, the Pew Research Center released a survey called “What Makes Marriage Work?” Not surprisingly, fidelity ranked at the top of the nine-item list — 93 percent of respondents said faithfulness was essential to a good marriage.

But what about children? As an ingredient to a happy marriage, kids were far from essential, ranking eighth behind good sex, sharing chores, adequate income and a nice house, among other things. Only 41 percent of respondents said children were important to a happy marriage, down from 65 percent in 1990. The only thing less important to a happy marriage than children, the survey found, was whether a couple agreed on politics.

So why do kids rank so low on the list? The fact is, marriages today are increasingly adult-centered, rather than child-centered, an issue identified in a sweeping 2008 report from Rutgers marriage researcher Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. In the report, called “Life Without Children: The Social Retreat From Children and How It’s Changing America,” (PDF) Dr. Whitehead notes that the percentage of our lives that we devote to parenting is shrinking. Because married couples are delaying children and having fewer kids, they start parenting later and finish parenting sooner than couples of earlier generations.

Labels: children, culture, Marriage, parenting

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...In the February issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family, Judith Stacey, a professor of sociology at New York University, and Timothy Biblarz, a demographer from the University of Southern California, consolidated the available data on the role of gender in child rearing. ...

Drawing on reliable comparative studies, you could say this: single moms tend to be more involved, set more rules, communicate better, and feel closer to their children than single dads. They have less difficulty monitoring their children’s whereabouts, friendships, and school progress. Their children do better on standardized tests and have higher grades, and teenagers of single moms are actually less likely to engage in delinquent behavior or substance abuse than those of single dads. Go, Murphy Brown.

The quality of parenting, Biblarz and Stacey say, is what really matters, not gender. But the real challenge to our notion of the “essential” father might well be the lesbian mom. On average, lesbian parents spend more time with their children than fathers do. They rate disputes with their children as less frequent than do hetero couples, and describe co-parenting more compatibly and with greater satisfaction. Their kids perceive their parents to be more available and dependable than do the children of heteros. They also discuss more emotional issues with their parents. They have fewer behavioral problems, and show more interest in and try harder at school.

According to Stacey and Biblarz, “Two women who chose to become parents together seemed to provide a double dose of a middle-class ‘feminine’ approach to parenting.” And, they conclude, “based strictly on the published science, one could argue that two women parent better on average than a woman and a man, or at least than a woman and man with a traditional division of family labor.”

Labels: culture, Fathers, gay parenting, gender, gender differences, lesbians, men, parenting, single parenting, women

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KEY POINTS

■ Although clinicians are ethically required to treat all patients in need of medical attention, many providers already impose medical restrictions on access to infertility treatments. Some providers feel that their obligation ends at assessing medical fitness. Others, while acknowledging their responsibility to assess parental fitness, feel ill-prepared to do so.


■ Recommendations from the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) include withholding services if there is evidence that the patients are unable to provide adequate care of the child. The ASRM further recommends that assessments of the evidence be made jointly by members of the fertility program involved and that the basis for making these determinations be set down in writing.


■ Current recommendations conclude that fertility services should not be denied to unmarried or homosexual persons or to those infected with HIV. Nevertheless, most fertility clinics are private organizations that can restrict access to services based on their own criteria. Approximately 97% of registered fertility clinics do not offer services to HIV-infected patients.


■ Perhaps the best approach is for each provider to decide on a case-by-case basis before offering infertility treatment which patients he or she considers good candidates and which patients should undergo more intensive psychological testing, counseling, or evaluation.


Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, culture, fertility treatment, parenting

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Forrest Glen Maridas is a polyamorist who believes that it is her constitutionally guaranteed right to freely express her sexuality in any form that that might take.

Maridas is 34, American and a full-time counsellor at a university, although she's currently on maternity leave. She's lived with Canadian Russell Osborne since May 2005 and he's sponsoring her for immigration as a common-law spouse under the family classification.

Maridas and Osborne and their two young children live in a home in Edmonton with Drew Thompson and Katy Furness. ...

Drew and Russell do not have a sexual relationship, which is described as a triad or a "polyamorous V." But all of the adults are free to date outside the family. "Being bisexual assisted in having a psychological framework for the ability of multiple relationships to make sense," says Maridas.

She also says that within their family, "there is not a ranking system that some polyamorists follow of primary, secondary, etc. relationships."

Maridas explained all of this in an affidavit filed Tuesday in B.C. Supreme Court. It was one of six filed by the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association, which is intervening in the case to determine whether the anti-polygamy law is valid.

Labels: Canada, parenting, polyamory, polygamy

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...The caveat (and we say it several times in the report) is this: With 39 persons in the sample, we don’t know how generalizable these findings are to the broader population of sperm donor conceived persons born to lesbian moms. But every other researcher who studies these populations has the same problem.

How do the sperm donor conceived offspring of lesbian moms fare? The answer is, nobody really knows. But some pretty disturbing questions are raised by the study we released last week. Read My Daddy’s Name is Donor to learn more.

Labels: children, donor conception, gay parenting, lesbians, My Daddy's Name Is Donor, parenting

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Marriage absence is the greatest domestic problem America faces. Our most daunting social, economic, budgetary, criminal and constitutional dilemmas are driven by marriage absence and will not abate unless traditional marriage is protected and encouraged.

Establishing sensible policies to return America to a marriage-based society will prove rewarding, productive and seminal. The major problems of most unmarried mothers and their children will be naturally resolved. A woman's right to be supported by, cared for and helped by her husband will be ensured. Health-care coverage will become commonplace without resorting to national health care. Chronic budgetary deficits at state levels will disappear, and the federal deficit will drop as the number of single-parent families costing taxpayers $20,000 each plummets. Most children will grow up in intact homes, disciplined and prepared to learn in school. Substance abuse, child abuse and neglect and poverty will decrease to manageable norms. The dollar will regain strength as the currency of world exchange.

The future of the United States is in jeopardy. Therefore, we must recreate marriage in America now, while we still have time to prevent certain financial and social collapse.

The rewards of the following "Marriage Values" policies are certain. We can reconstitute our nation's most valuable asset: healthy marriages, the social and economic cornerstone on which all successful nations have been powered.

Labels: culture, custody, divorce, divorce reform, economics, Marriage, parenting, poverty, stepparents

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Carey Goldberg ’82 has been writing about serious intellectual subjects throughout her career, from contemporary Russian art to how cancer metastasizes. Now she’s turned her attention to something different: magic sperm. Three Wishes: A True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak, and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood is a laugh-cry-and-cheer book, co-authored by Goldberg, Beth Jones, and Pamela Ferdinand. Goldberg spoke with Lenore Skenazy ’81, author of Free-Range Kids.

Y: What’s your book about?

G: The book begins when I turned 39 and was still single and decided to become a single mother. So I bought eight vials of donor sperm. But just as those vials arrived in my clinic’s freezer, I met the man who would become my husband and the father of my children. So I passed the sperm on to my friend Beth, who had just come out of a horrible divorce. But as soon as Beth got the sperm, she, too, met the man who would become her husband and the father of her child. So she passed the sperm on to our friend Pam, and the same thing happened! She met a man and had a baby. So it’s kind of a sisterhood of the traveling sperm. ...

Y: So is it a celebration of older motherhood or a cautionary tale?

G: When I was a single woman in my 30s, all the news I ever got about my prospects for marrying and having children was so gloom-and-doom. I really felt like it could be helpful to single women to hear that the outlook might not be nearly so gloomy. But the book makes clear that having a baby this late is no picnic. I had one miscarriage. Both of my co-authors terminated pregnancies because they had chromosomal disorders. Also, it’s clear that none of us chose to wait so long—it was just that the right man didn’t come along. The book’s message is that sometimes in life there comes a time when you have to stop waiting and take action. ...

Y: What advice would you give to Yale undergrads about dating, motherhood, and marriage?

G: My daughter Liliana is now eight. Recently I was playing the game of Life with her, and she reached the point on the board where your little car has to stop and you get married and put a spouse in. And my daughter said, “When I grow up I don’t think I’ll get married. I’ll just get some sperm.” And I found myself saying, “Well, that’s fine, but being married is really very nice too.”

Labels: abortion, culture, donor conception, Marriage, parenting

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