This article originally appeared in The 74.

The fertility rate for the United States has long been on a downward trend and is currently at a historic low. The price of child care, meanwhile, has been steadily rising; it grew 29% between 2020 and 2024, easily outpacing inflation, according to Child Care Aware of America.

Could those two trends be related? New research and surveys indicate yes.

In a recent research paper, Boston University economics Ph.D. candidate Abigail Dow finds that when child care prices increase, some American families decide to put off having more children, and many don’t have more children at all.

Dow looked at child care prices across the country in a dataset compiled and published by the Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor with data from 2010 to 2022.

She then isolated a “shock” to child care prices — an event, unrelated to something like a recession or a spike in inflation, that made the cost of care go either up or down. The shock she identified was that when states mandate smaller group sizes and/or lower child to staff ratios, child care prices rise, so she studied what happened to fertility decisions when states passed such regulations.

“My key takeaway is that child care costs are high in the U.S., and I do find they’re a barrier to having children,” Dow said. She found that a 10% increase in the price of child care for children from birth to 2 years old led to a 5.7% decrease in the birth rate among women aged 20 to 44. Her research also found that the price increase leads to women delaying when they have children: a 10% increase prompts women to push back their first birth by four months and to extend the time between a first and second child by half a month. Dow found that women’s decisions about whether to have second and third children were particularly hampered by high child care prices.

The findings are strongest for women ages 30 or older. This is, Dow posits, because they have more to lose if they can’t get child care: they’ve invested more time and resources into their careers and likely earn more, making the cost of having to give up on work to care for more children in the absence of affordable child care higher. Younger women have less to lose by having a child and dropping out of the work force if child care can’t be secured.

The research is novel: while there have been studies in European countries which suggest that women rethink having children when child care prices rise, Dow knew that those situations may not be applicable to the U.S., where the government spends much less on child care, it’s a primarily private system, and there is no guarantee of paid family leave. “There wasn’t a robust empirical analysis of: How do child care prices affect fertility rates?” Dow said.

Dow noted that child care prices aren’t the only factor dampening the country’s fertility rate — other research has found that things like housing and health care prices also make an impact. But it’s clear that the cost of raising children is top of mind for American parents when they’re thinking about the sizes of their families. In a survey of 3,000 nationally representative respondents by YouGov, the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University, and Deseret News released in November, a record share of participants — 71% — said that raising children is unaffordable, a 13 percentage point increase over 2024.

That high cost of raising children was listed as the single most important reason survey respondents offered for why they’ve limited the children they either had or planned to have. That response was twice as prevalent as the next two reasons they gave — a lack of personal desire and a lack of a supportive partner — and for the first time in the survey’s 10-year history, it was the top reason respondents gave.

The survey also found that support for government resources aimed at parents through direct payments and better programs had increased since 2021, and opposition to such interventions was 10 percentage points lower. A majority favor universal day care, while just 18% oppose it. Survey respondents also supported increased tax credits for parents.

“If you think about, ‘What do I have to think about when I’m raising a family for those early years,’ child care is going to be front of mind,” Dow said.

The situation is poised to get worse for Americans considering whether and when to have children. Dow’s data only goes through 2022. Since then, the billions of dollars in pandemic-era federal relief for the child care sector has disappeared. In its wake, states like Arkansas and Indiana have cut back on support for the sector. Indiana stopped enrolling new children in its child care subsidy program, and the state has reduced reimbursement rates for providers, leading more than 100 providers to shutter. Arkansas has also cut provider reimbursement rates, put new subsidy applicants on a waitlist, and instituted new copays for parents who receive vouchers. More of the cost burden will now fall on parents in states that pull back.

Dow cautioned that her research shouldn’t be interpreted as an argument for relaxing regulations in order to bring child care costs down and boost births. “These regulations are really important for child health and safety,” she pointed out. “I’m absolutely not in the business of saying we should be making these regulations more lax purely to make child care more affordable for parents.” But, she said, her research makes it clear that parents, and particularly mothers, make decisions about whether to have children and how many to have based at least in part on whether they can afford child care. “Anything we can do to make child care more affordable seems important from a policy perspective,” she said.

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I gasped, but internally, I wasn’t surprised. When I lived in California, dining out often felt like a precarious endeavor. It always seemed like my toddler had to have perfect behavior if we wanted to be welcomed back to that restaurant. We knew which restaurants were “family-friendly” and which ones it just felt inappropriate to bring a tiny little human after 5 p.m. After talking to my friend, it quietly dawned on me how my experience of motherhood is changing since moving to Italy over a year ago — and how the structural and cultural issues that defined my early experience as a mom feel more distant and unrelatable.

In many ways, my family’s move to Italy was borne out of our discontent as parents in America. While I was grateful for my maternity leave, I didn’t feel completely ready to return to work after four months. As the parent who provided health benefits for our family, working part-time wasn’t an option in a country without universal health care. Then there was the cost of childcare.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, many infant rooms in daycare centers closed near our house. The closest one would have been a 30-minute drive each way. The only suitable alternative was to hire a part-time nanny, which cost me about $2,200 a month. On days she was unavailable, I had my mom, who was still working, drive over and help. Every day felt like a constant puzzle to solve. In Europe, I’m no longer forced to do such mental math.

Before becoming a mom, I felt like I only heard about how hard it was to be a parent in America. It was on my mind so much that I publicly asked the question: Was this the worst time in history to be a mom in America? Historians told me it wasn’t a great time, but it also wasn’t the worst time. That Americans’ experience of motherhood has always, and still does, depend on factors like race and class. Yet today, many moms say it feels “almost impossible” to be a mother in America, especially in an economy where families are paying 25% more for groceries than they were before the pandemic and childcare costs can eat up to a fifth of a family’s income.

In the middle of my exhaustion, my spouse, who has dual Italian-American citizenship, suggested something radical. What if we relocated to Italy, a country known to be more family-friendly? It felt a little crazy, and still does. But since we’ve moved, motherhood in many ways has felt a bit easier.

I feel almost guilty sharing my childcare bill with friends back home: 220 euro a month, roughly $255. We also have access to the country’s public health care system. These two changes alone have significantly transformed my everyday life as a mom, especially since I gave birth to my second and experienced postpartum care here.

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But the differences extend beyond policy and economics. They’re cultural, rooted in the way Italian society values caretakers and children here. In everyday life, I feel supported as a mother in the smallest ways. When I go out with my baby and toddler, they’re adored. Strangers smile at them, ask their names, and tell them how adorable they are. If I’m struggling to lift a stroller up the stairs, or I’m juggling a crying baby and a hungry toddler, there is always someone there to offer me a hand.

I’ve had strangers hold my baby while I dig through my purse. I’ve been ushered to the front of checkout lines simply because I have kids with me. The worry of being kicked out of a restaurant because my kids are acting out has never crossed my mind. In fact, if one of them is unhappy, usually someone is happy to jump in and make a distracting silly face. I’ve even had restaurant workers hold my baby while I eat.

Living in Italy has made me wonder what it would mean to be a mother in a culture that actually cares — not just in policy, but in the everyday gestures of life. And what would it look like if America valued mothers?

That’s not to say being a mom in Italy doesn’t come without challenges. Italian moms definitely have their own struggles: long waits for public services, rigid gender expectations, low salaries and long school holidays. When we talk, they don’t hide the fact that they’re tired. The exhaustion of a baby not sleeping or being a mom to a toddler and an infant is a universal experience.

But here, being a mother doesn’t have to mean being in a constant state of being worn down because societal structures are continuously working against you. Here, motherhood is seen as a shared act by the community, not a private burden. It can also mean being cared for — by a culture that still believes kids belong in public, and that no one should have to parent alone.

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During his campaign, Mamdani’s promises clearly resonated with New Yorkers struggling with the high cost of living.

Of all of Mamdani’s campaign commitments, free high-quality child care for every New Yorker from 6 weeks to 5 years old – while boosting child care workers’ wages to match that of the city’s public school teachers – could be the most transformative.

The cost of child care in New York City is expensive. More than 80% of families with young children cannot afford the average annual cost of US$26,000 for center-based care. A recent study found that families with young children are twice as likely to leave the city as those without children. The study identified housing and child care costs as key drivers of migration out of the city.

New York’s child care problem mirrors a nationwide system that is seen by many experts as broken. U.S. families spend between 8.9% and 16% of their median income on full-day care for one child. And prices have been rising: Between 1990 and 2024, the cost of day care and preschool rose 263%, much faster than overall inflation.

Despite high prices, child care workers are poorly paid: In 2024, the median pay for child care workers, who are mostly women and often women of color, was $15.41 an hour, or $32,050 a year. That’s nearly at the bottom of all occupations when ranked by annual pay. Additionally, child care programs face high turnover, and it’s difficult for them to recruit and retain qualified staff. Program quality suffers as a result.

As a feminist scholar who has written extensively about child care, I believe Mamdani’s promise of free universal child care, with decent pay for child care staff, could transform the politics and the reality of child care in New York and beyond.

An example to the nation

During the Great Depression, the Works Projects Administration, a New Deal agency created to combat unemployment, established 14 emergency nursery schools in New York. Opened between 1933 and 1934, these schools were primarily intended to offer employment opportunities to unemployed teachers, but they also became a form of de facto child care for parents employed on various work-relief projects.

With the onset of World War II, rising numbers of women took up jobs in the city’s war industries.

In 1941, the lack of adequate child care prompted the administration of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to fund a handful of already existing nursery schools, including the New Deal nurseries whose federal funding had dried up. New York became the only U.S. city to provide publicly subsidized child care services.

New York provided an example to the nation, and between 1943 and 1945, wartime child care centers were established in hundreds of cities under the federal government’s Lanham Act of 1941. It’s the closest the U.S. has come to establishing a universal child care system.

While most wartime child care centers were shuttered at war’s end, in New York a citywide grassroots mobilization of parents forced the city to keep its centers operating. It marked the first peacetime allocation of municipal tax dollars for child care programs.

Building blocks

In the 1960s, under the liberal administration of Mayor John Lindsay, public child care in New York City was expanded, and in 1967 child care workers organized a union, AFSCME Local 205 Day Care Employees.

After a bitter three-week strike in 1969 to protest low wages and poor working conditions, child care workers won a contract that included a wage scale comparable to that of elementary school teachers in the city’s public school system. The contract also included a training program that allowed them to upgrade their skills and get credit for it.

When President Richard Nixon vetoed federal child care legislation in 1971 that would have provided federal funding for child care programs across the nation, New York’s child care movement took to the streets to demand universal child care, even if the federal government refused to fund it. Groups like the Day Care Forum and the Committee for Community Controlled Child Care staged demonstrations on the city’s Triborough Bridge – since renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge – and set up a one-day “model day care center” on the lawn of City Hall.

Public child care services survived the city’s fiscal crisis of 1975, largely due to the activism of working-class communities who fought against day care closures.

Though far from universal, the child care system in New York today boasts the largest publicly supported system in the country, and can serve as the building blocks for Mamdani’s plan.

Transformative beyond New York

Mamdani’s campaign estimated that his universal child care plan would cost $6 billion annually. To fund his policies, Mamdani has proposed an increase of the state’s corporate tax rate and raising the city’s income tax by 2 percentage points on New Yorkers earning more than $1 million a year. While Mamdani will need the assistance of Gov. Kathy Hochul to raise taxes, Hochul supports universal child care, even if she disagrees on how to pay for it.

Universal child care has positive economic impacts, including more women in the workforce and more money in the pockets of parents to spend in the economy. Research from the liberal Center for American Progress concluded that the availability of affordable high-quality child care would lead 51% of stay-at-home parents to find work, and about a third of employed parents to work more hours.

In New York, the disposable income of families could increase by up to $1.9 billion due to the avoidance of child care costs.

One year from the U.S. midterms, Americans remain worried about the cost of basic needs. And majorities of both Democrat and Republican voters say the cost of child care is a major problem, and they want government to prioritize helping families pay for it.

If he can find the money to pay for it, with universal child care, Mamdani could blaze a trail that other policymakers follow.

Simon Black, Associate Professor of Labour Studies, Brock University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Had I called my new roommate several weeks before move-in day to establish a color scheme for our sheets and quilts, I assume the response would have been a very loud dial tone. It was a different time, but I didn’t realize just how different until last week, when someone in my group chat mentioned the Facebook group DormRoomMamas and I slipped down a rabbit hole into the billion-dollar realm of dorm room planning and makeovers. It’s a world where mothers of incoming college freshmen want someone to just tell them the correct number of towels and sheets to shop for, what air purifier has the highest Amazon ratings, and how many framed family photos are appropriate to smuggle into their child’s new living space. It’s a land of mood boards titled “Ottomans for girls,” triple-digit checklists of dorm room “essentials” and terminology like “bed party” and  “fridge bridge.”

@theasmithh1 Freshman year dorm😆💖 so blessed @scarlett #minorhall #olemiss #dormtransformation ♬ TELEKINESIS – Travis Scott

It’s a blur of Woozoo fans, Hulkin bags and throw pillows appliqued with CALL YOUR MOM, provided by a mom who hasn’t given you a reason to call yet because she’s right there with a hex wrench, precise room measurements for peel-and-stick wallpaper, and very strong opinions on how to fold underwear. Some of these mothers are professional dorm room stylists (a string of words that probably shouldn’t exist) paid to execute room redesigns that seem more appropriate for luxury Airbnbs than for rooms whose signature scent will be ripe feet. But more of them appear to treat easing the transition from home to college as a calling beyond paid work that compels them to spare little expense in reifying their roles as providers for and protectors of young people on the cusp of change.

I was vaguely aware, during my time in dorms and off-campus apartments, that there was a place called Target that sold closet organizers, cute duvet covers, and framed “Starry Night” prints, but these spaces seemed more often to accumulate furnishings organically — a graduating senior’s futon here, a rug from AmVets there. Dorm rooms were sites of evolution, not re-creations of home; they were liminal spaces where posters, electronics, tapestries and strings of lights shaped like fish or chili peppers were visual shorthand for who their residents were or hoped to become. Dorm decor was a precursor to social media that let students unobtrusively survey their peers’ musical taste, affinity for sports, interest in partying, Greek affiliation and propensity to refer to movies as “cinéma.” If you wanted to sprawl out on a couch, well, that’s what the library was for.

To say that’s changed in the decades since doesn’t quite capture the scale of the consumer-facing shift. Big-box chains like IKEA, Target and Bed Bath & Beyond began marketing heavily to college students in the 2000s, innovating programs that let buyers purchase from one location and pick up at another and publishing standalone Back-to-School catalogs. Alongside them, design blogs and the rise of Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest midwived the modern dorm aesthetic, which combined low-priced, easy-to-assemble starter furniture with friendly textiles, fun colors, and adaptable, modular storage solutions. And the rise of campus brand ambassadors recruited by clothing, electronic and energy-drink companies meant that each school year brought an infusion of consumers who could guide their impressionable peers into the sightlines of Red Bull and American Eagle in return for swag or even salaries.

@ibbdesign Watch this dorm room Get IBB’d! Our Instant Basic to Beautiful mantra can be applied to any space! It’s always important to focus on function as well as form especially in smaller spaces like dorm rooms and apartments. Getting creative with storage solutions and finding versatile multifunctional pieces is imperative – but make it aesthetic too! As an #interiordesign major and a daughter & granddaughter of interior designers, @jayliegeyer had a clear vision for her freshman #dormroom & we had so much fun helping her execute the design. We’re currently working on more projects with college students & can’t wait to share some sneak peeks with you! *all items available thru @ibbdesign #dormroomdesign #dormroomdecor #dormtour #tcudorm #dormdesign #instantbasictobeautiful #dorminspo #getIBBd #teamIBB #IBBDesign ♬ MILLION DOLLAR BABY (VHS) – Tommy Richman

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In 2011, an enterprising college student looking to bring a bit more style to student housing joined forces with her mother, the cofounder of a creative agency, to found Dormify, an online dorm-decor retailer that leveraged peer-to-peer marketing via trunk shows, YouTube haul videos and more. In 2015, Target introduced its Made For U College Styler, a digital tool that used quiz results and data scraped from customers’ social-media profiles to put together shoppable, sample dorm rooms. The venerable home-design blog Apartment Therapy introduced Dorm Therapy in 2023 as a destination for everything from shopping checklists and DIY guides to dorm room tours and shoppable roundups. And no ceiling has yet emerged for the market. Despite the expected impact of a “demographic cliff” that began emerging after the Great Recession led to a dip in the American birth rate, the number of incoming college students increases year over year. Spending on furnishing and outfitting dorm rooms, meanwhile, nearly doubled between 2023 and 2024, from $6.7 billion to more than $12 billion.

What groups like DormRoomMamas highlight is the emotion that undergirds this consumer phenomenon. College is generally a time when young adults individuate from their families and hometowns, but a lot of mothers (and it is, for the most part, mothers driving this trend) are putting a level of expense and effort into setting up their kids’ dorm rooms that, inadvertently or otherwise, reinforces rather than loosens the proverbial apron strings. These women approach dorm room makeover season with the set-jawed precision of a military campaign: Their mission is to replicate a sense of home in an 8’ by 12’ box, and they’ll be damned if they’re caught flat-footed, without enough under-bed storage and cheery framed YOU GOT THIS! prints to get the job done.

(Lock Stock/Getty Images) A mom helps her daughter decorate her college apartment.

It’s never actually made explicit, but a running joke in these TikToks is that the students don’t necessarily seem to be requesting the excess. One clip that has racked up more than a million views begins with pink-and-blue bubble text that warns “Mom, don’t go overboard with my dorm decor” over a POV shot of a mostly bare room. Images shuffle in time with anticipatory piano notes and a countdown clock: dorm-supply checklists, half-assembled furniture and snapshots of the mother and daughter through the years. It ends in the passenger seat of a car, presumably about to depart for campus, homing in on a young woman scrolling her phone and eventually offering a tight, distracted smile to the camera. Guess who didn’t listen to the plea about not going overboard?

And, like so much else in an influencer-driven economy, the bar for what’s considered essential to college-dorm life gets higher each fall. In some cases, literally: the use of multiple bed risers to create increasing amounts of storage space has seen beds rise to Princess-and-the-Pea heights, often requiring one separate piece of furniture that allows students to make contact with their mattresses and another to match the exaggerated height. But the sense of competing with other parents to best prepare their new students is pervasive. One mother who began trading texts with the mothers of her son’s soon-to-be roommates detailed the experience in Business Insider, writing that the text circle “turned what should be a rite of passage into something that feels a little more like a wedding registry.” As the other parents “started filling their Amazon carts with things I never even considered buying my sons,” and the roommates themselves offered little input, author Tanya Bricking Leach found herself rethinking who those ever-rising expectations are for.

DORM SWEET DORM: Mom of three goes viral for turning college dorms into dream rooms. pic.twitter.com/oZhaIdL5o1

— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) August 26, 2025

I get it: With two years before my own kid starts college, I’m aware that one of the less embarrassing ways to express that visceral blend of love and loss is with tangible, purpose-built products that are both evidence of care and undeniable improvements on past eras of dorm living. (What I would have given for a laundry backpack.) And there are plenty of dorm room inhabitants who are thrilled with the results of their dorm room mama makeovers. But it seems like a couple of things can get lost in focusing on the aesthetic and consumable aspects of the home-to-school transition.

One is individuality. Social media’s category of viral dorm room inspo is heavily female, each room’s jaw-dropping glow-up seeming to share the same components — matching headboards, desks repurposed as vanity tables with Hollywood-style makeup mirrors and more. DormRoomMamas’ gender-specific mood boards and themes (bows! ruffles! wineglasses! Yes, wineglasses!) have an identikit femininity, and the focus on marketing a rigid binary to parents can feel like a rerun of how retailers sell parents on preparing a nursery, right down to accepting that each well-considered element in the room is going to get puked on sooner or later.

The other thing lost in aggressively parent-led dorm design is that college itself is a place where attempting and maybe not always succeeding and carrying on anyway is the whole point. It’s hard not to consider what messages rising expectations for dorm prep send to young people in their first days of real independence. “You should never have to experience unfamiliarity,” and “You will always have what you need exactly when you need it” don’t seem like the best takeaways for this stage of young adulthood. As someone who sobbed openly at my kid’s middle-school graduation, I’ve already learned that there’s no skating by the existential overwhelm of raising a child in a time when you can only hope to one day let them go by choice. But anticipating every possible instance of vulnerability my child might face and pre-emptively padding it with stuff won’t do anything to dull a primal, instinctual vigilance.

Of course, there is plenty of space between a dorm room with a sparseness that spotlights the unfamiliarity of a new environment and one that’s filled to bursting with the material evidence of parental involvement. And what the media amplifies in the flurry of pieces on back-to-school hyperconsumption isn’t necessarily the norm. (For the record, my son’s answer to the question “Would you let me plan the design of your hypothetical dorm room?” was a polite but very firm “No.”) Shopping away the uncertainty of the near future has become the unquestioned norm, but being honest about what can and can’t be guaranteed with a picture-perfect new home seems like an important lesson.

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I thought of that moment recently when I saw the unexpectedly hilarious People magazine headline: “Kristin Chenoweth slams non–pet owners who say her dog isn’t her ‘baby’: ‘She came out of my vagina.'" The gist was this: Chenoweth, the showbiz dynamo who broke out as Glinda in the original run of “Wicked” and will play the title role in the much-anticipated musical “The Queen of Versailles,” is currently partnering with a dog-food subscription service called Nom Nom. This involves doing a lot of interviews about her relationship with her dogs, past and present. And that, in turn, has led to headlines taking Chenoweth’s joke both literally and very personally. 

There’s no question that Americans love pets: Statistics from the trade organization American Pet Products Association released in 2023 showed that 66% of Americans have pets, and that they spend significant amounts of money to ensure they’re living their best lives. But the question of whether “pet parent” is a legitimate identity (something that’s debated repeatedly and often angrily online) points to a discomfort with a world in which pets are no longer part of the family, but the family itself, full stop. The result is a sustained collision between unfettered consumerism, gender-role anxiety and entrenched beliefs about what kinds of love are valid and meaningful. 

There was a time when the phrase “pet parenting” was an acronym for a decidedly human enterprise called Parent Effectiveness Training. These days, it’s likely buried in search results under pages of goods and services marketed to enthusiastic pet owners that go well beyond contemporary expectations like doggy day cares, cat hotels and raw-food delivery services. Self-optimizing humans can now optimize their pets as well, with color-changing kitty litter that detects urine abnormalities, FitBark activity monitors and a range of button-training programs to hone interspecies communication; physical-therapy centers for aging and injured dogs offer healing modalities including acupuncture, massage and aquatherapy.

(L-R) Michelle Vicary, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Kristin Chenoweth and Shannen Doherty in the Getty Images & People Magazine Portrait Studio at Hallmark Channel and American Humane Society's 2019 Hero Dog Awards at the Beverly Hilton on October 05, 2019. (Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for Hallmark Channel)

Pets and humans have ever-broader options for entwining their daily lives, routines and milestone moments. There are 23 states in America where your dog, cat — any pet who is willing to ink a paw, really — can be an official witness to your wedding, and a smaller number in which your pet can actually serve as a wedding officiant. A growing number of restaurants and cafés offer dog menus, and at a few, like San Francisco’s upscale Dogue, good boys and girls are the target customers for a menu of braised-beef short ribs and antelope-heart pastries. Human-sized pet beds, memory-foam mattresses and co-sleeping attachments all exist to make sure everyone’s on the same level and getting a good night’s sleep.

Reactions to this new normal have been very telling. In November 2023, the New York Times published a feature titled “When your significant other has four legs,” profiling several women who were quite happy to put down the dating apps and focus on their own lives, which include rewarding relationships with their pets. Comments on the piece brimmed with hostility for the very idea that a life prioritizing pets might be more joyous and meaningful than one spent searching for a suitable human. “This is gross. Sad. Abnormal,” read one. “Great story about taking the easy way out,” snarked another. 

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Because birth rates around the globe have been on the decline for more than a decade, trends in pet primacy are regularly framed as usurping the rightful role of human children. It’s not a spurious conclusion: Census data shows that the percentage of women aged 30–44 with no children is higher than it’s been since 1960. Millennial women, ushered into adulthood by the 2008 financial crisis with untenable student-loan debt and a front-row seat to a sh*tshow of school shootings, environmental destruction and educational defunding feel both less equipped to have children and less interested in navigating the economic challenges of doing so. Add in the reversal of Roe v. Wade, that’s turned planned-for and much-wanted pregnancies needlessly tragic, and it’s not difficult to see why starting traditional families isn’t a priority. 

But there seems to be some difficulty in understanding that choosing pets in the absence of either romantic partners or biological children isn’t the same as replacing either of those relationships. When women are the ones doing the choosing, though, there’s a thread of real anger at the idea that they are not only reneging on a social contract but rubbing it in the faces of those who haven’t. Friction between pet parents and so-called real parents abounds online, from TikToks that mock people who insist on bringing their dogs everywhere they go to Reddit threads that insist people who refer to their cats as “the kids” are stealing valor to longform stories of bad pet-parent behavior engineered to make everyone who reads them as angry as possible at everyone involved. 

Pitting groups of people against one another based on differences in lifestyles and beliefs (like, say, whether the term “fur baby” is ever acceptable to use) has always been a successful way to take the heat off of the political and institutional entities that exert the most control over how well both people and their pets live. There’s been a longstanding reluctance to connect, in plain language, diminished material choices with the global slump in birthrates; it’s much easier to point to overindulged pets than to reckon with social and economic factors that keep everyone from thriving. 

The chief complaint about pet parenting seems to be that it wastes valuable love that could go to a human child on a fuzzy facsimile of one, as though companionship is a zero-sum proposition. Even the late Pope Francis — who took his name from the patron saint of animals — had some harsh words in 2022 for adults who have pets but not children, suggesting that opting out of childrearing is “selfish” and “takes away our humanity.” (Spoken like a man who has never had to pay preschool tuition and failed to understand that wiping a butt is no different from scraping poop out of the grass with a hand covered in a purple, lavender-scented poop bag purchased at Whole Foods. Poop is poop, Francis.) 

It’s worth keeping in mind who benefits from ginned-up wars about what makes a legitimate parent — because it’s not the people who could, perhaps, once afford to have both children, pets and even a mortgage, but these days are lucky to be able to afford just one. The people who cast pet parenthood as sad or unnatural are people who aren’t actually interested in human quality of life. Instead, they are the techno-pronatalists scrambling to maintain a white-supremacist bulwark against immigration, and the conservative reactionaries like the authors of Project 2025, whose stated aim of “restor[ing] the family as the centerpiece of American life” works by taking choice, autonomy and dignity away from citizens. 

Which is why more of us might want to take Kristin Chenoweth’s path and lead with absurdity. Go ahead and Photoshop your cat into ultrasound photos; send your nosy in-laws a holiday card of you and your dog frolicking in the snow; celebrate the relationships you have instead of waiting around for the ones you don’t. Caring for living things, regardless of species, is always an act of hope. But trolling those who complain that you’re doing it wrong can be very satisfying.

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As the virus that causes COVID-19 began tearing through communities, Chelsea and millions of others hunkered down to try and protect themselves against a practically invisible and unpredictable threat. People took to the streets in Black Lives Matter protests to demand changes in our social structures that discriminate against people of color. In Portland, Oregon, where Chelsea is based, thick smoke from the worst wildfires in the state’s history cast the city in a dark red shadow, as if it was some sort of underworld.

As a therapist, Chelsea knew firsthand how these stressors were impacting mental health. Everything felt uncertain, and that instability didn’t seem to align with her plan to become a mother.

“There was just so much tension,” Chelsea, who is using a pseudonym for privacy reasons, told Salon in a phone interview. “It didn’t feel like a safe time to bring a child into the world.”

Climate change is increasingly impacting both the physical health of mothers and children and family planning decisions. As people become more aware of the environmental impact of having children, some are opting out of having kids entirely. But more and more mom activists are also rallying together to fight for climate reparations so that their children can grow up in a safe, sustainable environment.

“I think everyone would agree that our kids should have clean water to drink, healthy air to breathe and a chance for a stable future,” said Jenny Zimmer, co-executive director of the climate activist organization Mothers Out Front. “We’re not asking for anything crazy. We are asking for a stable and healthy future for our kids.”

Climate change is already directly impacting the health of mothers and children: One 2019 study found higher temperatures are increasing the preterm birth rate. A review published last year found things like pollution were associated with reduced fertility and pregnancy complications like miscarriage. Sea level rise has also been linked to infertility, and pregnant people have an increased risk for contracting climate-related illnesses like malaria.

In 2023, the World Health Organization issued a call to action for countries to address the health of mothers and children in light of climate change, something the agency called a “glaring omission” in existing policy.

“Women and children are particularly vulnerable to injury and death in natural disasters,” said Kris Natalier, a sociology professor at Flinders University and chief investigator of the Maternal Futures study. “As floods, wildfires and the like intensify, women and children, along with other vulnerable groups such as the aged, will bear the brunt of the immediate consequences and post-disaster challenges.”

Many mothers already have climate change knocking at their door in the form of increasingly prevalent natural disasters like wildfires, heat waves or air pollution that keep their kids indoors or contribute to conditions like asthma, said Lauren Leader, the co-founder and CEO of All in Together, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering women. When she was on the local town board in Harrison, New York, flooding was "just a constant issue in our town,” Leader told Salon in a phone interview. “When I think about who were the most active people in our community fighting back against the worst impacts of climate change, it was all the moms.”

Zimmer said many moms join Mothers Out Front because they are experiencing climate anxiety and feel overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility to mitigate the threats of climate change that their children face.

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Others come with specific resolutions they want to see implemented in their communities. In certain jurisdictions, for example, moms have advocated for replacing old school buses, which produce emissions that can exacerbate asthma, to electric ones. They push for improvements in water quality at their children’s school or fight for policies that increase taxes paid by the fossil fuel industry. One mom advocated for the city to rebuild a road her kids had to cross to get to the school bus, which was flooded with knee-deep water due to sea level rise, Zimmer said.

In addition to Mothers Out Front, moms in other activist groups like the Moms Clean Air Force, Science Moms, the Sunrise Movement, Mothers of East Los Angeles, and others fight for climate reparations in local and national movements.

“The best antidote to despair is action,” Zimmer told Salon in a phone interview. “We really do see that when moms get together and organize — they are really powerful spokespeople for change.”

Although individual choices can make a difference in the rate of emissions contributing to climate change, collective action is necessary to reduce the rate of global warming to the degree that is necessary to prevent potentially irreversible damage.

For Zimmer, who brings her kids to city council meetings and involves them in her activism, establishing this sense of community at a young age and showing her kids they do have the power to make change is a way to combat a growing sense of nihilism about climate change.

“My kids can see that their parents are standing up for them and fighting for a better future for them,” Zimmer said. “For me, this is sharing with my kids the value of being a part of a community and taking collective responsibility for big problems.”

Ryan Filler, a web designer in Memphis, Tennessee, said he and his partner were on the fence about wanting to have kids — not only because of how much a child can contribute to climate change, but because of the state of the world they were asking their kids to grow up in.

A protester holds up a protect your mother Earth placard during the protest march on November 06, 2021 in Bristol, England. (Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images)“My wife and I decided to have one child, as much as we fear she might be lonely without any siblings,” Filler told Salon in an email. “It's a huge concern of mine not to add any stress to the planet — her planet, all of our kid's planet — by having a large family.”

Although the national birth rate is influenced by many factors including reductions in teen pregnancies and women having children later in life, climate change has been singled out as a direct factor making people have fewer kids. In one 2023 global survey, more than 50% of participants said climate change influenced their decision not to have kids. 

“It's not a surprise to hear people of childbearing age talk about not being sure they want to bring a child into this environment because of what seems to be a very bleak prospect,” said Almeta E. Cooper, the National Manager of Health Justice at the Moms Clean Air Force.

In the U.S., Republicans have been trying to boost the birth rate for decades, with President Donald Trump currently assessing various ways to persuade women to have more children, including small cash incentives. Some argue that the declining birth rate hinders innovation and productivity and that the next generation is more likely to be the one that comes up with solutions to the climate crisis. 

Regardless of how having more babies impacts the environment or the economy, the responsibility of our collective well-being often falls on women’s bodies. Yet reproductive choice is rapidly deteriorating across the U.S., as the maternal and infant mortality crisis continues to worsen. Many are weary of incentives to boost the birth rate that do not address the underlying issues contributing to a declining birth rate — including climate change.

“These are interrelated, complex issues, and if a person doesn't have clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and a healthy environment in which to live, how are you going to increase the birth rate?” Cooper told Salon in a video call. “You have to have a healthy setting in order to be able to do that.”

Against the backdrop of a warming world contributing to record-breaking heatwaves, wildfires and sea level rise, the Trump administration has significantly scaled back the degree to which the Environmental Protections Agency is enforcing emissions.

Whether people find the current environment suitable to bring a child into or not, that is entirely their decision. Zimmer acknowledges that we are in an uphill battle with the climate crisis. But she sees her kids as a source of hope.

“When I started as a youth climate organizer, I was motivated by this sense of anger and rage that my own future was being foreclosed upon by politicians and the fossil fuel industry,” she said. “After I had kids, it’s no longer about rage and my own future. It’s about my love for my children, and that is a deeper and more stable well to be pulling from.”

Filler says he constantly worries about his daughter, now two, growing up with a changed climate. But he finds comfort in the everyday moments he shares with his daughter: witnessing her share with another kid at the library or being kind to an animal she finds in their yard.

“I really hope she can carry that gentle nature into the world where it will probably be really needed," Filler said. “Maybe she really will grow up and be a scientist who invents free and perpetual energy, but even if she doesn't I'm going to do my best to raise her as someone who always does the right thing, even when it's hard, and I think that's the kind of person the world needs to face down the climate crisis.”

Chelsea, in Oregon, meditated on the decision of whether or not to have kids for about a year after she started doubting it during the pandemic. She kept thinking about how much sadness in the pandemic stemmed from losing or isolating ourselves from loved ones. Realizing how much family meant to her, she decided to have a baby. 

“I kept thinking about a really good quote my mom told me when I was a kid about whether I would rather regret doing something or regret not doing something,” she said. “I just think I probably would regret not having kids."

The process wasn’t easy. She and her partner struggled to conceive and ended up going through a couple of rounds of egg retrievals in the in-vitro fertilization process. Then, one day in December, she got pregnant.

Chelsea still factors in climate change in her decisions. As we spoke on the phone, she sat in front of a stack of cloth diapers she is waiting to use for her baby. She and her partner share one car instead of having two. And they collected all of their first-time parenting materials like cribs and strollers secondhand.

Over time, she recognized that the only thing she did have control over were her own thoughts, feelings and behaviors, she said. Having a child was not something that was dependent on what could happen externally. It was about the way she envisioned her own family to be.

“Maybe I'm a little too much of an optimist, but I feel like something is going to give with climate change,” she said. “I have a little bit of hope left.”

The post The moms fighting for climate justice appeared first on Salon.com.

When the kind, patient English-speaking taxi dispatcher outside Berlin Brandenberg Airport asked me this, I was shocked into momentary silence. Was he offering what I thought he was? 

“A car seat,” I said, daring to hope. A minute or so later a large van pulled up, with an age-appropriate car seat ready to go for my 3-year-old daughter, Evie, who was as giddy to see it as I was. It was simple to buckle us all in and head to our hotel, no need for me to clamber into the cab and bump my head on the ceiling while installing the awkward, difficult and outrageously expensive travel seat currently strapped to my back in a giant carrying case. The process can take up to five minutes, requires both the strength of a dozen bodybuilders to pull the seat belt tight enough and a great deal of patience, which I no longer possessed. It was Day 12 of a 16-day trip to Europe for my Philadelphia-based, American family, and suffice to say I was exhausted. This beautiful, wonderful taxi dispatcher had taken a literal load off my back.

We drove happily to our apartment-style hotel, in which I was able to book a two-room family suite for the price I’d spend on a single in the U.S. The pull-out couch in the living room was already made up for Evie, one more item checked off the mom to-do list without me having to lift a finger. 

When we toured the Berlin Wall the next day, no one even noticed the bored toddler playing with the gravel as my husband and I read the historical placards and took photos. Then we only had to walk a few minutes to find a crowded and exciting playground, passing ice cream shops, kids’ activity gyms and preschools along our way through central Berlin. At lunch our waiter giggled good-humoredly at Evie’s order of the “fishy bagel with no fish” and later that night at a rowdy Bavarian brauhaus for dinner, none of the drinkers minded when she took to the dance floor as the polka band blasted out a banger. 

he author's daughter Evie at the Berlin Wall. (Photo courtesy of Kelly Lawler)

By toddler standards, I doubt she could have had a better day. By parenting standards, I couldn’t have had a better experience either. Because just 24 hours into our stay in Berlin, my daughter had already become part of a community. I’m still searching for that sense of belonging back home.

"Children should be seen and not heard"

Any parent who walks through American society with tiny humans in tow can tell you that children are simply not welcome in public here. It’s something you don’t notice until you look for it, or until you have to return an Amazon package and everyone else in line at the UPS store is dead silent and radiating annoyance while your kid can’t stop chattering away. And it’s not just vibes I’m talking about. It’s blatant anti-child policies and aggressive adults in public spaces: breweries and restaurants that post “kid-free” notices during the childcare-strapped week between Christmas and New Years; malls that ban teenagers during after school hours; or even wedding invite after wedding invite that asks parents to exclude their children from a family celebration.

Kids don’t need to be loud, having a tantrum or actively causing disruption to be shunned; they just have to exist outside our prescribed child spaces. Just ask the museum security guard who once physically pushed my daughter back when she was at least five feet away from breaking a “please don’t touch” rule while she explored the art on the institution’s ostensible “family day.” Kids have naturally boisterous, curious and unfiltered personalities that clash with a populace of a country conditioned to repress emotions at all costs. 

It doesn’t take long on the internet to find social media posts shaming parents for bringing kids to a restaurant or decreeing that dogs are preferable in public to children. And just as many parents begging the rest of the world to see that kids actually belong out there. 

In the three-plus years I’ve been a mother, this lack of welcome means I’ve said “no” more than I’ve said “yes.” I can’t go to your out-of-town wedding if I can’t afford a sitter and my daughter isn’t invited. I no longer have long-lingering dinners at restaurants. I drive everywhere instead of bringing a stroller on public transit where it won’t fit. Sometimes I get so worried about what other people think I realize I’m parenting for the outside world, not for what’s best for my kid. 

American society, especially the current political ruling class, claims to be “family first,” but we are a culture that is deeply hostile to children and families. We are one of the only developed countries lacking a federal paid family leave policy, and the price of childcare and other cost-of-living essentials is skyrocketing. There is a pervasive, unspoken agreement in our country that children should be seen and not heard, and actually better off not seen, either. Don’t bring your kids out to dinner. Don’t bring them when you run errands. Don’t bring them to the festival or party or any of the best parts of life. And as a parent, it is demoralizing, exhausting and deeply saddening to feel this hatred. 

Family-friendly Europe may as well have been Disney World

The author's daughter Evie and the author herself at pub in Dublin. (Photo courtesy of Kelly Lawler)Berlin was our third stop on a trip to see friends and family that also took us to London, Dublin and the Irish seaside. All of our destinations were deeply accommodating to a traveling family. All the European airports had family lines at customs and even security that helped our cranky toddler make it through these tiresome exercises quickly. On our British Airways flight from London to Dublin my daughter and every other child on board were handed cute activity packs with pint-sized sleeping masks and coloring pages. 

Nearly every city bus we went on had designated stroller spaces (or “pram” or “buggies” as the Brits and Irish call them) next to priority seating and wheelchair corners. Major museums nearly always had kid-friendly spaces and activities, divvied up by age, right next to all the grown up art and history. All but the fanciest of restaurants we dined at had kids menus and crayons at the ready. Berlin even has designated kindercafes, restaurants with toys and games ready to entertain littles while the parents can enjoy a nice cup of coffee. 

And it wasn’t just the infrastructure that was so accommodating, but the attitude as well. On all those buses we took crisscrossing metropolises from one tourist attraction to another, Evie ran up and down the aisles and talked loudly about her desire to push the stop button. To my utter surprise as I moved to shush her, I seemed to be the only one who cared; no one looked up from their phones to spit a nasty comment our way. When we called ahead to that fancy restaurant to ask if we could bring a toddler, they told us “of course” and were so kind and sweet throughout our meal, even when she complained and threw her napkins on the floor. At the local fish and chips shop we went to one night in London, the cashier handed her a plate of free chips when she got fussy and hungry during the long wait for our order. It’s almost as if they had an innate understanding of the how and why of little kid actions. She wasn’t being a bad kid; she was just hungry and tired. 

And while I can spend a day running errands with my daughter in Philadelphia without spotting someone else under the age of 18, she was far from the only little munchkin running around these cities. Families with kids of all ages were just out doing whatever they needed to do, on commuter trains and busy sidewalks and at the pub on weekdays and weekends. The kids were not intruding on the scene; they were part of the regular cast. 

One more way to stress out American parents

Walking into a world where my daughter got to participate in the exploration and excitement as much as I did was a welcome shock. A relief. An unclenching. It wasn’t until I got to relax my shoulders and let her sing made up songs on a crowded train that I realized just how stressful all my interactions with the wider world have been since the day she was born. 

Those interactions haunt me, little itching social anxiety spirals that color my cautious lifestyle. I remember the time she had a public meltdown, perhaps the greatest fear of any American parent, in the grocery store. While she was lying prone in the pasta aisle and screaming about who-knows-what, old lady after old lady passed by sneering at my Millennial-style gentle parenting scripts as I tried to calm her down. No ma’am, I didn’t need help, thanks so much. 

I also remember the waiter who couldn’t stop staring the first time I nursed in public, and the logistical and financial nightmare of obtaining and installing a travel car seat for a single Uber ride from the rehearsal to the rehearsal dinner for my sister-in-law’s wedding. I remember the time I brought Evie to urgent care and I let her watch TV on an iPad after she had been crying for hours in pain, even as I was convinced everyone else in the waiting room was judging me. I remember being shushed for her playful sounds while in the children’s section of the library.

And I ashamedly also remember being 23 and snooty, loudly complaining to my drunk friends about all the strollers that I saw as obstructive and intrusive at the Washington, D.C. Cherry Blossom Festival.

Hating kids means hating much more 

Then author's daughter on a bus in Dublin. (Photo courtesy of Kelly LawleR)It is not surprising that Americans culturally reject children in public, because we are a society based on the myth of “rugged individualism” and capitalist hegemony: If it’s not for you, it is against you. If they’re not your kid, then they’re in your way. 

But here’s the thing: kids are people too. They’re not just tiny noise machines, they’re whole human beings who deserve to be out and about in the world. They don’t exist just to go to school and return home silently. They don’t act like robots. They need to run and jump and be loud and learn how to keep their cool in line for ice cream by getting out of the house and seeing what the line for ice cream is really like. In only a brief visit I could see that those European cities fundamentally understood this, and without in any way inconveniencing the adults going about their days. 

Our rejection of children in public is not without consequences for grown adults. It’s part of a prescriptive, old-fashioned notion of politeness and good manners that deliberately leaves out huge swaths of our population, particularly neurodivergent people, who might make noise and stand out from the crowd. Welcoming children is about being a generally welcoming and inclusive culture. But if you haven’t noticed, “inclusive” is starting to become a dirty (and banned) word in the U.S.

It is very hard to win as a parent, particularly in this country. It’s expensive, time- consuming and deeply exhausting to raise children in modern America, where our disparate population lacks “villages” to rely upon, school shootings hardly make the news anymore and most childcare facilities cost more than local mortgage and rent bills. If you want to go have a nice meal at a restaurant you can shell out hundreds for a babysitter or bring the kids with you and risk the ire of all. Maybe they’ll throw food or have a meltdown and you’ll never be able to return to that restaurant again. Maybe you’ll bring a tablet and they’ll be calm and quiet, but the same people who would have thrown you dirty looks for a rowdy child throw you equally judgmental glares for “letting the iPad babysit them.” There are scarcely any ways to win. 

The author's daughter on a beach in Bray, Ireland. (Photo courtesy of Kelly Lawlsro)Earlier in our trip we visited the Irish town of Bray, a picturesque Dublin suburb along the Irish Sea. At a restaurant Evie made a friend with a local Irish girl, and the pair decided to climb on a retaining wall in the outdoor seating area, which a waiter quickly told us wasn’t allowed. We stopped them, then headed to a playground. Next, we went to the pebble-stoned beach where Evie delivered hand-selected rocks to a group of teenagers nearby enjoying the unseasonably warm March day. The teens called her adorable, smiled and accepted their presents, then went back to their phones. We got ice cream and stopped for souvenirs and the store owner directed us to the nearest bathroom upon a potty emergency. We took the train back to Dublin, and Evie fell asleep amid the bustling rush hour commuters, and we carried her blissfully unaware and snoring back to our hotel. 

From her three-foot vantage point she interacted with at least a dozen adults that day (well, if you can call the teens adults), all of whom were polite, gentle and helpful even when she broke the rules. We barely spent any time with them, and yet they acted as part of that village everyone tells me I need to raise a kid. 

Perhaps I’ve given up on finding that village here after dirty looks and hostile policies, but if I’ve learned anything from this trip it’s that there are people ready to make the world more welcoming to kids, because they’re people too. And honestly if you spend some time with them, by gosh they are so much fun to be around. They are funny and energetic and life-affirming. Even the sullen Irish teenagers knew that. 

I only hope that I won’t always have to get on a plane to find a place for us to belong.

The post My European trip reminded me of one more way America hates kids appeared first on Salon.com.

Although its seven articles have been amended and interpreted in different ways throughout the years, they still guide today's literary custodians, with the foremost being to stand against censorship.

“Books and other library resources should be provided for the interest, information and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves,” reads Article I. “Materials should not be excluded because of the origin, background or views of those contributing to their creation.”

Understanding this clarifies why the Trump Administration is threatening the country's library system.

“When it comes to the history of the public library, what's so beautiful about it is that it is this continuing journey towards making our American ideals real, but it's a real struggle, Logsdon told Salon. “It's not like we started out with everybody free and equal and welcome at the library.”

When I spoke to Logsdon and Lucie Faulknor, producer and co-director of "Free For All," they were in Boston to present a screening at its library, part of a community tour that includes showings in New York, Philadelphia and Washington D.C.

This is the prelude to the film's PBS debut on "Independent Lens" at the end of April. But its message is especially urgent right now.

On March 14, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy," which calls for several government agencies to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law,” including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, or IMLS.

The IMLS is an independent federal agency that supports 125,000 public, school, academic and special libraries and museums in all 50 states and territories, according to the American Library Association. It administers both federal grants to states and discretionary grants to individual library entities. It also contributed outreach funds to “Free for All.” 

Libraries are the nexuses of democratized access to culture, community expertise, diverse perspectives on history and the instruments that further that knowledge. They also are gathering spots and safe spaces for the vulnerable.

“People who are in library leadership, on boards, and certainly librarians even today, are not interested in limiting, shaping, prescribing how that creative and generative expression should be had,” says John Chrastka, Executive Director and founder of the non-profit advocacy organization EveryLibrary. “They're just interested in making sure that everybody's got a fair shake to get to it.”

This may be why the Trump administration is set on starving our nation’s libraries to death, or close enough to it.

“Article II: Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

If you grew up in the pre-Internet age, your local library probably played some role in your upbringing.

But if you talk to most adults today, they will likely tell you they haven’t visited their local library in many years, if ever. To Trump’s administration and his extreme right allies, they are somehow insufficiently patriotic. Extremist groups like Moms for Liberty allege that they "indoctrinate" children into learning far-left ideology by allowing them to access “inappropriate” reading material.

A more common position is that the Internet and digital technologies have made libraries unnecessary. But this is largely predicated on the inaccurate idea that your local library’s sole purpose is to lend books. 

You can rent films and borrow the latest music releases at your local library, or sign up for free museum passes. Many also make tools and other household implements available to library cardholders. Libraries offer English classes, provide resources to attain citizenship and assist small businesses. Some host sessions with tax experts.

Kids at the self check-out at the Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library (Lucie Faulknor)They might also be their community’s most reliable source for Internet access, if not the only one.

Among what the ALA estimates to be more than 1.2 billion in-person visits annually to libraries around the country, homeschoolers are among the system's most avid patrons.

One of the people Logsdon and Faulknor introduce in “Free for All” is Rebecca Kirchberg, a Columbus, Wisconsin, resident who, at the time of filming, had 14 children and another on the way. Her small town's local library is essential to her children's education.

“We don’t get a lot of the school information, and having that library to really pull us together into the community has been so helpful for us,” Kirchberg says in the film as her kids peruse the shelves. She adds that their library influences them as “a faith-filled family that’s always looking to learn and explore.”

“If you don’t have good information,” Kirchberg adds, “there’s no way you can make good decisions.”

“Article III: Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.”

“Article IV: Libraries should cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgment of free expression and free access to ideas.”

Webster Free Circulating Library staff circa 1904 (Courtesy of New York Public Library)Trump’s March 14 order also calls for the elimination of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution, which was further targeted in another executive order signed on Thursday, March 27, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

An accompanying fact sheet directs Vice President JD Vance, a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, “to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian’s museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo. 

This is unprecedented at the Smithsonian, the nation’s preeminent historical archive. Its iconic status ensured that Thursday's executive order drew immediate national attention.

But another assault on public libraries was already in motion, although fewer people may have noticed.

On Thursday, March 20, Trump appointed Deputy Secretary of Labor Keith E. Sonderling as the Acting Director of the IMLS.

“I am committed to steering this organization in lockstep with this Administration to enhance efficiency and foster innovation,” Sonderling said in an agency press statement. “We will revitalize IMLS and restore focus on patriotism, ensuring we preserve our country’s core values, promote American exceptionalism and cultivate love of country in future generations.” 

“Just the words ‘patriotic history’ scare me to death,” Logsdon said. “I grew up in the Deep South . . . and I was the tail end of [learning] the Southern version of history. Up to that point, it was like, ‘Oh, the North were the bad carpetbaggers,’ and ‘slavery was a benevolent institution.’”

“I think that's what they have in mind when they say ‘patriotic history,’” she concluded.

As is the case with the March 27 executive order, what materials or functions meet the qualifications spelled out in this order isn't clear. Presumably, that is the point.

“That aspect of things needs to be taken head-on because libraries fundamentally are constitutional organizations already,” Chrastka said. Libraries honor the five freedoms cited in the First Amendment: freedom of and from religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assemble and the right to petition.

“That means we’re going to be on a collision course with the Trump administration over the constitutional compliance for libraries, as opposed to being compliant with the Trump administration framework,” he added.

“Article V: A person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views.”

Public libraries are meant to eliminate barriers to knowledge long held by the wealthy. This concept extends back to Benjamin Franklin’s founding of the first public library in 1731. The reason for this, as historian Jill Lepore says in “Free for All,” is that Franklin believed a government by and for its citizens should have an educated populace.

Tulare County Library (Robert Dawson)On the cusp of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations, there are many debates about what our constitutionally-established rights afford us and to whom those protections extend. But there is also a rising discourse around the need to strengthen the fabric of our communities by connecting with our neighbors, making libraries one of the most effective “third places” in American life.

Sociology professor Ray Oldenburg coined that term, expounding its necessity in his book "The Great Good Place” and the essay collection “Celebrating the Third Place.” He proposed that home and work are our first and second “places,” with “people places” designed to strengthen local ties and foster the common good constituting these “third” spaces.

Libraries, of course, fit the bill, providing workshops, public readings and performances, along with arts and crafts classes. “Joyful association in the public domain is far better than watching television in our lifeless subdivisions,” Oldenburg proclaimed in a 2014 New York Times op-ed.

But for many, today's libraries represent some combination of all three spheres. Libraries double as work spaces. After-school programs provide childcare. Central libraries in major urban centers provide a safe harbor for unhoused people to sleep during the day. They might also host free medical clinics and wellness classes.

“Library professionals want to stand in gaps. That's one of the things that they're good at,” Chrastka said. “They're standing in knowledge gaps, you know – ‘here's there's the good stuff in the archives, read it’ – and they also have a deep empathy, I would suggest, because they are readers.”

“Reading builds empathy,” Chrastka continued. “So when you see gaps in the social services, when you see that another component of government has been taken over by an anti-person perspective and says, ‘those people aren't valued,’ librarians have stepped up.”

According to the ALA, library funding draws less than 0.003% of the annual federal budget yet makes a substantial local impact. “From technology classes for job seekers to services for people with disabilities, from library delivery for older Americans to summer reading programs for families, IMLS funding makes a real, concrete difference in the lives of Americans every day,” its website reads. “The president’s executive order puts all of those services at risk.”

Trump’s March 14 executive order doesn’t directly eliminate IMLS because that would exceed executive authority, the ALA explains. Instead, it aims to hollow out the agency, “[reducing] the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.”

The president’s order also creates an artificial fiscal cliff. Although he signed the Senate-approved continuing resolution for fiscal year 2025 that provides funding for IMLS through September, the executive order overrides Congress’s intent.

In Logsdon's view, “It's not really about the money. Do you know what I mean? That's clear to me. It's about politics and it's about having targets.

“Article VI: Libraries which make exhibit spaces and meeting rooms available to the public they serve should make such facilities available on an equitable basis, regardless of the beliefs or affiliations of individuals or groups requesting their use.”

Out of all the public institutions under fire by this government, why libraries? Logsdon doesn’t have the answer to that, but points to an observation made by one of the scholars in “Free for All.” The library is free and open, and it's unregulated in many ways, they said. Everybody can come in, and that makes it unpredictable, and unpredictable can be scary.

“You know, it's about free access. It's not about reading only patriotic history or whatever is prescribed by your lesson plan,” the filmmaker added. “It's about the freedom to explore all the ideas that are out there.”

That principle has been tested many times through book banning efforts. Moms for Liberty and others have loudly demanded the removal of many books from school and community libraries over the years, but the rise of Drag Story Hour gave it and other extremists a convenient scapegoat.

Drag Queens Kelly K, left, and Scalene OnixXx read story book on the last Drag Queen story hour at Canyon Crest Town Centre location of Cellar Door Bookstore on Saturday, April 29, 2023 in Riverside, CA. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)Viewers got a taste of this on Wednesday, March 26, when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., used a photo of Drag Story Hour board member Lil Miss Hot Mess as a prop at a televised House subcommittee meeting attacking PBS and NPR.

Greene was alarmed that Lil Miss Hot Mess had starred in a digital segment for “Let’s Learn,” an educational series produced by the WNET Group in New York. The congresswoman's stunt blindsided the performer because she filmed the segment back in 2021. She was asked to contribute to the children's series because she has written several children’s books and performed readings at libraries in New York, Los Angeles and other places. She’s also a university professor.

Lil Miss Hot Mess has participated in Drag Story Hour since 2016. What won her over was witnessing what she described as “the joy and creativity and play that was happening in these libraries – it was magical.”

At the same time, Lil Miss Hot Mess was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. “I think politicians, leaders of mainstream LGBT organizations, leaders of mainstream literacy, education, arts organizations thought that Drag Story Hour at best was kind of cute, and maybe at worst was a little bit of a nuisance,” she said.

“But I think many of us had this feeling that we're the canary in the coal mine,” she added, “not only around targeting LGBT and especially trans people, but also starting to target public institutions like libraries and schools to try to defund them.”

Chrastka agrees, tracing conservatives’ library vilification back to the classic dog whistles of race and gender, with book bans serving as a proxy for attacking those populations. Once literacy censors realized racial animosity wasn’t working, tactics shifted to demonizing queer literature, particularly books about the trans experience.

“The attacks on the profession and the institution have evolved tremendously," he said. "The language has been purified in a certain respect and honed, but it has been out long enough now that there are certain populations that do not have to be convinced. They only have to be updated on who’s the current enemy.”

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“Article VII: All people, regardless of origin, age, background, or views, possess a right to privacy and confidentiality in their library use. Libraries should advocate for, educate about, and protect people’s privacy, safeguarding all library use data, including personally identifiable information.”

Making a sentimental case for public libraries is easy. They are repositories of history, thought and memory — shared and personal. But warm sentiment is easily dismissed as frivolous. Libraries should not be.

Gloria Cowart pictured at the San Francisco Public Library (Anita Bowen). In its response to the March 14 executive order, the ALA reminded the president and Congress that libraries are “seedbeds of literacy and innovation.” Philosophically, that makes them fundamentally American places. In a society whose public educational system is underfunded and whose rural communities are often shortchanged in resource allocations, they are essential. It’s also helpful to know that if you were to use library materials to research subjects considered to be controversial or threatening to whoever is in power, the Library Bill of Rights calls for your librarians to shield your reading list and other personal information.

If the IMLS is eliminated, wealthier cities probably will not lose their main libraries. But branches in far-flung exurbs and small towns will be devastated.

As Chrastka observes, “The idea that we have to treat public libraries and the public good as if it were a commercial entity for it to be validated is a problem in American thought.” Indeed, the common good should be held to a different standard that’s impervious to the whims of the ideologically narrow.

Logsdon said that the longer she worked on “Free for All,” the more she noticed how often conflicts over access, funding and censorship kept coming back. “The same battles they were fighting in the 1850s here in Boston about what kind of books belong in the library are back again,” she said. “You never win. You just have to keep fighting.”

"Free for All: The Public Library" premieres 10 p.m. Tuesday, April 29 on PBS' "Independent Lens." The film will also be available to stream on the PBS app. To find out what you can do to help save public libraries, visit the American Library Association's website.

The post “Reading builds empathy”: The case for saving America’s libraries appeared first on Salon.com.

Reliving childhood holiday memories through the gifts you buy your kid is a guilty parenting pleasure. Yes, you buy the latest, most popular toys; yes, you stay up all night putting those toys together; and yes, you play with them as much as your child does, or maybe more. A guiltier pleasure is attempting to go above and beyond anything your parents may have done for you. In my case, that's an even more ridiculous project — I always felt fortunate enough to get everything I needed in my childhood Christmases — but here we are.

I had an excellent plan. I would teach my child to expect only three gifts for Christmas: something she wants, something she needs, and something educational. In theory, it makes perfect sense. In reality, two things happened I did not game-plan for. The first obstacle was that I didn't know she would be so stinking cute, with a perfect little smile that made me want to spoil her rotten. The second is that putting only three gifts under a family Christmas tree pushes against the gift culture in which I was raised. It's kind of like asking a fish not to swim. I am a product of the Big Show.

Where I'm from, we only live for the Big Show. 

The Big Show is a grand gesture by parents eager to prove how much they love their children. It looks like a gift explosion. Imagine a beautiful Christmas tree, then pile around it so many gifts it's almost impossible to get close to the tree — maybe impossible to even see the tree. Gifts all over the floor, gifts stacked up against the wall, gifts on top of other gifts, gifts on the couch, gifts under the couch, gifts in the kitchen, gifts by the toilet, gifts spilling out of the front door — gifts, gifts, gifts.

This was normal in my childhood household and throughout my neighborhood. We were taught to go all out for Christmas. If it was Christmas and the $600 rent is due, and there was exactly $600 in the bank, then you did not pay the rent. You attempt to create the Big Show. This was Dad Logic 101 when I was growing up: You can talk to the rental office, negotiate with the mortgage company, come up with the extra money in January. You will be able to figure it out. But you cannot recreate Christmas. You cannot attach yourself to the magic of December 25 on December 26. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

I saw this throughout my childhood. Automobiles were repossessed in the middle of the night. The power was cut off. Creditors made my house sound like a call center with the way they would ring us all day looking for money owed. That money was spent on those gift explosions. When Christmas came around, my dad had no time to chase a good credit score. He was more into chasing that magical moment — the moment when his spouse or child would tear open their dream gift, take a hard pause, and then say something corny like, “This is all I ever needed in life.”

Lucky for Dad, I was always a grateful kid. When he sprang for that Triple F.A.T Goose coat, I made sure I wore it until the feathers burst out. And when the rent money was spent on those Air Jordans, I wore them until my feet grew and busted at the seams. I played with all of my toys: Mr. Potato Head, Connect 4, the Michael Jackson doll. And every time I received a gift that my dad scraped and saved and borrowed to purchase, I always gave him that look and the little speech about how I could not live without the item he fought so hard for me to have.

My father mastered The Big Show and Dad Logic. We never missed a meal and always had a place to stay, while my siblings and I gifted him the smiles he was searching for while spending his last dollars on our gifts, even as he gave Santa, the imaginary king of giving, all the credit. 

Before I had my own child, I wondered why my dad worked so hard just to give credit to Santa. Once I earned the role, I understood that the Big Show was never about getting credit — it was about the smiles on our faces. Our smiles were like a drug to Dad — an unimaginable high that forced him to take risks and allowed him to float through most of the year feeling like the best parent ever. I imagine my father believed that if he messed up a thousand other things, but got Christmas right, then everything else would be OK.

I find myself chasing that same kind of smile when my wife Caron and I began dating. I would do things like charge trips I could not afford or buy the designer items she would randomly mention during our conversations about the things we dreamed of having. Delivering these items made me extremely happy. Receiving those items made her extremely happy. Like me, she is also a very grateful person. But this also pushed us into very dangerous territory. We loved each other dearly, but began letting expensive gifts define that love. She would go over budget to chase the Big Show, just like I would. Just like my dad before us. 

I brought this up in a conversation and we both agreed to scale back. We failed. I also brought up the idea of not spoiling our daughter by buying a mountain of toys, promising to stick to the three-gift rule. We failed at that as well. We didn't even beat ourselves up over it, but we vowed to stick to the rules in years to come. That future came quicker than I could have imagined. It was our 4-year-old daughter who stepped up and ended the Big Show for us.

One night over dinner, we asked her what she wanted for Christmas. Cross tilted her little head and raised an eyebrow. “A Moana baby doll and a Moana dress,” she said. 

She did not ask for a house full of gifts, a new Power Wheels truck, a bicycle, 60 Barbie dolls, a Barbie mansion, a Barbie automobile tire rotation, a toddler kitchen, a toddler hair studio, or any of the other gifts I probably would have purchased to make the Big Show happen. She was simple and to the point, and we listened to her.

A week after Cross gave us her two-item obtainable list, she added an American Girl doll. I whipped out my phone and went to the website ready to order because I'm such a sucker. My wife stepped in and told her, “You have a list. You can get that for your birthday next month.”

Cross did not fight or complain — she simply said OK. She is way smarter than me and understands that she doesn't need any and every thing to feel loved. Just her family.

In these scary times, when it's easy for a parent to feel like you're not doing enough or you're doing too much for the children, I'm happy that my child understands going overboard isn't a sign of love. She has indirectly taught Caron and I to focus on what really matters, like our health, well-being and commitment to our family, and to strive for an abundance of love over an abundance of gifts.

I know now I don't have to hold myself accountable for every magic moment like my dad did. When my daughter wakes up on Christmas Day without an American Girl doll, I can let someone else take the blame. This Christmas, let’s drag Santa through the dirt instead, and maintain our good names.  

The post Moving on from a “Big Show” Christmas: What my preschooler taught me about holidays and abundance appeared first on Salon.com.

After the November election, a rowdy debate erupted in online spaces over whether it's acceptable to cut off family and friends because of how they voted. Supporters of Kamala Harris expressed a range of views, from a reluctance to burn bridges to a "screw 'em all" mentality. "It's okay to shame someone for doing something shameful," feminist writer Jessica Valenti argued on Instagram. Shunning those who voted for Donald Trump, she added, was "a reasonable response by those of us who are disgusted, anxious, and afraid."

Some on the "Hysteria" podcast agreed with Valenti. But guest Megan Gailey said, "If you think you can bring them over, bring them over." Errin Haines agreed: "We cannot give up on our friends, our family. I think there was too much of that, frankly, after 2016." But that's a liberal podcast, so of course the panelists also offered reassurances that it's OK to disown family members if their Trump vote is "a symptom of larger issues."

On the Trump-voter side of the debate, the sentiment has been nearly unanimous: It's an outrage if "woke" friends and family stop speaking to them. The only real disagreement among that cohort is whether this trend is literally the devil's work, or merely liberal "intolerance." One TikTok video that went viral featured a woman crying about being cut off and saying, "I'm completely heartbroken about my family taking it how they are. I never did this to them when Biden won." Conservatives have coined the phrase "vote-shaming," which seems to equate political and ideological conflict with personal choices regarding diet or sexuality. 

Estrangement has always been part of being human, but in recent months, we've seen a deluge of press coverage of the phenomenon. Most stories ignore the question of politics or mention it only in passing, instead blaming the seeming rise in family estrangement on social media, therapy culture and shifting cultural norms that prioritize individual happiness over familial duty. Yet an undercurrent of political tension rumbles right under the surface, a suspicion that this is tied to the increasing partisan polarization driven by the MAGA movement.

Perhaps America's most famous estrangement story is the one involving Trump super-donor Elon Musk and his daughter Vivian Wilson, who has publicly denounced her father for refusing to accept her trans identity. Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, who served on the House Jan. 6 committee, has repeatedly spoken out about members of his family disowning him over his opposition to Trump, who has threatened to throw Kinzinger in prison. 

"On the day after the election, I had several calls from clients that they need to have an appointment as soon as possible," Dr. Farnoosh Nouri, a clinical assistant therapist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, told Salon. She reports that colleagues across the state are reporting the same. "One colleague had 33 calls the day after the election, new clients who wanted to come in."

Before 2016, Nouri said, she had not witnessed this kind of political stress on families. After Trump's first win, she saw a spike in college students "struggling with going back home for Thanksgiving holidays, for Christmas holidays." Now the fear and stress are ramping up again. Across social media, the stories are mounting, both from liberals who wonder whether it's time to go no-contact with MAGA parents and from Trump voters who complain about "childish" offspring who no longer speak to them. Nouri's experiences are backed by new statistics from the Public Religion Research Institute, which found that "Democratic voters (23%) are nearly five times as likely as Republican voters (5%) to say they will be spending less time with certain family members because of their political views."

Interesting finding from @prripoll.bsky.social. www.prri.org/research/ana…

[image or embed]

— Amanda Marcotte (@amandamarcotte.bsky.social) December 13, 2024 at 2:12 PM

Salon posted a request on Reddit to interview adult children who factored politics into their decision to go no-contact with parents. The response was overwhelming. Contrary to the stereotypes that adult children who make this decision are being callous, impulsive or foolish, the respondents — many of whom said they were in therapy — spoke eloquently about what was often described as a long and emotional decision-making process. 

"I literally thought being a Democrat was a sin"

“I don't know anybody who's gone no-contact with their family just because of politics.”

In saying that, a woman Salon will call Ellie echoed a sentiment that came up in nearly every interview with children who have cut off right-wing parents: It's not fair to reduce the dispute to mere political differences. (All adult children and parents interviewed in this article are identified by pseudonyms to protect their privacy.)

Ellie's parents, she said, were "extremely, extremely religious" and "very physically violent." This is not uncommon in fundamentalist Christian households, where the biblical proverb about "sparing the rod" is regularly wielded to justify corporal punishment. 

The problem, Ellie said, is that in many cases it's not possible "to separate what people believe in politically with their values as a whole." She argued that "Donald Trump and his administration and all these Republicans have been justifying abuse forever," which she compared to the ways her family used religion to rationalize abuse. 

"Children who choose to estrange themselves aren't making a little decision on a whim," explained Joshua Stein, a researcher who tracks online trends, especially those that intersect with psychology and bioethics. Stein has been collecting data on the online discourse about estrangement and says that many children who were raised according to the fundamentalist teachings of James Dobson and Michael Pearl "are now adults and are estranged from their parents." For many such adult children, he says, "It's not the fact that the person is MAGA. It's the fact that you do not feel that it is safe to be around them."

Maureen was also raised by parents she describes as devotees of Dobson, a famous proponent of spanking children. "I literally thought being a Democrat was a sin," she said, laughing. "I was very encouraged to get married young, to an older man," she said, but found herself becoming more liberal over the years and eventually left him. Trump's election further strained her relationship with her parents. "I was raised with all the shame, like having sex before marriage was bad," but "then my family was just completely willing to embrace Donald Trump."

"All the things that they told me Christianity stood for? No longer matters," Maureen said. Like many of the adult children who spoke with Salon, she went full no-contact with her parents during the COVID pandemic. 

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Paul described living "two lives" with his conservative Roman Catholic parents. In the outside world, he said, "I was very liberal," but at home, "I had to keep that to myself." He describes feeling mounting frustration with "this weird allegiance to Trump" that started during Justice Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings and escalated during the pandemic. That anxiety was interwoven with his efforts to build a personal life outside his household. "Anytime I got close to a woman," he said, his parents "would sabotage the relationship." When Paul started seeing a woman who was both Jewish and Spanish, his mother "had some wonderful expletives about her," he said sarcastically. 

Paul's parents "dragged me to church every Sunday," he said. He often saw an older man at Mass "who looked like a shell of himself," and worried, "That's going to be me when I'm 60." He felt that Trump's political rise made the situation worse by creating "this environment where you're either with us or you're not with us." He moved out of his family home, but has concealed his new address from his parents so they can't show up at his house uninvited.

Other estranged kids didn't necessarily grow up in religious households, but told similar stories: Trump's election had exacerbated existing family tensions, often to the breaking point. "My father has always been conservative Republican, but was never vocal about politics and was a reasonable man," explained Penny, who spoke with Salon through a chat app. "His new wife, on the other hand, was very divisive and made 'owning the libs' her purpose in life."

Penny says she kept politics out of conversation in person but, as is common in many of these cases, social media got involved. Her dad's wife "didn't like my fact-check on a mutual relative's Facebook page on a racist, anti-liberal post," she said, and un-friended Penny on Facebook while continuing to send her "anti-liberal, anti-BLM, racist memes via Messenger." Penny messaged her father's wife and asked her "to stop sending me these racist things," which provoked a crisis: Her stepmother then announced "that she didn't want me in her life anymore (um, OK) and that she would speak to my dad about it." Penny added, parenthetically, "Because apparently I was 5, not 47." That resulted in a big fight with her father, in which she says he blamed her for all the tension and bad feelings. She hasn't spoken to him since 2020. 

"Our once-reasonable father has been brainwashed by her and made into a MAGA," she lamented. 

Robert felt he had a good relationship with his parents, but after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, his father celebrated with a Facebook post about how aborted pregnancies "could have all been doctors or lawyers or electricians." Robert has two teenage kids and wants "to protect the options that are open to them." When he confronted his father about the post, it blew up into an argument that kept escalating. Robert realized his father has "a very strong personality" and "would raise his voice and possibly physically dominate the situation" when challenged on his beliefs. 

"I was spending hours of my day, every day, just thinking about this argument we were having," Robert said, adding that he felt ill whenever he received emails from his parents. "It was pushing me into depression and honestly to the point where I was having suicidal thoughts," he said. He cut off contact, which he saw as an act of self-preservation. "I still hold out the hope that something will change," he added, but currently has little hope "they are ready to actually listen."

"She is racist," Christine said of her mother. That was especially painful on a personal level, she added, because Christine is biracial: Her mother is white and her biological father was Black, and the family history was awkward. There are "a lot of clashes around race," she said. "I am the result of her getting caught sleeping with a Black man." 

While the estrangement from her mother was "a long time coming," Christine said, things came to a head during the pandemic when her mother began to make cruel comments about her ex-husband's new wife, who is an immigrant. "My mom was starting up on her racism again," Christine said, and "I called her out on it" for the first time, although her mother had "said several things in the past that were even racist towards me." 

Christine said the issue wasn't just political differences with her mother, but her mother's tendency to denigrate "any identity that deviated from hers." She concluded, "If this is the type of toxic relationship you wouldn't tolerate from a romantic partner," then she also shouldn't endure it from a parent. 

Blaming "woke ideology"

"I was not invited to my daughter's wedding," Darlene told Salon. "That's how sick these people are, because how do you do that to a mom?"

Quite a few parents who have become estranged from their children expressed interest in speaking with Salon, but most declined after learning they would be asked questions about their political views. Darlene was the exception. Like the adult children interviewed, she also saw a connection between politics and her personal situation. 

"There's a mindset, there's an entitlement" in younger people, she said, which she believes has led to the government being "out of money." She added, "I don't have beaucoup bucks to just throw it out so that somebody else can make the decision as to how it gets spent, when it's not on the same values that I have."

Darlene's daughter is a practicing nurse and aspiring country singer. Darlene says she gave her daughter money to start her band and record an album, but believed that "I was to have no say in how we went about promoting" the music and managing the band. Things turned out differently, in her view: "I just was to give the money and she was at will to do whatever she wanted with it." Darlene also blamed her son-in-law, whose family is "more left" and "very controlling," she believes. (Her daughter did not respond to a request for comment.)

She felt that her daughter's unwillingness to speak with her was indicative of a larger social problem: "What's happening to this country if you can't sit down and have a civil conversation?” She felt that Americans are not "discussing what's actually happening to this country" or "trying to find solutions," but "keep raising taxes" instead. Similarly, she said her daughter would not "sit down with me and discuss what was happening with the money," but implied that "I was just to be quiet" when it came to her daughter's music career. 

Darlene said she has worked with Dr. Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who has made a name for himself counseling parents whose children have cut off contact. His book, "Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict," is controversial. Adult children in estrangement forums argue that Coleman is overly aggressive in his efforts at family reconciliation and too quick to blame "the younger generation's dysfunction," as one redditor put it.

In an interview with Salon, Coleman argued that estrangement is on the rise and partly results from "Instagram influencers having opinions about who's toxic" and low "rates of social trust." On the other hand, he has also been criticized by some estranged parents, because his book asks them to reflect on the role their actions may have played and to consider making amends. 

Coleman told Salon that political differences are a "common pathway" to estrangement. He has many clients who voted for Trump and have an "adult child who hates that idea." That dynamic, he added, "can either fuel underlying tensions in the parent-child relationship or it can create a rift that can later leads to an estrangement." 

Coleman is no defender of Trump, whom he calls "an incredible amplifier of these kinds of hostilities." Trump's "contempt, his anger, his tribalistic orientation" creates "enormous social permission for people to say and behave in ways toward other people, family included, that they might not otherwise." Coleman said that he wished political opinions were less important, but would advise parents to listen to their children's views with "empathy" and without getting "defensive." He added that "a deeper dive" into whether "other issues could be underlying the conflict" is often important.

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Joshua Stein, the researcher of online content, wasn't surprised that Salon struggled to get parents to talk openly about family estrangement. When he first started researching forums for estranged parents, most of them were public-facing. But once members realized that outsiders were reading their discussions, the groups shifted to private forums, often behind a paywall. Most of the rhetoric in these groups, he said, allows parents "to absolve themselves" and "blame it all on the kid." The parents often ascribe estrangement to "a social contagion or a mass psychosis."

Stein sees a link between the culture of these forums and the larger MAGA movement. The pro-Trump "community has insulated itself from criticism by treating any outside information as illegitimate," he said, and many parent forums do the same, "perpetuating the posture that the kids are unreasonable" and the parents "did nothing wrong."

While such parent groups are nearly all private, the people who run these communities often market themselves aggressively and in public. Last year, Diane Cohn launched the forum Estranged Parents (membership is $28 a month) with a video titled "My Daughter Stopped Talking to Me [SO I LET HER GO]," featuring dramatic music and images of Cohn clicking away at her computer keyboard. She declined to answer questions from Salon, but her videos center on political disagreements with her daughter, which suggests she believes that will draw in potential customers. 

In another video, "What's Behind the Estrangement Epidemic?", Cohn — whose avatar features her face within a red strike-through circle — lays out her theory: The underlying problem is "woke ideology." She blames "schools and universities where ideological indoctrination of young minds, in many cases, delivers dogmatic thinking disguised as critical thinking," a "declining work ethic" and "alternative lifestyles" that shift young people "away from traditional family values, the bedrock of civilization."

In an environment where the "government steps in to pick up the slack," Cohn says, young people feel "free to delete family from their lives." Salon obtained a copy of a video posted by Cohn (which she later removed) that is more explicit. She complains about college campuses "where they confirm that your gender is anything you want it to be," and suggests that "meritocracy" has been replaced by "skin color as a primary indicator of who's in and who's out." Wider social acceptance of estrangement, she concludes, will lead to "America's collapse."

Unsurprisingly, Cohn markets her community almost exclusively to conservatives. Stein pointed out that longstanding right-wing media organizations have produced lots of content aimed at estranged parents in recent years. Focus on the Family, founded by Dobson, has extensive materials for Christian conservative parents angry that their children have walked away from them and rejected their faith. Dennis Prager of PragerU has posted videos with titles like "You Better Have a Really Good Reason for Not Talking to Your Parent," "Your Parents Don't Deserve This" and "When Adult Children Don’t Speak to Their Parents." Conservative organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies routinely denounce children who go no-contact. Even New York Times columnist David Brooks weighed in, declaring that estrangement contributes to "the psychological unraveling of America."

Sheri McGregor, a "certified life coach" and author of multiple books about estrangement, has one of the few websites where comments from estranged parents aren't behind a wall. One popular post titled "The beat goes on: Politics dividing families" offers a glimpse of what goes on at more private forums. "Suddenly I was a horrible human being because my political views did not line up with her 'progressive' views and I was called a racist, a bigot, homophobic, transphobic, you name it," complained one poster, who said one son "dialed it down" after she threatened to throw him out.

Another post suggested disinheriting children, and deploying "your thoughts about the estrangement in the will as a last word." This poster added, "It is very sad where we are in this country because respect is disappearing and has to be enforced at an early age." Another attributed her daughter's queer identity to being "brainwashed by her environment," comparing her situation to "Hitler youth." Another person wrote, "What is wrong with this generation?! They feel so empowered so entitled now!" adding that her son "got 'covid' supposedly last year" but cut her off after she sent him anti-vaccine articles. 

Jolie Robertson, a YouTuber who has created videos defending kids who go no-contact, said she attributes these reactions to "the expectation of dishonest harmony in families." She added that "politics and morals are pretty intertwined at this point, and a difference of morality" has always been a factor in "loss of community."

Authoritarianism starts at home

Most estranged children and their defenders use intuitive arguments to defend their belief that the personal and political are intertwined. Social science, however, backs them up. One of the best predictors of authoritarian political beliefs — and likely Trump support — is how a person answers questions about the most desirable traits in children:

• independence vs. respect for their elders
• curiosity vs. good manners
• self-reliance vs. obedience
• being considerate vs. being well-behaved

People who prefer obedience over curiosity, independence or consideration tend to have authoritarian personalities. As political scientist Matthew MacWilliams found, authoritarians are more likely to be strong Trump supporters. This linkage makes sense, MacWilliams told Salon, because authoritarianism is all about in-group versus out-group thinking. In that worldview, children are expected to "conform to in-group norms, be obedient, be orderly, be disciplined." 

MacWilliams added that it's not surprising to see politics become intertwined with personality issues in family estrangement cases. He characterized authoritarianism as a "worldview, a predisposition" more than an ideology, adding that "values and worldview drive politics," not the other way around. Authoritarian values, he said, are the "poison root" from which far-right politics and regressive attitudes on child-rearing both flow. 

In her new book "Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America," journalist Talia Lavin devotes the second half to exploring the widely-read marriage and parenting manuals of Christian nationalist subculture. These books or websites explicitly argue for hierarchical relationships, with women and children chastened to live their lives in unquestioning submission to patriarchal authority. As Lavin lays out in painful detail, this worldview is frequently enforced through violence, at least on children. The parenting manuals treat physical discipline not merely as an aspect of parenting, but as a parent's main tool. 

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"They see violence and authoritarianism as normal, in both the private and public spheres," Lavin told Salon. "When you're raised seeing violent authoritarianism in the family sphere and come to accept and embrace it in adulthood, you're the model authoritarian subject: someone for whom violence and authority are intertwined, who accepts and expects brutalization of the most helpless."

Whether they faced physical abuse or not, the estranged children who spoke with Salon mostly spoke of a long process of unlearning the worldview in which they had been raised. For Maureen, having daughters made her "a million times more pro-choice." For Ellie, disability caused by medical neglect as a child was part of her journey, especially as "my dad told me a couple of years ago that maybe I wouldn't be so sick if I believed in Jesus."

Many children cited strong relationships outside their families as bridges away from the more authoritarian worldview. Paul has multiple degrees and says the people he has met at work and in his personal life have deepened his appreciation for diversity. Christine spoke of her stepfather, who divorced her mother long ago, as an anchor of tolerance, acceptance and more liberal values. 

Writing for Politico in 2020, MacWilliams noted that "approximately 18 percent of Americans are highly disposed to authoritarianism," according to his survey data. "A further 23 percent or so are just one step below them on the authoritarian scale." He told Salon that the way these attitudes manifest depends on whether and how such authoritarian values are "activated." Donald Trump serves as a powerful catalyst, unleashing such individuals' preferences for "authority, obedience and uniformity over freedom, independence and diversity."

This model of "activated" authoritarianism may help explain the apparent escalation of politics-related estrangement. As Coleman said, Trump's political rise offered "permission" for people to unleash authoritarian tendencies, including in their personal lives and family interactions, with the unique stress factors of the pandemic adding to the tensions. 

Trump's message, MacWilliams said, was, "If you don't agree with him, you're an enemy of the state. He's made it seem that the differences are dangerous," and in that context some Trump voters will apply that hostility to their closest family members.  

"The relationship between two people is like a dance"

Mainstream media coverage of the estrangement phenomenon tends to minimize or ignore the role played by authoritarian attitudes and values, instead leaning into such trending topics as social media, "therapy culture" and liberal intolerance. A New Yorker article by Anna Russell, published last August, followed "Amy," a woman who went no-contact with her evangelical parents and recounted alarming details about how they had treated her over the years. Her parents contacted the administration at her university, for example, to express "displeasure about Amy’s transformation" toward more liberal views. They skipped her wedding, refusing to be vaccinated against COVID-19. They've told Amy she is going to hell. Still, in a familiar effort at journalistic balance, Russell cited Reddit forums as a primary factor, writing that "posters are not exactly unbiased" and tend to "advocate a slash-and-burn approach to complex relationships."

"What is lost when we render our families optional?" Russell worried, in the rhetorical equivalent of leading the witness. "As a new parent myself," she continued, "I felt scared at the idea that I might somehow screw up, and my child would reject me." This article angered many posters at r/EstrangedAdultChild, where some said that Russell's article "discounts emotional abuse" and that she seemed to agree "with the idea that children should allow themselves to be disrespected for their parents' emotional comfort." 

A similarly-themed New York Times article published in July, headlined "Is Cutting Off Your Family Good Therapy?" leaves the reader with little doubt that Ellen Barry, the paper's mental health reporter, believes the answer is no. Barry writes that "promotion of estrangement as a therapeutic step is clearly on the rise, thanks mainly to social media," adding, "Whether or not mental health clinicians should encourage this practice is hotly debated." The Economist, The Atlantic, NPR and the Guardian have all published articles hitting similar notes, drawing the ire of estranged adult children on Reddit.

Nouri, the therapist at SMU, expressed skepticism that her profession is pushing clients to go no-contact. "Our job is to bring people together, not to create division," she said. The goal of therapy is to help clients foster "the connections that we need in order to be healthier."

Nouri added that she rejects the basic premise of the media debate over whether it's acceptable to go no-contact, and would rather focus on how to support individual people in their specific situations. "I tell my clients the relationship between two people is like a dance," she said, "and if one person is not willing to take the steps in this dance, it's not going to happen." Many family relationships can be mended, she believes, but if one person feels "powerless" and unable to speak without being "put down," then "creating distance is an act of self-care."

Maureen didn't agree that estrangement is a "trend" brought on by social media, although she agreed that online forums can make it easier to walk away. But she sees the issue less in terms of social contagion, arguing that it's simply that "more conversation leads to more acceptance." 

"I don't feel like social media made me do it," she said. Instead, she felt the forum offered support for her decision. 

Stein also rejects narratives that blame social media or therapists. "Parents in these relationships tend not to think that the children are making a well-informed choice," he said, noting they will blame partners, social media, friends or media brainwashing, rather than accept that a child is "deliberately and intentionally choosing" to separate themselves. Even Coleman, who has described family estrangement is "a social contagion that happens through Instagram and TikTok and Reddit," spoke in more measured language to Salon, saying he tells clients their child "wouldn't be doing it unless they felt like it was good for them."

All this raises the question of whether the media discourse around parental estrangement qualifies as a "moral panic," a phenomenon described by its leading theorist, Stanley Cohen, as occurring when "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests." Sometimes the underlying episodes or trends that spark the panic are real and sometimes they're not — as was the case with the ritual child abuse panic of the 1980s, for instance — but in either case, the threat is wildly exaggerated. Cohen's original example was the 1960s moral panic in the U.K. over "mods" and "rockers," when the emergence of rival youth subcultures was treated as the downfall of British civilization. 

Media coverage of parental estrangement has gotten entangled with other buzzy topics like "cancel culture" or articles scolding young women who are unwilling to date Trump voters. A Washington Post editorial lamented that "someone will need to compromise" in that standoff, although it wasn't exactly clear why. In the "Hysteria" episode about whether it was acceptable to banish Trump voters, the one panelist who strongly supported such actions, Erin Gloria Ryan, complained that Democrats "have been feminized in this way, where we are expected to just be tolerant and forgive over and over again," with no reciprocation from the right.

Stanford professor Adrian Daub, author of "The Cancel Culture Panic," has pointed out that moral panics are typically about preserving social hierarchies: If a Starbucks barista gets fired for expressing a left-wing opinion, no one calls it "cancel culture," but if a right-wing pundit is heckled by undergraduates during a campus speech, our constitutional freedoms are under threat. In an earlier interview with Salon, Daub argued that accusations of "cancel culture" are typically aimed at younger or lower-status people, specifically so higher-status folks don't have "to reflect on their own practices." It's "cancel culture" when Elon Musk or JK Rowling is criticized for transphobic rhetoric, but not when billionaires or Republican politicians focus public anger on ordinary people who don't conform to gender norms. 

The outrage at no-contact adult children appears to follow the same model. In his videos denouncing this trend, Dennis Prager says, "The Bible never commands us to love our parents, but it does command us to honor them." Cohn, the parent influencer, says that her daughter "didn’t want for anything, materially," and mentions an occasion when she prevented her daughter from choking, seemingly as evidence that she has earned a continuing relationship.

Similar logic is echoed throughout anti-estrangement articles, such as the New York Times noting that "estranged children are likely to lose access to financial and emotional resources." No equivalence is drawn the parent side, even though it's also true that a parent who refuses to make peace with an adult child runs the emotional risk of losing that relationship permanently. Once again, the implicit assumption is that the lower-status person has a duty to maintain or restore harmony. 

It is clearly true, as Coleman has argued, that the growth of individualistic values and greater economic freedom have created a context in which adult children can cut off contact with their parents, something that was often impossible for earlier generations. It doesn't follow, however, that such people have given up on "connectedness and interdependency and mutual reliance," as Coleman told NPR.

Most adult children who spoke with Salon did not seem lonely or disconnected from life. Most cited strong relationships with friends, other family members and romantic partners as giving them the strength to separate from parents they felt were harmful. Many spoke warmly of Reddit, which provided connections to other people in similar situations. On the estranged-parent forums, the term "found family" is sometimes uttered with evident contempt. Many of the adult children say they have simply found community. 

The post Going no-contact with MAGA parents: Crucial self-care or the “unraveling of America”? appeared first on Salon.com.

Maybe those men were just better trained to fear their wives’ fury than my own man, or maybe they were biased. After all, every woman that I knew in that room did the conventional thing and married an older guy — some by just a handful of years, a small enough of a gap to warrant having seen the same movies in high school, and some by a lot, enough to raise uncharitable questions about whether “old sperm” was a thing that they should be concerned about, seeing as children were the future and all. So by this logic, if the younger wives were middle-aged, that could only mean their more advanced husbands (in years, at least) were in danger of being at old age’s doorstep. Even so, I chose to believe them. I thought I was safe.

But then my novel — which features my fictional doppelgänger as the narrator, who finds herself in a situationship with a Kpop boy bander multiple years her junior — came out, I discovered that in fact, some people automatically assumed that the mother in the book was also middle-aged.

The first time it happened, it was in print. A journalist had interviewed me over Zoom about the backstory behind "The Band," and our conversation was the kind that felt like it was between old friends, rather than total strangers who got introduced via a publicist. She was an author herself; also, a woman, and assuming that she didn’t have any fancy Zoom filters or high-tech ring lighting going on, looked approximately in the same age group as me. We chatted effusively about everything from situationships (love them/hate them) to our favorite bands (N’Sync, BTS) and day jobs (professoring, psychologizing, writing) to using prophecy as a plot device (to emulate both the Bible and Shakespeare). Her article, when it came out a few weeks later, reflected the depth and breadth of our conversation along with all the highlights — everything I had hoped for — but one thing that caught my eye was the mention of the middle-aged psychology professor at the center of the book. This was news to me. I had no idea I had written a book about a woman who was halfway to the grave.

Despite spending the last four years writing, editing, and promoting this baby, the fact that one of its main characters (whose voice, profession, and other demographic labels were largely my own) was already in middle age felt like a revelation — albeit not necessarily a good one. The closest thing I can liken it to is the adult equivalent of finding out that Santa isn’t real or that the tooth fairy just threw your baby teeth in the bathroom trash can after paying you market price for them. It threw me into an existential crisis that started with me going back to my bone-broth regimen (for the collagen, all the well-preserved women of TikTok tell me) and ended with me hungry and asking ChatGPT “What is the definition of middle age?”

Keep in mind that I make no references or clues to my protagonist’s actual age in the novel and only mention, in passing, her school-aged children, who just so happened to be the same ages as my real children. (As they say, all writing is autobiography.)

So I thought that maybe this was a one-off. I moved on with my life and my book promotion, wandered away from my commitment to slow-cooking chicken feet in my Instant Pot for its collagenic properties, and figured that I wasn’t really middle-aged. I comforted myself with reminders: I still got carded for buying alcohol at the grocery store! (At least when I didn’t have my children with me). I still got randos DMing me across my socials! (At least whenever I posted material that didn’t involve books or husbands or kids). I could still fit into the short-shorts I had since college with my alma mater scrawled across the butt! (Although now I have just enough shame to only wear them to bed and not in public, where other women — my age or not — could judge me).

But then, during another interview, it happened again. The second time I heard the reference to the "middle-aged woman" at the center of the book — much to my shock and awe — was in person. During an author panel at a yacht club, the bookseller interviewing me and another novelist expressed her surprise that the "middle-aged" mom in my book was so driven by sex. I, in turn, expressed my surprise that this was a surprise to anybody.

I looked around the room at the audience. Based on my cursory and non-scientific snap judgment, it looked like most people there were my age; a good number of them were older, as at least one had explicitly pointed out to me during our taco bar lunch earlier that day. I asked them if they stopped caring about or talking about sex after college, or their 20s, or whenever it is when a person transitions from being a young person or generic adult into “middle age,” whatever that is. I stopped just short of asking them about their own sex lives because I still wanted them to like me enough to buy my book.

Afterward, when I returned to my separate life as a social psychologist and mother myself, I wondered: Is motherhood itself synonymous with middle age?

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Here's why it matters: As I teach my undergrads every semester in the Psych of Prejudice class they're required to take, ageism is real. By that logic, it's no stretch to unpack the many negative connotations of "middle-age," and to be automatically labeled that because one is a mother is a social liability of motherhood that nobody is talking about, but maybe we should. Because here's what else comes with that: the association between motherhood and all the other things we — myself included — historically associated with aging, like an absent sex drive, a declining openness to experience, irritability and moodiness.

I grew up across various neighborhoods in China, Puerto Rico, and American cities across the Midwest, the South and the West Coast, and I don't remember knowing any sexy moms. Maybe women just aged faster back then, before Instagrammer mothers who could pass for the same age as their teenage daughters invaded our feeds and told us that anything was possible, especially with the right gym equipment/plastic surgeons/plant-based diets/Korean skincare products. The only time I came close was once in the fifth grade, when my own mother elicited shock and awe from my classmates when she showed up to pick me up from school early in a green velvet dress and face full of makeup.

“That’s your mom?!” a boy I was madly in love with asked me, clearly impressed. He was probably thinking of his mother, who wore her grays prematurely and her clothes breathable and loose-fitting.

“Yep,” I replied, smug for the first time that year as the new girl in school already in the comedogenic throes of puberty. But then in the months and years that followed, that green velvet dress disappeared, never to make an appearance again, and instead got replaced with muumuus, as comfortable as they were shapeless. I didn’t think much about it until several years into my own marriage, when my husband would make the oft-repeated joke that if I ever started wearing muumuus myself, we would never see another wedding anniversary. I’d laugh and remind him that I like my outfits uncomfortable and spandex-ridden, partly to keep him on his toes and partly because my self-esteem is unstable so I could use all the help I could get, particularly in the form of attention from strangers. But also because I believe in the mom who still relishes being seen for herself and not just as an extension of what she can do for other people.

As I approach my 40th birthday — which might soon usher me officially into middle-age-dom myself — I’m comforted by the oft-cited finding that a 40-year-old woman (and mother) usually has the sex drive of a single (and childless) 18-year-boy. In this climate, few stats give me more hope for the future. 

The post I didn’t know I was middle-aged until I wrote a book about sexy moms appeared first on Salon.com.

Then last week, an ongoing listeria recall was reissued to include an additional nearly 2 million pounds of ready-to-eat meat and poultry items that may be contaminated, raising the recall to a total of nearly 12 million pounds of product. As Salon reported, the recalled foods, produced by the Oklahoma-based company BrucePac, were sold at major retailers nationwide, including Trader Joe's, Walmart, Aldi, Target, H-E-B, Giant Eagle and Kroger. 

Amid the recall alert, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) also specified that some of the potentially tainted products had been distributed to schools nationwide. 

This series of alarming food recalls has left many parents grappling with a growing sense of unease. Each notification serves as a stark reminder that the meals they prepare for their children — once deemed safe — can suddenly become potential sources of harm, as can school breakfasts and lunches. While food safety experts stress that the recall system functions primarily as a precaution, with only a small fraction of recalled products causing illness, the reality is that parents often bear the emotional toll of these alerts.

However, health and legal experts say there are also steps parents can take to feel more in control of their family’s food safety. 

Amie Alexander, a registered dietitian at Nutri Peak, said first and foremost, consumers shouldn’t feel like they have to panic whenever news of a recall hits the headlines. 

“It's overwhelming to think that something as straightforward as the food you're packing for your kids, something you expect to be safe and healthy, could make them sick,” Alexander said. “However, while serious, it's important to remember that the recall system exists as a precaution for consumers.” 

For example, it made headlines when, in June, it was reported that the Food and Drug Administration had already “removed over 100 food and beverage products from the market deemed in ‘violation’ of agency regulations.” 

It seems like a staggering number of recalls, but according to data reviewed by Newsweek, among the 108 food and beverage products recalled by the FDA from January to May, only eight caused “harm or disease to at least one consumer.” 

During the same time period last year, eight food and beverage products again—but out of only 98 recalled—were linked to illness or negative effects. 

Alexander continued: “Often, potential hazards are caught well in advance of anyone falling ill.” 

That said, for busy parents, even simply having to monitor the USDA and FDA for recall alerts can start to feel daunting. After all, there is already a lot of unseen labor involved in feeding a family, from the juggling act that is meal planning to accommodate for different tastes and needs to grocery shopping. Statistics also show, these tasks primarily fall to mothers. 

According to a 2019 time-use survey sponsored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in households with both female and male household leads and one or more children under the age of 18, “80% of mothers say they are the household member who usually prepares the meals.” 

That’s the same as the share who say they are the primary grocery shopper, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.

“For mothers specifically, it’s more of the emotional labor we have to take on because the vast majority of us —not me, though — are ‘food people,’” said Margaret Quinlan, a researcher at the University of North Carolina who studies the intersection between parenting and health. “We monitor what we don’t have, buy groceries, keep up with the kids' tastes and safe foods, etcetera.” 

According to Quinlan, children, particularly those with pre-existing medical conditions that lead to school absences, can face disciplinary actions at the district level if they become ill from food items — another stress that parents don’t need. 

“In my research partner's kids' school, they can lose their magnet spot if they are absent too much. My kids could be retained for missing too much school,” she explained. “Parents don’t need to worry about dealing with other bureaucracies because corporations can’t be bothered to follow the rules. They can afford to pay to make the problem disappear, but parents might have to do more to deal with it.” 

Quinlan continued: “It is stressful and I feel like a Victorian before food regulations and inspections.” 

Sylvia Smith, a relationship and parenting expert at Marriage.com, echoed Quinlan’s sentiments. 

“With each notification of yet another recall — whether it's contaminated prepackaged lunches or potentially unsafe food on the cafeteria menu — your alarm goes through the roof,” Smith wrote via email. “Food safety is one of those things that, as a parent, you just can't compromise on; and when recalls happen, sometimes it feels like the situation is beyond your control.” 

The key, she said, lies in trying to balance vigilance with a pragmatic approach. 

“Recalls are usually issued as a precautionary measure, meaning there is a good chance the food in question may not have harmed anyone,” Smith said. “I do think it's important for parents to stay educated about potential risks by keeping an eye on official recall alerts from agencies like the FDA or USDA. The ways of dealing with it are the introduction of a food safety system in your home, like regularly checking product codes or batch numbers that will help you manage the stress and not be overwhelmed.” 

For parents who still find themselves weary from news of another recall, Smith said it may be time to rethink their approach to shopping for some grocery items. 

“On a practical level, you may limit your reliance on highly processed foods that are more likely to figure in a widespread recall,” Smith said. “I also encourage you to get to know local vendors or farmers who can help you feel more secure about the food you're serving.” 

It’s sensible advice, but Quinlan points out that some of it may not be realistic for every family, especially in the short-term. “There is judgment for parents who send their kids in with processed foods, but I have a picky eater, and if his safe foods are not safe, that is an issue for our family,” she said.

On a broader scale, many parents' anxieties about the recent surge in recalls stem from a sense of powerlessness when it comes to holding corporations — especially repeat offenders — accountable.. But Oliver Morrisey, the owner and director of Empower Wills & Estate Lawyers, believes that parents actually have more power in these situations than they realize.

“Let’s talk about class action lawsuits for a second,” Morissey wrote via email. “If you’re seeing recalls from the same company or supplier repeatedly, it’s worth considering whether there’s negligence at play. Parents can come together to file a class action lawsuit, which is a way to hold these companies accountable on a larger scale.” 

According to Morissey, the idea is that if enough people take action together, it’s not just about compensating for any harm already done as a result of the recalled food, but about forcing companies to improve their safety measures. 

“It’s more than just reacting to recalls,” he continued. “It’s about preventing future ones by making it clear that these lapses aren’t acceptable. This kind of collective legal action is incredibly powerful and often pushes companies to address issues they might otherwise ignore.” 

Parents can also advocate for stricter oversight of the food provided to schools and other institutions that serve children. They can campaign for mandatory and more frequent food inspections, as well as push for harsher penalties for companies that fail to meet safety standards.

“This doesn’t have to be done individually,” Morissey wrote. “You can collaborate with other parents and legal experts to make a case to local governments or school boards. The goal here is to make sure that safety measures are strengthened across the board so that these recalls don’t become such a regular occurrence.” 

The post With recalls on the rise, parents grapple with new anxieties around food safety appeared first on Salon.com.

“I found myself rushing between meetings and late nights trying to catch up on emails, all while missing those precious early moments with my newborn,” Morgan, a father of two located in San Francisco, California, told Salon. “I missed those first smiles, the bonding time, and even the sleepless nights that, in hindsight, I wish I could have shared more fully with my partner.”

Parent-focused policies, like child tax credits, child care, and paid family leave, are receiving more air time during this year’s presidential election. It comes at a time when the U.S. Surgeon General recently issued an advisory that American parents are so stressed out that it’s a public health crisis, suggesting the country is truly at a tipping point when it comes to parental stress.

There are legitimate reasons why this is happening. The United States is the only high-income country, and one of only a few countries in the world, without a national paid family leave policy. While the U.S. has the Family and Medical Leave Act, research shows low-income workers are less likely to benefit. Some states have taken matters into their own hands by implementing a mandatory paid family leave policy, but not all. 

Earlier this month, Americans watched vice presidential candidates Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz engage in a debate and answer questions about paid leave. During the debate, Walz agreed paid leave would be a “day one” priority for a Harris-Walz administration. Walz brought up a paid family and medical leave law he signed as governor that will go into effect in 2026. It will give workers 12 weeks at 90% of their pay to care for a newborn or sick family member.

“I had to go back to work five days after my kids were born,” Walz said on the debate stage. It was the first time a candidate suggested a lack of paid leave doesn’t only affect the person who gave birth, but it affects both parents.

In contrast, Vance’s proposed solutions for child care were heavily gendered. When asked the same question about paid leave, Vance responded with an anecdote about his spouse, Usha Chilukuri Vance, and how being a “working mom” is “extraordinarily difficult.” Vance said there needs to be a “family care model” that makes “choice possible” — in terms of mothers staying home with their children or returning to work.

For decades, paid leave has failed to be passed at a federal level. While both candidates agreed something needs to be done with the next administration, the conversation around paid leave, some experts believe, is dated. In other words, experts say more needs to be said about how the lack of paid leave affects families as a whole, including both parents, not just the mothers. 

“There has to be some sort of family economy that includes men, and then there has to be a rebranding,” Eve Rodsky, author of the book "Fair Play," told Salon. “Until we acknowledge the problem that these are seen as policies for women, then we're never going to be able to include men.”

The burden of care, Rodsky said, has always been put on the mother and that’s why, in her opinion, this issue has yet to be solved. 

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“I think it is important to acknowledge that’s why these policies have never been solved because they're women's issues,” Rodsky said, suggesting that they aren’t taken as seriously. Plus, when men do take time off to care for their children, it can be seen as weak — like when Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took paternity leave and was called a “loser.” Rodsky said this election cycle she’d like to see conversations between candidates expand beyond policies, and instead discuss what it means to be part of a family in America. Certainly, family values are being touted as a priority for both presidential candidates.

“Policy is important, but we didn’t get there with Build Back Better because we don’t ask this fundamental question: ‘What does it mean to be a participant in a family these days?’” Rodsky said. Scientific research continues to support the idea that families are better as a whole when both parents have access to sufficient paid family leave. 

One 2021 study by McKinsey & Co. found that when fathers take leave, it benefits everyone in the family. First, 100 percent of those surveyed who took paid leave were glad they did, and 90 percent of those heterosexual men who took leave reported an improvement in their relationship with their partner. Fathers who took paid leave to bond with a new child also attributed a tighter bond to their increased presence. It can also, the study found, “level the playing field” for working mothers, and perhaps even ease the cognitive labor from the start of parenthood.

Other studies have shown that paid paternity leave is associated with a reduced risk of maternal postpartum health complications and an increased rate of infants receiving their necessary vaccines on time. 

“Paid parental leave can reduce financial stress, allow parents to focus on bonding with their child, and increase gender equality when fathers have more time to participate in child care duties,” said psychologist Ashley Schappell D’Inverno, PhD, a behavioral scientist in the Division of Violence Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a media statement. “All of these positive effects trickle down to benefit the child and the family as a whole.”

Dr. Sham Singh, a Harbor UCLA-trained psychiatrist at Winit Clinic, said that having only a few days of paid leave had a “significant impact” on his transition to fatherhood. 

“After just a few days, I found it challenging to leave my partner and newborn behind; I wanted to support my wife as she navigated the early days of motherhood, but I also had commitments at the clinic that I couldn’t ignore,” Singh said. “This juggling act added a layer of stress and anxiety, making it difficult to fully engage in those precious early moments with my child.”

In contrast, when his second child was born, he had the opportunity to take several weeks off changing his experience. 

“This time, I could be fully present, involved in the daily routines, and fully engaged in caregiving,” Singh said. “Having that time transformed my relationship with my child and allowed me to be an equal partner in supporting my partner.”

Ultimately, having a paid leave, “set the stage” for a “healthy work-life balance, creating long-term positive effects on my family dynamics,” Singh said. 

The post Not just mothers: Fathers also need paid leave — and presidential candidates must address that appeared first on Salon.com.

For years, parents have battled a lack of support from both federal and state governments. We live in a country without universal childcare or guaranteed paid family leave, where mental health care remains expensive and inadequately covered. The reality of postpartum depression is often dismissed despite its prevalence, while affordable, accessible care is still not readily available for many women. On top of that, we live in constant fear for our children's safety — fears made real by the lack of meaningful gun control laws.

Reflecting on this, the weight of these systemic shortcomings is undeniable. In countries like Sweden and Denmark, where parents are supported with generous parental leave and accessible childcare, parents face far fewer stressors. By contrast, here in the U.S., where, according to the American Psychological Association, 41 percent of parents are too overwhelmed daily to function, we are told to simply "figure it out." Many parents are working full-time jobs, battling financial insecurity, and trying to be present for their children, all while lacking the fundamental support they need.

While I appreciate the surgeon general acknowledging some of these issues, as well as the societal pressures that worsen parental stress — such as workplaces hostile to parenthood, especially motherhood, and a culture where it's still taboo to discuss stress — it does little to ease the daily struggles we face right now. Society continues to add to these burdens, leaving parents to carry the weight. Schools pile on homework, extracurricular activities consume evenings, and social media bombards us with comparisons to seemingly perfect families. We're constantly told that if we just work harder or follow the right advice, our children will thrive. But when they don't, who gets the blame? Always the parents.

We live in a culture that has idealized parenthood while simultaneously shaming parents for every problem their child encounters. Parents are criticized from every direction — schools, doctors, parenting books, and social media. I recently saw a psychologist's post suggesting parents who want their kids to excel academically, play sports, or be happy are merely living vicariously through them to compensate for their unfulfilled dreams.

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Sure, there are parents like that, but most of us are simply trying to give our children the best chance and the tools to navigate an increasingly chaotic world. We are slapped with labels like "helicopter parents" or "overbearing parents when 74% of parents are legitimately stressed about sending their kids to school because of safety fears including school shootings. Yet society continues to point fingers at the parents rather than addressing the root causes of these stressors or fears. It's as if the world expects us to protect our kids from everything while simultaneously blaming us and denying us the tools to do so.

In fact, I have never felt more picked on in my life than when I became a mother. While I certainly faced challenges as a woman in the workplace, the level of criticism, shame and blame I encountered as a mother was far worse. When my older daughter struggled with separation anxiety at school, I was blamed for it and told that it was a result of my anxiety. Year after year, I was the scapegoat, while it couldn't have possibly been from living in New York City during 9/11 and having to drop her off at school a few days later. When I advocated for her academic ambitions, I was labeled a "tiger mom" when I was merely following her lead. My younger daughter's learning disability went undiagnosed for years, and yet I was told I was being too concerned. It felt like no matter what I did, it was either too much or not enough.

Yes, parents make mistakes. I've made my share. I'm sure there are many things I've done wrong that my daughters could list for you. We are also responsible for the children we bring into the world, but some pretty significant issues our children face — peer pressure, social media, the challenges of friendships, and the uncertainty of sending them out into an unpredictable world — are far beyond any parent's control. It's astonishing how much blame is placed on parents while the wider world escapes accountability. We don't talk enough about how the unpredictability and chaos of the world and all our children encounter shape them, possibly just as much as our parenting does.

While many parents may roll their eyes at the surgeon general's report, it may be a positive step that it at least acknowledges the struggles parents face today. We know there are real and pressing challenges — poverty, child illness, learning disabilities, work stress, the influence of social media — the list goes on. And while many of these issues require a complete overhaul of government programs, workplace policies, and societal norms, at least this report brings the conversation to the forefront.

And as parents, how can we afford to wait for the world to change, especially with our stress levels literally making us sick? The surgeon general's report highlights that many parents are already stretched thin between work and caring for their children. Yet, if we can find the time and energy, there are ways we can make a difference. We can engage in activism, join community boards, school boards, or local politics, and make our voices heard at the voting booth. There are also excellent nonprofits offering support, and we can extend a hand to other families in need through our own acts of giving. We can at least be part of the change that's needed.

It's also essential for us as parents to continue helping ourselves and our children manage stress and build fulfilling lives despite the obstacles we face for our families' well-being. Studies show that fear of the unknown amplifies stress and anxiety, clouds our judgment, and, when prolonged, can negatively affect our health. How we relate to uncertainty plays a crucial role in handling the highs and lows of parenting. As parents, we want to enjoy this journey, make thoughtful decisions, and be there for our children for as long as possible.

Unlike many, I like to think of the unknown as a place of hope. Sure, things may not always turn out the way we want as parents — the "maybe not" — but that's only one side of the unknown. The other side of uncertainty holds a "maybe" filled with possibility, potential, and even miracles we can't foresee. This fresh perspective on uncertainty can give us the strength to face each new day, believing that our children can still overcome their challenges. It also gives us hope for change — whether in government programs, workplace support for parents, more postpartum care, or, most of all, a kinder, more generous world for our children.

No one knows the future, and I see that as a good thing, especially if we want the world to improve for our children. If we can't be sure doom and gloom are ahead, then embracing "maybe" and holding onto a loose grip of hope is far better for every parent's mental health.

Ultimately, instead of constantly pointing out what parents are doing wrong, we must address the real issues that affect us all. At the same time, as parents, we need to acknowledge our fear of the unknown and learn to approach life's unavoidable uncertainties with less stress and worry. Even with all our challenges, the truth is that Maybe everything can still turn out okay. But for now, we must stop blaming parents for a world they didn't create alone.

The post Stress from parenting is finally recognized as a crisis. Maybe it’s time to stop blaming parents appeared first on Salon.com.

"One of the ways that you may be able to relieve a little bit of pressure on people who are paying so much for day care is, make it so that, maybe like grandma or grandpa wants to help out a little bit more, or maybe there's an aunt or uncle who wants to help out a little bit more," Vance said. “If that happens, you relieve some of the pressure on all the resources that we’re spending on day care.”

The response aligns with the messaging of a resurfaced clip of Vance where he seemingly endorsed the idea that “post-menopausal females” exist to help parents raise children.

Multiple reports and studies have shown that current child care costs are untenable for American families. To put it in perspective, the average cost of child care for two kids is more than the average rent in all 50 states across the country. Finding high-quality child care is a major challenge for most parents. It’s the driving force behind big life decisions, like reducing hours at work, changing jobs, or leaving the workforce entirely. Vance’s solution to this — to have families rely on each other for child care — as if American families haven’t thought about doing that already, is offensive to many in the trenches right now. 

“This idea that we might be able to find some free solution we haven't thought of is rather insulting,” Erin Erenberg, founder of Chamber of Mothers, a nonprofit that advocates for better support for moms, with local chapters in 21 states told Salon. “The fact that it is financially not a priority for our lawmakers is a major problem and signals, especially to mothers, that our care work is not valuable.”

Indeed, the proposed solution touches on a toxic American narrative that continues to plague mothers — that caring for children is the domain of women and such labor should be done for free. When it comes to parenting between today’s generation of parents, there is a lot to be said about the generational differences between Millennial and Gen Z parents and Baby Boomers. Despite disagreements, one commonality is that the solution to the current childcare crisis isn’t asking grandma for help, for a myriad of reasons. 

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Erenberg said part of the problem with today’s child care crisis is that families live more isolating lives. The “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality has not only pushed more families to be nuclear in structure, but it’s also affected the way lawmakers approach child care. 

“The system is absolutely broken,” Erenberg said. “When you look at the fact that we do not subsidize any kind of child care from ages zero to five, you can see why families are struggling.”

Daphne Delvaux, an employment attorney and founder of The Mamattorney, a platform educating women on their rights at work, told Salon that in her opinion, the biggest issue is that the U.S. does not invest financially in child care.  Indeed, the United States relies on parents’ ability to pay and the private market to provide child care services more than other countries.

Mothers today frequently face “an impossible choice,” Delvaux said. 

“Either pay their full salaries, or more, to child care providers — or leave the workforce,” she said. “Due to the pay gap, it remains women who usually leave paid work as the historically lower-earning partner.” 

It’s not just child care that is driving women out of the workforce; it is also elder care duties — which adds to why grandparents aren’t the solution.

“There are a lot of aging parents who might otherwise be able to help, but they become a care concern of their children,” Erenberg said. “That's why you hear so much about the sandwich generation, where you have parents who are looking after their aging parents, and trying to find time and financial resources to take care of aging parents while taking care of their small children.”

Proposing grandparents to solve the child care crisis is “naïve, aloof and divorced from reality at best,” Delvaux said.  

“And classist, ableist and exploitative at worst,” she added. “Not all grandparents are ready, able and willing to provide child care; many grandparents still work themselves, especially with the rising cost of living.”

Gloria Feldt, a grandmother of 16, said her own grandmother was her “primary caregiver” when she was in preschool. She also helped pick her up from school later in her youth. Feldt told Salon she loves being with all of her grandkids and prioritizes being there for them, but today is a “different day” from her own youth.

“I’m still working full-time and living in a city far distant from them,” she said. “Even my own mother who was lucky enough to have been present at the birth of all four of her great-grandchildren was still working literally on her deathbed at 74.”

Her mother, she said, wasn’t available to help with her children when they were young — until they were teenagers.

Tracy Lamourie, a publicist and grandmother to a two-year-old, told Salon she thinks most grandparents would love to watch their grandkids while their kids work, but that’s just not a realistic setup for many. 

“Unlike the old days, most grandmas like myself aren't home baking cookies. We're fully functioning members of society — in my case running a global business serving clients across industries,” Lamourie said. “The slow days of most people having retired grandparents at home with nothing else to do are over for most people as the older generations are still working the same hamster wheels for survival that the young parents are just getting on.”

Erenberg said part of the solution is thinking of “care” as an “infrastructure.” Paid family leave would certainly help, she said, in addition to a “serious investment” in a child upon birth.

The post JD Vance is wrong, experts say: Boomer grandparents aren’t the solution to rising day care costs appeared first on Salon.com.

A transgender third-grader in New Hampshire has won the right to be treated as a girl in her school community — including being allowed to use the girls' room. Score one for tolerance, and the increasing strides grown-ups are making in understanding that gender isn't always definitively settled the moment a baby is born, nor is orientation only figured out in adolescence or beyond. Children are a lot more complex than that.

The girl's triumph is a well-earned one. Her family — who have chosen to remain anonymous — told the Nashua Telegraph that after last year's winter break she returned to the second grade fully female-identified. She was dressing as a girl and using a female name. The school initially accepted her as female, but, the parents say, the staff began addressing her as a male and "the child was ultimately separated from her classmates, seated in a single desk in a room of shared tables and was no longer allowed to use the girls' restroom." Isolated and despondent, the girl's "behavioral issues increased" until the family removed her from the school. She finished out the year with tutors.

The child is now at a new school, where the district superintendent Mark Conrad acknowledges, "The issues that public schools must often address mirror the broader issues in our society … It's our policy not to discriminate against any student, and that would include transgender students." The district has agreed to treat the girl "the same as all female students in every aspect," including using her female name in school records, and letting her use the girls' room. Furthermore, her transgender status is considered "confidential medical information" that can only be shared among "appropriate and necessary" staff. It'll be up to the child and her family to decide whether to reveal that she's transgender — as it should be. Kudos to the district, and to the child's parents for putting the needs of the girl first, and for being so encouraging of her right to be herself.

Equal rights are won in ways both large and small. Earlier this year, Baltimore County barred discrimination "on the basis of gender identity and expression and sexual orientation when it comes to housing, employment, public accommodations, and financing." That decision came after Chrissy Lee Polis, a 22-year-old transgender woman, was brutally beaten by two teenagers when she attempted to use a McDonald's bathroom.

The local New Hampshire school community still doesn’t have a formal policy on rights for LGBT students, though Nashua's Ward 4 Selectman Stacie Laughton, the state's first transgender elected official, told the Union Leader, "I think the schools could use some guidance, and I think there should be a policy in place." And Janson Wu, an attorney with Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders who represented the family in its discussions with the district, told WBZ NewsRadio 1030 this week, "Children often have difficulty having schools respect them for who they believe they are. If a transgender girl wants to be able to wear feminine clothes to school and be addressed as a girl, oftentimes we see schools feeling a fair amount of discomfort around that." As evidence, look no further than the comments on the story on Café Mom, where posters have dismissed the child's orientation as "mental illness" and said, "My son knew he was Spider-Man when he was 7. Should I have made the school accommodate his desire?" Because, of course, fantasy role-playing and the gender at the core of your being are totally the same thing.

Wu says, "I think that as the environments become more and more welcoming to transgender and gender-variant youth, we’re going to see a lot more students coming out. And that's something that schools and parents will need to be prepared to deal with."

The right to be treated with dignity, the right to move freely through the world, to be seen for who you truly are, is supposed to extend to every person in America. That includes those who still climb on monkey bars and carry Justin Bieber backpacks. And every student deserves a family that supports and advocates for him or her, and a school environment that's safe and sensitive. A child in New Hampshire has that, and because she does, she opens up that possibility for every student — gay, straight and transgender alike – to have it as well. Sometimes you open a door and it leads to a small room with sinks and stalls. Sometimes you open a door, and it leads to acceptance and tolerance and respect.

The post A transgender child’s victory appeared first on Salon.com.

I had just dropped my daughter off for her first year of college. Finally, it hit me: This was her gig, not mine.

For years I had gone to every preschool, elementary, middle school and high school meeting. At every symposium on learning through play, every panel on teenage angst, every forum on how to build grit, I was there, all ears and taking copious notes along the way.

In an instant, I witnessed the culmination of all those years. Twenty Amazon boxes deposited in my daughter's dorm room and left scattered on the twin XL bed, my final deliverance. The mattress was wrapped in a strange institutional rubbery plastic sheath, but that wouldn't defeat me. I had carefully researched everything that would turn this environment into collegiate cottagecore: the right pastel teal LED desk lamp (with a bendy arm and three color settings), the fan that claimed to fill a hot shoebox of a room with soothing white noise and cooling breeze, the must-have shower caps for curly-hair that if washed too often wound up resembling something the Vikings wove into sweaters.

These were the details I self-medicated with during the lead-up to freshman move-in day. I moaned and groaned about the ridiculous minutiae with all my mom friends, but secretly I loved every video about 12 ways to decorate with fairy lights. My daughter wasn't into this decor stuff, but I was — and what better way to escape the harsh reality of my one and only child flying the coop and the harsh light it shined on every other aspect of my life?

I told my daughter — who was a bit anxious about her new adventure (where were those notes on grit?) — that college was like an island in a sea of being home. Did I honestly think so? Not really, but maybe it would minimize the hugeness of the moment, plus I liked thinking about it that way. It was better, at least, than thinking about the alternative. Being home would now be an island in the rest of her new and independent existence.

The fact of the matter is I'm a bit jealous. It began with the tours of verdant campuses, huffing and puffing (why is every college built on a hill?) as the sound of young a cappella voices echoed in my brain. I truly loved college. I mean, college was stressful, sometimes depressing and often a bit of a slog, but it was also the only time of my life when I was encouraged, nay mandated, to be a philosopher. And people actually wanted to listen.

Now, I'm an empty nester with an as-yet unpublished novel in a marriage where we can finish each other's sentences. Not in that soulmate-y, romantic kind of way but rather in that we're-repeating-ourselves-a-lot kind of way.

Yet I still have philosophies. I do, and one is called "the rule of threes." You have a first impression, then an opposite second impression, then deeper knowledge just gets you back to your first impression. My husband thinks it's cool, but he's heard it a hundred times (and by the way, he thinks he's the one who invented it).

When my daughter was a newborn, I remember meeting parents with one-year-olds and thinking, "Whoa, a year old. That's big. Getting to that. For a mother. I can't imagine."

Now that my daughter's 18, I think, "Whoa, 18. That's big. Getting to that. For a mother. I'm old."

As a copywriter at an ad agency, I had a creative director who used to declare in his British accent — which gave everything added import and eloquence — that every ad campaign needed an "organizing principle" to connect the many print ads, radio spots and TV commercials. The phrase marked a very bright and shiny time in my early 30s when I was a career girl on the move, living single downtown and dating. It was a time when every presentation sparkled with the possibility of a glamorous TV shoot, and every first dinner with a guy could wind up with me wearing a pouffy white dress.

Today, I went on a walk with a friend. She turned to me and said, "I get how you're feeling. Even if she just came home and shut the door to her room, your daughter was the organizing principle of your day."

That expression. It had evolved from something that inspired me to try and create work that wowed an industry and won awards to words that represented my life as a perhaps too fully-invested parent.

In that moment, however, I realized it had been good to have these organizing principles in my life. What would be the next set of goals and aspirations around which I would wrap my day? Suddenly, it was all up to me.

Plus, my daughter has discussed grad school. Whoa, grad school. That's big. Getting to that. For a mother. Are grad students too old to decorate with fairy lights?

The post A funny thing happened on the way to the rest of my life appeared first on Salon.com.

Murthy said parents have “a profound impact on the health of our children and the health of society.”

“Yet parents and caregivers today face tremendous pressures, from familiar stressors such as worrying about their kids’ health and safety and financial concerns to new challenges like navigating technology and social media, a youth mental health crisis, an epidemic of loneliness that has hit young people the hardest,” Murthy said. “With this Advisory, I am calling for a fundamental shift in how we value and prioritize the mental health and well-being of parents.” 

In the United States, there are an estimated 63 million parents living with children under the age of 18. Over the last 10 years, parents have been reported to be more likely to experience high levels of stress compared to other adults; according to the advisory in the previous month, 33 percent of parents reported high levels of stress compared to 20 percent of other adults. 

The advisory calls for national paid family and medical leave programs and paid sick time for all workers. Additionally, Murthy calls for increased support for child care financial assistance, universal preschool, and a culture shift. 

“It’s time to value and respect time spent parenting on par with time spent working at a paying job, recognizing the critical importance to society of raising children,” he said. Murthy has previously issued advisories about loneliness, firearms and more.

The post American parents are so stressed out it’s now a public health crisis appeared first on Salon.com.

If they are, your future includes a missed day or two of school. If not, you’ll live in fear of every little head itch over the next couple of days. What remains a peculiar childhood memory for many, no longer exists for today’s school-aged kids, and that’s because the guidance on how to handle lice in an educational setting has changed. As kids return to school, they embark on yet another year where school nurses will continue to debunk and destigmatize head lice. 

“It just doesn’t make sense, if you think about the life cycle of the lice, to send a kid immediately home when you see it, when it's very likely possible that they've already been infected for three weeks or so,” Lena van der List, a general pediatrician from the University of California-Davis Children's Hospital, told Salon in a phone interview. “It’s not very easily transmissible between children, and it’s misdiagnosed frequently by non-medical professionals.”

When people think they're seeing lice, van der List said, they are just casings of these nits that aren’t alive. Head lice, scientifically known as Pediculus humanus capitis, are tiny parasitic insects that feed on blood from the human scalp; they most frequently affect kids. The wingless insects usually spread through direct contact from the hair of one person to the hair of another. Notably, research has shown that head lice are not a significant health hazard or a sign of poor hygiene.

“Despite this knowledge, there is significant stigma resulting from head lice infestations in high-income countries, resulting in children and adolescents being ostracized from their schools, friends, and other social events,” the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) states. “Head lice can be psychologically stressful to the affected individual.”

A nurse examines a group of school children in New York. She is looking for head lice. (CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)Hence, a change in guidance over the years. According to the AAP “no healthy child or adolescent should be excluded from school or allowed to miss school time because of head lice or nits.”

“Medical providers should educate school communities that no-nit policies for return to school should be abandoned, because such policies would have negative consequences for children’s or adolescents’ academic progress, may violate their civil rights, and stigmatize head lice as a public health hazard,” the AAP’s policy, which was released in 2022 states. 

In February 2024, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also updated its guidelines stating “You do not need to send students with head lice infestation home early from school.” 

“Students with lice can go home at the end of the day, be treated, and return to class after beginning appropriate treatment,” the CDC states. “Nits may stay in hair after treatment, but successful treatment will kill crawling lice.” 

Leaving kids with lice in school might sound outrageous to those who were banned from classrooms in decades past, but experts say it’s a reflection of our changing understanding of lice. For example, people used to believe that lice could jump from head to head, but that’s not true. However, a Washington Post article did point to selfies as a possible source of contagion, because putting heads together and leaning in to take a snapshot seems to give the bugs that opportunity.

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“If someone has a hat, or wears a hooded sweatshirt or coat that hangs on a hook right next to somebody else's coat, so they touch, the head lice can transfer over that way,” Kate King, a school nurse at a middle school in Ohio and president of the National Association of School Nurses, told Salon. “I wouldn't say they're highly contagious, they certainly can move from one space to another, but they do not jump, and they do not fly.”

Nobody likes to think that insects are crawling all over their heads, King added. It’s “kind of gross,” but it’s “not a high risk for disease or any other sequelae.”

Head lice used to be listed as a communicable disease, and had to report it to the Health Department, King added. 

“We want to look at this as helping people get rid of head lice, versus stigmatizing and saying, ‘You have to go home, you can't come back to school,’” King said. “We really want children to be in school, to feel comfortable in school, and not to be excluded for something that they don't need to be excluded for.”

Van der List said the “parental workforce” has also changed the approach to managing head lice, alongside rising concerns about absenteeism. Previous guidance to send children home immediately “really hurt families,” she said, and “for no real good reason.”

Plus, over-the-counter treatments are effective. 

“Over-the-counter treatments are great,” she said. “But in the very rare case that you're having this kind of persistence, you do want to talk to your physician because there might be a prescription needed.”

But rarely, head lice require a call to the doctor anymore. 

The post Head lice at school isn’t the crisis it used to be. Here’s why appeared first on Salon.com.

Vance later tried to walk back his comments, which have been described as misogynistic and insulting, saying they were taken out of context. “The left has increasingly become explicitly anti-child and anti-family,"  he told Fox News' Trey Gowdy in July. “This is not a criticism and never was a criticism of everybody without children — that is a lie of the left. It’s a criticism of the increasingly anti-parent and anti-child attitude of the left."

Nonetheless, as Vance has voiced his concerns about people not having enough children, yet most recently skipped the vote in Congress to pass a $78 billion tax-cut package that would have expanded the child tax credit, a bill which would have benefited an estimated 16 million children nationwide. (Republicans who voted against it expressed concerns that it would disincentivize people from working.)

In contrast is Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz, who as governor of Minnesota has been on a mission to make the state, in his words, "the best in the country to have kids." Walz enacted a law that enshrined “reproductive freedom” into Minnesota’s state constitution. He signed a paid family and medical leave law due to go into effect in 2026 that will give workers 12 weeks at 90 percent of their pay to care for a newborn or sick family member. He launched a $316 million grant program to increase pay for childcare workers and an additional $6 million to expand childcare businesses in Minnesota. In 2023, Walz expanded the state’s childcare credit to $1,750 a year, making it the highest in the country. That same year he passed a bill that made free lunch at school available to all Minnesota students. 

Republicans have long branded themselves as the “pro-family” party, but for those following policies that actually benefit American families, they see a disconnect between rhetoric and action. When it comes to a VP pick who’s better for parents in the United States, experts say Walz is the more “family-friendly” candidate. 

“When we look at Tim Walz's record, it's more than just rhetoric about working families — he's delivered,” Ravi Mangla, a spokesperson for the Working Families Party, told Salon in a phone interview. “As governor with a narrow one-seat majority, he passed paid family leave, expanded child tax credit, made record investments in public education — we know that he backs up his words with action.” 

In contrast, when looking at Vance, Mangla said, Vance has “a very thin record to show.”

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As a senator, J.D. Vance also voted against the Right to IVF Act, which would have protected the accessibility and affordability of in vitro fertilization (IVF) nationwide. For Walz, IVF is “personal,” as he’s said. Walz and his wife went through years of fertility treatments to finally have their two children. Walz is a supporter of maintaining access to IVF. 

“Most of his talk about helping working families is just that: it’s talk,” Mangla said. “It's not backed up with anything that's been delivered, and when you look at his Senate votes, he's repeatedly voted against bills that would help working families, like legislation to make childbirth more affordable, or his outspoken criticism of IVF, which has allowed so many families to be able to to have children and have the families that they want.” 

Daphne Delvaux, an employment attorney and founder of The Mamattorney, told Salon, Vance does not “walk the walk.”

“Parents across the nation are struggling keeping up with expenses and are living paycheck to paycheck,” Delvaux said. “The child tax credit would have lifted at least half a million children above the poverty line.”

Notably, Project 2025, the controversial right-wing political initiative pushed by the Heritage Foundation — which Vance has praised — suggests the solution to a lack of paid family leave is the “Working Families Flexibility Act.” Basically, it would serve as a way to incentivize workers in the private sector to work overtime to accumulate paid-time off that could be applied toward paid family leave.

“If an individual worked two hours of overtime every week for a year, he or she could accumulate four weeks of paid time off to use for paid family leave, vacation, or any reason,” Project 2025 states. Despite their emphasis on “restoring” the American family, there is no call for a “paid family leave” in Project 2025’s 900-page vision.  

Delvaux said it’s significant that Walz positioned Minnesota "as an economic powerhouse" because it "cuts against the argument that family-supporting policies raise costs and ruin the economy,” Delvaux said. “In fact, it is precisely because he invested in families that the state is so strong; his record speaks for himself.”

The contrast between how Vance and Walz approach family-centered policies speaks to the differences between the two political parties. But despite Project 2025’s plan to restore the American family as the “centerpiece” of American life and to “protect children,” Republicans only appear to support a specific definition of a family. 

“Republicans count themselves as a party of freedom, yet have such a narrow idea of what a family can be or look like, or who's included in that family,” Mangla said. “It is really at odds with one another.”

In September 2023, polling from the left-wing think tank Data for Progress found that 53 percent of women voters said they would consider cutting their work hours if they lost access to childcare. Executive director of the group, Danielle Deiseroth, told Salon the organization’s polling on policies to improve access to childcare, and lower its cost, is really popular — and not just among women, but men, too.

“Many Americans, and American women especially, are not only tasked with the cost, the time, of childcare, but many of these women are also tasked with caring for elderly relatives or other relatives, too,” Deiseroth said. “This is a huge factor to folks — finances and feelings towards these big-ticket items that impact their lives right now.”

In 2023, Republicans introduced their “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” but it mostly focused on COVID-19 school closures and book bans, which isn’t aligned with these “big-ticket” items that voters care about. 

“Republicans’ ‘family-focused policies’ are trying to tell families how they should raise their kids and live their lives,” Deiseroth said, pointing to policies around restricting access to abortion, birth control, reproductive care, medical care for transgender youth and policing library books. “Versus Democrats’ plans, which are about giving you the freedom to make choices, to do what you want with your own body, to raise your kids in the way that you deem fit.”

Deiseroth added Data for Progress polled Vance’s favorability in the Rust Belt recently. 

“Which you think would be JD Vance's strongest footing,” Deiseroth said. “He has an unfavorability rating that's worse than Trump in those states.”

The post Which VP pick truly upholds family values? Experts say it’s Tim Walz all the way appeared first on Salon.com.

Chaudhary said that for more than 95 percent of human evolutionary history, humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies where mothers and infants had more support than children do now in Western societies. “Contemporary hunter-gatherer societies can offer clues as to whether there are certain childrearing systems to which infants, and their mothers, may be psychologically adapted,” Chaudhary said in a statement. 

Dr. Chaudhary and his colleague Dr Salali studied the Mbendjele BaYaka hunter-gatherers who reside in the Republic of Congo. Through their observations and analyses, they found that older children and adolescents are very involved in caring for infants, which they speculated could also boost their confidence as caregivers and act as a protector against anxiety as a first-time parent. The authors of the study also said that in hunter-gatherer communities, childcare is viewed as a way to give parents a break. In Western societies, it’s often primarily used to allow parents to work. Ratios of caregivers to infants were five-to-one in the observed hunter-gatherer groups. In the U.S., daycare centers typically have one caregiver looking after multiple children. 

“The nuclear family system in the west is a world away from the communal living arrangements of hunter-gatherer societies like the Mbendjele,” Chaudhary said. 

The post It really does take a village: Study links mother and child wellbeing to multiple caregivers appeared first on Salon.com.

The difference in how the public views parental involvement based on gender contributes to headlines celebrating how today’s generation of dads are supposedly more involved than ever before. Over the last decade, multiple studies have stated that Millennial and Gen Z dads spend more time with their kids than previous generations. This is research worth highlighting, as studies continue to report that children benefit from more involved dads.

At the same time, studies continue to show that family responsibilities still fall more on mothers and that mothers are stressed. What’s going on?

According to a 2023 study by the Institute for Family Studies, fathers in the U.S. spend an average of 7.8 hours per week taking care of their children at home, an increase of one hour per week in just about two decades. Taking a deeper look, the researchers found that college-educated fathers with children under age 18 spent an average of 10 hours and 12 minutes a week on childcare, which was more than 2 hours a week since 2003. 

“That’s a big jump and it's encouraging news,” Dr. Wendy Wang, the director of research at the Institute for Family Studies, told Salon. “But on the other hand, you break it down by father's education and other characteristics, and you find out it's not all fathers are experiencing this increase in their time as their children.” 

Indeed, for dads without a college degree, time spent on childcare declined from 6.2 hours a week in 2003 to 5.9 hours a week. Marital status affects time spent with children as well. The study found that only half of the never-married fathers see their children at least once a day. But Wang added that more time college-educated, married fathers spend with their children doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s less responsibility placed on mothers. 

“If you compare mother’s childcare time and father's childcare time, even though fathers have become more involved with spending more time, mothers do a lot more,” Wang said. “But I think with more fathers, they're being involved, hopefully, that will lighten up some of the burdens from mothers.”

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Eve Rodsky, author of the book "Fair Play," told Salon that studies examining the time fathers spend with their children today usually fail to capture the reality of the situation for a multitude of reasons. One being that the time parents spend with children has gone up for both women and men. Indeed, one study found that today’s generation of moms spend nearly twice as much time with their kids compared to moms 50 years ago.

“Everybody's percentage of having to intensively parent has gone up,” Rodsky told Salon. “There’s no inherent difference in this generation of men.”

Rodsky added it’s also an issue of relative statistics and absolute statistics. Frequently, she added, studies claiming that fathers are spending more time with their children children are based on data that’s self-reported. The way questions are asked matter too, she further elaborated. It’s not so much who is in charge of childcare, or the time spent with a child, but the questions to ask should be centered around the cognitive labor of a task. In other words, the mental load. 

Rodsky said these studies stating that fathers today are spending more time with their kids can sometimes be helpful, but most times they are harmful. 

“Men will say, 'What do you have to complain about? I'm so much better than my dad,'” she said. “We're not looking at that type of comparison. We're looking at, well, I have to do much more than my mom, right? We want equal partnerships.”

Rodsky said women want their male spouses to handle the “conception and planning” of cognitive labor. To take ownership of a task from start to finish. “We need people who are willing to handle the conception and planning, to take over the cognitive labor, the ownership of a task from start to finish,” she said. “Until then, women will not have any relief from the mental load or from this unpaid labor challenge that we're in right now.”

Rodsky said early in her research for "Fair Play," she did a word cloud study for women on words they associated with childcare and housework when married. The two most used words were “overwhelmed” and “boredom.” 

“Nobody wants to be overwhelmed and bored, so I think that was the biggest concern for me, because this is a higher educated population of women, and so there is that boredom in the remoteness of the unpaid labor tasks,” she said. “But on top of it, it's still extremely overwhelming because of these cognitive labor demands.” 

For future research on parenting and gender roles, and to get a better grasp on what’s happening in America, Rodsky said there needs to be a deeper understanding of cognitive labor.

“I think it's important to understand the difference between cognitive labor and execution,” she said.  “The more that we get people to understand, and for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to understand, and for Department of Labor to understand, and for anybody who does time use to understand: that there's a difference between execution and cognitive labor, then I believe we're going to be in a much better place for how people report how men are doing more.”

The post Today’s dads help out more than previous generations. Is it actually enough? appeared first on Salon.com.

It wasn’t a chore – I was happy for my parents. They'd be catching up with friends from a bygone era at an old haunt of theirs: a beachfront tiki bar-dance club with frothy, tropical drinks, raucous conversation, and a steady stream of Italian-Americans — the kind of atmosphere that irrevocably signals that you’ve reached the threshold of the Jersey shore. 

A gentle breeze drifted in from the ocean on my right, wrapping itself around my pre-teen sister and me where we were seated on the boardwalk in plastic chairs, picking at the last vestiges of our cotton candy and caramel apples. The sky was growing steadily bluer by the minute. Over the toss of the tide and an arcade full of screaming children, I could hear the opening bassline of New Order’s “Blue Monday” emanating from inside the tiki bar. 

Somewhat insufferably and unoriginally, I often find myself more preoccupied with thoughts of other periods throughout the 20th century than the now. Sure, there’s the existential dread fomented by these trying times that makes contemplating the present and future near impossible on most days that end with "y." But I’m also intensely fascinated by the cultural and sociopolitical contexts that defined those decades. When my grandmother passed away over the winter, the only good thing to come of it was the troves of sepia-toned photographs and personal items that were unearthed from her storage. It felt like sifting through the treasures inside Ariel’s’ underwater grotto; even the tiniest trinket was etched with perfect, arcane meaning.

My parents, children of the ‘70s and teens of the ‘80s, have always been relatively tight-lipped about their high school days, at least when my four siblings and I were younger. The main way they've communicated those years of their lives with us has been through music, much of which is deep cuts from first-wave bands like Depeche Mode, The Cars, The Talking Heads, and more. 

Naturally, as the five of us have grown and dabbled in our own intermittent spates of degeneracy, we’ve become more privy to our parents' young adult lore. When a high school friend of theirs visited our home recently, she assuredly told my siblings and me, between deep sips of pinot grigio, “You guys don’t know your f***ing parents.”

Tectonic plates shifted and the rapture came and went before I had time to come down from her simple yet utterly astounding observation. She was right. At least in the context she was talking about, outside of old disposable camera photographs, I had no clue who these people really were, despite their lives’ obvious interlacing with my own. 

How was it so easy to forget that they were people before they were my parents?

This question has been simmering at the front of my mind for the past week, a time during which I’ve consumed dozens of TikToks and Instagram reels of Gen Z-ers like myself asking their Gen-X parents, “How would you dance to this song in the ‘80s?” The song in question is Bronski Beat’s debut single, “Smalltown Boy,” a synth-pop hit with unmistakable falsetto yowls and striking lyrics, which describe a young gay man who is forced to leave home after being harassed over his identity. 

The videos, which have circulated widely across social media, are incredibly wholesome: The question is asked, and moms and dads are immediately luminous, momentarily transported to another time before they fall into an all-too-familiar rhythm. The clips I’ve seen have ranged from Jennifer Garner doing a variation of Molly Ringwald’s signature “Breakfast Club” punch-kick combo (surprisingly, instead of her "13 Going on 30" favorite, “Thriller”), to dads in skinny jeans dropping their best moonwalk and moms going full disco-mode while throwing their arms from side to side. 

I scrolled through reel upon reels this past weekend, smiling to myself with the quiet knowledge this trend had inadvertently served as a unique reminder of our parent's personhood, not as our guardians, but as people independent of that association.

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This observation was encapsulated quite profoundly by one Gen-X Threads user, who directed a few thoughts at “younger respondents” underneath a video of one middle-aged mama absolutely boogieing down. 

“We don’t ‘revert’ for a few minutes during a song/dance or however we used to express ourselves regularly,” the commenter said. “We may forget or feel put upon by our responsibilities but we remain whole inside with memories of freedom to express without consequence. We don’t become other people as we age.”

“'She’ is the same ‘she’ that first danced to this tune in a club 40 odd years ago. Older sure, wiser, we hope, but always constantly ourselves.”

On Reddit, one Gen-X parent confided to the thread that she not only loved the videos but also “secretly hope my kid will ask me to be in one lol.” LOL indeed!

Perhaps it's the power of music, from its sheer emotional appeal to its lasting psychological impact, that also functions as a common thread between the kids watching and the parents dancing. According to Gen-Zers like me who are similarly infatuated with the trend and also suffer from bouts of temporal and generational dysphoria, the trend, as one X/Twitter user puts it, is “proof our generation is lame af.”

“80s dancing parents is the new sea shanties. I want one hundred thousand videos of this,” another person tweeted, citing TikTok’s obsession with sailor’s work songs in 2021. 

Watching videos of the ‘80s dance trend also made me yearn for what truly reflected a simpler time. “Dance like nobody’s watching” seemed to have really meant something back then.

Devoid of cell phones and social media and all its many drawbacks, the ‘80s seemed like a far more uninhibited era, as evoked by the dancing specifically. Many of the moves observed in the videos are jerky, and erratic, which would be delineated as awkward or nerdy by today’s watered-down standards. And yet, it’s undeniably passionate, injected with beauty and vigor that might just be inspiring Gen-Z to bust out the Cabbage Patch or the Roger Rabbit at their next nightclub appearance.

Our parents aren’t preserved in amber – they’ve aged and changed. And they were meant to. If our caregivers still acted the way they did in their most hormonally frenetic heyday, sans a fully matured frontal lobe, I’m certain a lot more of the proverbial sh**t would have hit the fan. 

But as one person wrote on X/Twitter,  “The groove will always remain within you.” 

And that’s true. I’ve seen my parents be moved by the beat at countless concerts, thrum on the steering wheel-air drums, and rock out in our kitchen while making dinner my entire life. But when I recently asked them how they would’ve danced to “Smalltown Boy” back in the day, they smiled and politely declined to show me. And that’s OK; I didn’t mind. Maybe some memories should be reserved only for them, for the people they were before they were before they became my mom and dad.

The post The compelling trend of watching Gen X dance like nobody’s watching appeared first on Salon.com.

In the same sun-drenched week in August, that baby, my elder daughter, started preschool and I signed a publishing contract for my debut novel, "California Dreaming." Two years after that, my younger daughter has started at that same preschool, and "California Dreaming" is mere days from being released.

Like those early months of motherhood, writing is an intensely private, solitary act. For me, to write necessitates going inward, it requires shutting out the outside world and external stimuli for the sake of being able to listen fully. My writing process takes inspiration from Anne Lamott’s practice of the one-inch picture frame. All through my daughters’ early years, I would carve out pockets of time — while they napped, or after bedtime, or when they were at the playground — to write. My pace of writing my novel was complementary to the pace of motherhood, the pace of attending to a baby and then a toddler. Each day I wrote just 250 words, filling my one-inch frame.

I am not the first to notice the connection between writing and parenting, but while many have compared publishing a book to giving birth, for me there is an even more apt comparison. Both child and book lived in and then with me for many years after their births. For me, publishing a book feels most parallel to sending my child to preschool for the first time, for it is in both these acts that that which once lived solely inside the private, domestic realm, and within only a few primary relationships, now enters the public sphere.

The distinction between the public and private realms, the separation between domestic and political spheres, has long been deeply intertwined with the preservation of a capitalistic society. Mothering so often happens outside of the public sphere, outside of the public gaze, and much has been written about the hidden, unpaid labor of caretaking. In our society, there is a hiddenness inherent in the domestic realm and a hiddenness to the lives and experiences of women.

Perhaps the novel form itself could be considered a kind of public square, a forum in which human relationships, motivations, self-discovery, and journeying gets played out again and again through different lenses, and under different gazes. Historically, even in the context of the novel, significant female life experiences — childbirth and abortion, breastfeeding and postpartum depression — have not been explored nearly as deeply as those life experiences of typical male self-development.

In my writing, I am drawn to exploring the inner lives of women, especially during moments of significant life transitions. In "California Dreaming," the main character is Elena, who, over the course of the novel, grows from a young, idealistic early 20-something, into a 30-year-old woman who reckons with the decisions she has made, the values she holds and the stories she has inherited. It is a bildungsroman, a story form that traces the general and spiritual coming-of-age process, and it is told in the first-person point of view, granting Elena herself the narrative voice to describe her journey. There is an intimacy in using the first-person, a way of drawing near to the narrator that allows for greater play and insight into the narrator’s own development, her way of viewing the world, her inner life.

In an interview with Terry Gross in 1985, the writer Grace Paley reflected, “When you write, you illuminate what’s hidden, and that’s a political act.” For many years, my primary world has been the private, domestic, intimate world of mothering little children and writing and rewriting and editing a novel. A hidden world. And now, gradually, there are bridges between the private and public realms, and that which has been hidden is becoming illuminated, revealed.

In the months after giving birth, I felt the deep truth of the fact that I was not fully separate from my children. And yet, as they have grown, we have each gone through periods of differentiation, of reasserting the boundaries of self. My children no longer exist primarily in a carrier or in my arms; they are no longer solely dyadic extensions of me. They go to school, they have thoughts and experiences and dreams and feelings and wishes that I am not witness to, and that they navigate with peers and teachers and the many other people who populate their life. They have relationships that are their own.

So, too, with my novel. For many years I worked in private tandem with the novel, with my own creative process. In the months since I signed my book deal, however, I have begun to experience the way my creative process—a process of unfolding, refining, listening, and responding—is being transmuted into an object, into something that will go out into the world, into the public sphere, and there take on a life of its own. We are differentiating, my book and I, and soon it will be in relationship with others, with readers who will encounter it as themselves, and form judgments, connections, and opinions about it that are distinct from my own.

Motherhood’s value has often been located in the fact that the children we are mothering will eventually become citizens of the larger society. Similarly, a book on its publishing journey—as I have newfound understanding and appreciation for—ultimately becomes a commodity. The publishing industry measures a book’s success in sales, and even my chance at publishing another book in the future may rest on the sales numbers of my first. In these months of preparing for my book’s launch, of asking bookstores and libraries to stock my book, and friends and family to pre-order, I have been struck by my own doubts of its inherent worth. To ask people to buy it, to spend money on it, has necessarily sent me diving into questions of its value: Will this book change your life? Must it be read? Will you like it? I don’t know.

Here’s what I do know: it had to be written. It called to me again and again during the writing process itself, that private, intimate birthing and caring for of this idea, these characters, this story, this particular viewpoint on the whole messy endeavor that we call life, and I couldn’t not write it.

In many ways, this is the same way I feel toward mothering my children. I don’t know who they will become, or what they will or will not contribute to society. I mother them in this moment, now, because they are here, in front of me, whole and perfect and messy and complete human beings just as they are. I attend to them because I must, because I am called to with my whole self.

It can seem at times that worth and value exist exclusively in the public sphere, in the shared collective, in the process of being witnessed and incorporated into the greater whole. But when this greater whole is one whose meaning rests in capital, then worth and value become markers for how much something contributes to capital: the book that sells well, or the child who grows up to be a “productive” member of society—a worker, a voter, a consumer.

It is not that I am against a shared, collective space, not that I wish for more individualized and individualistic paths toward meaning — far from it. However, in the context of a public sphere that primarily operates in terms of product, output and money, the private realm can sometimes seem a place of refuge, a place where creative process and attentive mothering can actually coexist in harmony, for the sake of attention itself, for the sake of love—and not future production or consumption.

Yet, I wonder whether that coexistence can only occur out of the public gaze, in a hidden domain, or if it would be possible for it to thrive in the public sphere. What kind of relationships could we have, the witnessers and the witnessed, in which we could write and mother from a place of intimate curiosity, where we could do so in a way that feels held by others, by community, where it is neither solely a solitary, lonely endeavor, nor one whose worth is measured in a balance sheet?

Perhaps it is only in a novel where we can fully explore that possibility.

The post My book is not my baby — but the two do have a lot in common appeared first on Salon.com.

What was once misguidedly glorified as peak happiness of the female experience has turned into a dominant depiction of something quite different. Minna Dubin’s book "Mom Rage," recently examined the “hidden crisis of rage” affecting so many American mothers today while Jessica Grose’s book “Screaming on the Inside '' investigated the unsustainability of motherhood in America. These public narratives have likely contributed to viral essays, like the one by Vox writer Rachel Cohen, who wrote “it’s genuinely difficult to find mainstream portrayals of moms who are not stressed to the brink, depressed, isolated or increasingly resentful.” 

When I was pregnant two years ago, I wondered if motherhood would be as difficult as I read about in the public discourse. When I asked experts and historians if this was the worst time in American history to be a mom, I was told it wasn’t a great time, but it wasn’t the worst time. That Americans' experience of motherhood had always, and still does, depend on factors like race and class.

But since 2022, the path to pregnancy and choosing to become a mother has become more dangerous in the face of strict abortion laws. Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women. It’s nearly impossible to unanimously distill the experience of American motherhood into one narrative, especially along the backdrop of a changing reproductive access landscape. In an attempt to assess the current state of motherhood, I asked a dozen mothers from across the country point-blank: What’s it like to be an American mom in 2024?

“I would say that the moms are not okay and I find myself saying that in a variety of contexts,” Erin Erenberg, founder of Chamber of Mothers, a nonprofit that advocates for better support for moms, with local chapters in 21 states told Salon. “There are folks who are facing motherhood and having a more difficult time of it because they're up against systemic racism and poverty.”

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Erenberg, a mom of three children, used the example of it being a privilege for an American mom to have a desk job today. 

“We have mothers in our communities who are saying 'I can't go back to work when I'm still bleeding because I work on a fulfillment floor,'” Erenberg said. “[They say] ‘Here I am standing picking and packing boxes, bleeding through my jeans, my milk is seeping through my top.' There are so many different levels of privilege and pain, but the thing that is uniting all of us right now is that we're not okay.” 

Lack of federal paid support influences major life choices 

One theme I noticed in interviewing dozens of moms from different parts of the country with kids of all different ages is how a lack of federal support — from no paid parental leave to affordable child care — affects major life decisions. According to Paid Leave U.S., 25 percent of American mothers return to work two weeks after giving birth. Meanwhile, 51 percent of people in the U.S. live in a “childcare desert,” which the Center for American Progress defines as a place that has either no child care providers or so few options.

In 2024, there is still no U.S. federal law that provides a right to paid family leave, leaving most women to depend on their employer to take time off after having children or if their children get sick. It’s this lack of federal paid support that’s influencing where mothers work, live and how many more children they want to have, if any.

“I've stayed in roles I'd otherwise left because I had paid leave,” Amy Sterner Nelson, a mom of four, told Salon. “It's impacted my career choices.” 

Nelson was a lawyer for a decade, but left her job after her second child was born because she didn’t have a flexible work environment. “I think it's almost impossible to be a mother in America today because we live in an economy where most of us need to have two-income households,” she said. Indeed, families are paying 25% more for groceries than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic. “But we live in a culture where no one recognizes what that means.” 

Nelson pivoted to start her own business, a network of coworking spaces called The Riveter, to have more flexibility. Still, her schedule is demanding. She works between 5 and 7 in the morning, gets her kids ready for school, then works more between 8:30 am and 2:30 pm. “Then I pick my kids up and I'm mostly with them after school and that is because I can't find reliable after-school childcare, right?” she said. “We live in Ohio, now 500 yards from my parents, so they can help fill in gaps, otherwise it wouldn't be doable.” 

But starting your own business to have more flexibility later in parenthood comes with a cost when it comes to having another child. Taryn Lagonigro, also an entrepreneur, said with all four of her pregnancies, she had to make a decision about how long her maternity leave would be based on their financial situation at the time. With her third daughter, she was able to take six weeks off. 

“But since I was able to work from home, I still considered myself fortunate,” she said. “My youngest daughter required open heart surgery when she was just a few months old, so I had to take an extended leave that was fully unpaid to be able to stay home for her recovery.”

Eileen Lamb, author of "All Across The Spectrum" and a mom of two children with autism, said finding someone who's able to take care of her son's needs is certainly “difficult.” But she feels lucky to work for a company, Autism Speaks, that is understanding of her needing time off to take care of her kids. She said finding an employer who is understanding and offers flexibility when it comes to parenting children with higher needs has been key.

Carley Storm, a mom of two, said that lack of affordable childcare has influenced her decision on having another kid. She was paying $1,600 a month, totaling $19,200 annually, for childcare.

“The financial burden made it necessary for me to wait until my oldest child was in kindergarten before considering having a second child,” Storm said. “This delay was driven by the need to balance the financial strain of child care expenses with providing a stable environment for my growing family.”

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, childcare costs for one child take up between 8 percent to 19.3 percent of median family income.

Many moms feel "time poor"

In addition to the financial strain of childcare costs or not having paid maternity leave, there is also a feeling of being “time poor” for many American mothers. Dawn Robinette, a mom of a 13-year-old in Texas, said she thinks this feeling of not having enough time to do anything is “the reality for most moms today.”

“One priority causes another priority to fall off your plate,” Robinette said. “And most of the time, everything seems like a priority, so you must be okay with something not getting done. And then of course, you feel bad that something didn’t get done.”

Erenberg said she sees this struggle a lot among local chapters of Chamber of Mothers, too, and feels it herself. She thinks it’s in part because American motherhood is getting “bigger and bigger and bigger.” 

“It comes back again to this notion that we've misunderstood having it all with doing it all,” she said. “With the first wave of feminism, having it all was about you can have a career and you can be a mother, but I think what that's evolved to is that we have to do it all.”

Erenberg said the month of May, for Mother’s Day, is filled with tons of activities at her children’s school, which is great. But she’s left wondering how mothers are actually supposed to attend these activities. 

Brit Jones, a full-time working mom of two, said “balance” is “impossible to achieve,” in her opinion.

“My kids are 9 and 14, and there’s never a day where I feel like, ‘yes, I have succeeded across all fronts.’” she said. “Or, ‘I’m gonna high five myself, no balls were dropped today.’” 

When asked what people misunderstand about motherhood the most, answers differed. But mostly it was that the struggles for moms vary. Some mothers said lack of affordable childcare wasn’t an issue because they had a strong support system or lived in a family. Another mom told me she and her husband moved in with their parents to have built-in childcare. 

Erenberg said while all mothers’ struggles depend on a variety of factors, they are the one thing that brings mothers together right now. “The thing that is uniting all of us right now is that we're not okay,” Erenberg said.

The post Modern motherhood is a major challenge and many parents are struggling to cope appeared first on Salon.com.

Ian, who was more of a music connoisseur than I, informed me that he’d listened to Taylor’s entire catalog driving our oldest to school each day, and not only did she have more songs, she largely wrote them herself and played guitar. Our 9-year-old feminist’s favorite song was “We Are Never Ever Ever Getting Back Together.”

I was skeptical but in spite of myself, I kept skipping to “Stay Stay Stay,” right after “Never Ever Ever” on "Red," because it reminded me of Ian and our relationship — despite the muddling hardships of middle-aged marriage, we always chose to stay. It tickled me that 22-year-old Taylor had written, “Before you, I'd only dated self-indulgent takers.” How many narcissists could she have dated in her short lifetime?

When Taylor came to nearby Philadelphia in 2018 and Ian wanted to buy our daughters premium seats, I balked. Why ruin all future concerts for a 10- and 7-year-old? I figured they should sit in the wet grass in general admission like we had for our first shows.

We compromised on second best. The girls were ecstatic in their own ways: our younger one dancing in the aisles, while our oldest stayed seated and sang quietly along, intently studying Taylor and how everything worked together on stage.

I was struck by how well Taylor understood her audience and how well she tailored — pun intended — her performance to the young girls filling the stands. While some artists might be disappointed to have a following of preteens, Taylor seemed to relish it.

As it turned out, it was our last normal Friday as a family of four. We returned home to Baltimore, where the following week, Ian was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer.

While he was in treatment, he worked on introducing the girls to a deeper well of music—Neil Young, Yo La Tengo, Belle and Sebastian, Willie Nelson—but their favorite was “Woman” by Ke$ha, with the hard-to-forget lyric, “I’m a motherf**king woman.”

When he died 10 months later, “I’m a motherfu**ing woman” stuck. I played Ke$ha’s "Rainbow" album over and over on a road trip to Massachusetts and Maine that summer, eventually adding in P!nk and Adele, although we all agreed that Adele made us melancholy. I wanted the girls to have strong female role models.

Missing the chatter and clatter of the office during the pandemic nearly a year after that, I told Alexa to “play Taylor Swift’s latest album” — I didn’t even know it was called "Lover" — as background music.

I tried my former go-to artists, but it was too easy to get overly introspective sitting alone in my room while I tried to work. Taylor’s upbeat-sounding songs, which didn’t demand too much from me, turned out to be the perfect pandemic soundtrack.

I loved the playful optimism of “Lover” and “Paper Rings.” And when I really listened to the lyrics to “Soon You’ll Get Better” — about Taylor’s mom’s struggle with cancer — I was stopped in my tracks. So many lines in that song hit home, but “I'll paint the kitchen neon, I'll brighten up the sky/I know I'll never get it, there's not a day that I won't try” captured the utter helplessness of being a caregiver.

That summer, “Miss Americana” came out on Netflix, and though my 13-year-old thought she had outgrown her, we all emerged from the documentary impressed with Taylor’s newfound feminism, perception — and depth. I liked what she had to say about her struggles with body image and how she navigated finally opening up about her politics.

After getting my heart bruised by a friend I had hoped would be more, I discovered that "Red" was my favorite Taylor album. Not just “Stay Stay Stay” but especially “Treacherous,” which reminded me of how scary — and risky — falling in love again can feel.

It turns out that Taylor gets her heart broken a lot. And even at 22, she possessed a sageness about relationships.

In Susan Cain’s "Bittersweet," she talks about what draws us to sad music over happy music.

“People whose favorite songs are happy listen to them about 175 times on average,” she reports. “But those who favor ‘bittersweet’ songs listen to them almost 800 times, according to a study by University of Michigan professors Fred Conrad and Jason Corey, and they report a ‘deeper connection’ to the music than those whose favorites made them happy.”

“They tell researchers that they associate sad songs with profound beauty, deep connection, transcendence, nostalgia and common humanity — the so-called sublime emotions,” Cain writes.

Similarly, I associated Taylor’s music with my lost friendship and my missing husband and my newly wild hormones.

When I felt like I was coming out of my skin as the never-ending pandemic raged on in the winter of 2021, I took long, freezing nightly walks with my reluctant Shih Tzu and listened to the whole "Red" album in order. I did the same thing as I started writing down my experience with cancer and grief for an hour each night. During the day I told Alexa to “shuffle songs by Taylor Swift,” switching over to "Red" at 5 p.m. to write.

At the same time, I was going through a “red” phase of my own, trying to brighten up my widowhood with first a cheerful red coat, and as the seasons progressed, red strappy sandals and three red bathing suits — culminating in a sporty red car.

My daughters watched this transformation with fascination, not having the words for “midlife crisis.”

When she released "Fearless (Taylor’s Version)," my 25-year-old co-worker and I bonded, not just over our love for Taylor’s music but also her project to rerecord all her old songs so that she would own them outright. We loved the example she was setting for young artists, particularly women.

"Red (Taylor’s Version)" came out two years after Ian’s death, and my daughters and I cheered. My 14-year-old, who once considered herself too cool to watch Taylor’s documentary, asked me to go on long drives. We drove north on I-83 in Maryland toward the Pennsylvania border and dissected every song.

So when presale tickets for Taylor’s Eras tour came out on what would have been Ian’s 51st birthday, it seemed fated that we would get a code. Except fate, as my daughters and I know — I might say as we know all too well — doesn’t work like that. I put a plea on Facebook and after hours of effort, a friend found us just two tickets to the Philadelphia show, where we’d first seen Taylor with Ian.

As the date grew closer (it would be in May, just days before the fourth anniversary of Ian’s death) I purchased three tickets from a third-party reseller so we could all go. To appease my guilt at spending this much money on concert tickets — an amount that would make Ian blush, despite his desire to get them front-row seats the first time around — I decided to pay the original two forward. I gave them to a friend, and when she got sick and couldn’t go, she passed them on to two thrilled teenage girls.

On that perfect-weather night in May, we danced and swayed with the nearly all-female audience as Taylor gracefully — and when she couldn’t pull off graceful, then humorously self-deprecatingly — moved through her eras. That July would mark four years since we’d seen her as a family of four, and I wondered at how much we had all changed.

My oldest, the introspective one who’d stayed in her seat for the first concert, never left her feet. At almost 16, she was just beginning to emerge from a long depression that started when her dad was diagnosed with cancer, compounded by the pandemic and her ADHD, which made getting caught up difficult. My younger daughter, the extrovert in a family of introverts, planned her outfit with care, choosing to rep the "1989" era. She wore a white mini skirt, a sparkly white boa, and a powder blue halter top with matching cowboy boots. At nearly 13, she was the one who occasionally sat down with me to rest her feet.

I tried unsuccessfully to hold back tears as Taylor entered the stage at exactly 8 p.m. to wild cheers from the audience, my own children and to my surprise, myself. I marveled at this near-sacred space Taylor represented for her fans and our family, and at how far we’d come since the early days of Ian’s death — when my daughters could hardly stand to be in the same room together and I would sometimes shout at them until my throat was hoarse. When my older girl disappeared into her room for long hours and my younger one slept with me every night, worried about letting me out her sight. Here we were, arms linked, experiencing this hallowed moment together.

"The Tortured Poets Department" dropped this Friday, and we spent the weekend listening, looking for clues about Taylor’s life, and ultimately our own. Though it’s an album devoted to the grief of busted romance, we see ourselves in it too. In the “manuscript” of Taylor’s life, she — like us — has learned to “do it with a broken heart.” And, she seems to be saying, it hasn’t been all bad.

As my now teenage daughters and I move into our own unknown and increasingly separate eras, we’ve reached a place not unlike “Florida!!!”: “Well, me and my ghosts, wе had a hell of a time/ Yes, I'm haunted, but I'm feeling just fine.” We know there will be inevitable heartbreak and grief along the way — but also touchdowns and comebacks and even the “alchemy” of new love. Throughout Taylor’s eras and our own, there is room for it all: joy, adventure, pain, wanting, rebirth. The best is yet to be written.

The post Taylor Swift, grief therapist? How my late husband’s Swiftie legacy brings our family comfort appeared first on Salon.com.

My daughter, who trusts me to take care of her, to slay all of the monsters under her bed, to hold her at doctor's appointments during shots, to explain things that she doesn't understand, to be her go-to guy for everything when everyone is around or when it's just us, does not, cannot and will not listen to any of my food recommendations. The nerve!

Doesn't matter if it's candy, cake, cereal, or whatever – if she doesn't know it, then she doesn't trust it. Sometimes I feel like she looks at me as if I am a scammer, a food scammer – a great guy when it comes to recommending movies or new cartoons or books, but a super scammer when it comes to anything edible.

“Hey baby,” I say in my sweetest voice. “You love pie and you love apples so I know you would just love this apple cobbler.” 

“Cobbler?” She responds one eyebrow raised, her small nostrils flaring over the plate, “Daddy, no. It’s be-sgusting!” 

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What confuses me the most is that sometimes she'll do this with foods she is very familiar with. Paying attention to detail, to some of the smallest things like packaging, the way it is arranged on the plate, and who prepared it, whether it's me or her mom. 

“Mommy, you are the best cook in the world,” she swoons, kissing up to my wife. “Your pancakes are so be-licious!” Daddy's pancakes are be-sgusting!” 

My wife could lay back and suck up all of the praise, but since she's a good sport, she explains to our daughter that they are the same pancakes, from the same company and we prepare them the same way — in the toaster oven, for four minutes, sliced into triangles and served with strawberries and whipped cream.

But that’s not good enough, my daughter requires more. 

We have been having this battle with our child since we switched her to solid foods three years ago and have developed a few ways to con her into eating healthy and sometimes trying new foods. I'm excited to share a few with you. 

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In our recently published research, parents told us how much effort they put in to feeding children when there is little money.

They also told us how the ever-present juggle of budgets and the realities of family life strained relationships and increased their mental load.

Living in poverty

In the cost of living crisis, one in six Australian children live in poverty. More families than ever are seeking help from food banks.

So we asked parents what it was like to feed young children when money was tight. We interviewed 29 Australian parents with at least one child between six months and three years old. Most had an income around or below the poverty line.

The average age of parents was 32 years, including 28 mothers and one father. This is what they told us.

Family tensions rise

Families' financial position was precarious, with little buffer to cope with more financial strain. One parent told us:

We're still on the one income […] We try and get a lot of free vegetables from the food banks and whatnot. We've borrowed money in the past, but the main thing we do is make sure [our child's] food is fine.

This uncertainty about money flowed into relationship tension, and stress about food waste and the food bill. Another parent, who said they had lost weight due to not eating proper meals, told us:

Things have been tense, and [my partner's] pretty upset about outgoing money for [food …].

There was also strain when young children created a mess with food or threw it on the floor:

But then my partner's like 'why are you buying that bunch of bananas? Most of it's, like, in his hair.' As trivial as it might sound to some households, [it] caused a lot of stress in ours.

Making trade-offs and sacrifices

Parents described feeding the family as a difficult balance. They put the needs of children and partners first. They often hid their sacrifices from their partners. One parent told us:

My partner doesn't miss out anywhere near as much as what I do. He doesn't know that either. […] But there is many, many, many days where I will go without a meal.

The unseen mental load

Not having enough money increased the load caused by the thinking, planning and emotional strain of getting enough food to feed everyone. One participant said:

It's always there in the back of my mind […], what would I do if I really didn't have anything left to feed all of us.

Resilience and creativity

Parents described multiple strategies to make the most of the food they had.

We will now go to the fruit and vegetable shop that's quite far away from our house because it's cheaper to buy it in bulk [… We] pre-plan, absolutely, and meal plan.

Despite hardships, parents adapted to challenges by being creative with food and cooking. One parent said:

In the last food parcel I got there was this big bag of polenta, […] you don't want to be wasteful […]. I'll look at […] simple recipes that have that ingredient […] and go from there.

Parents valued mealtimes as family time, to connect and share. Parents tried to make the most of their situation and remember that when it comes to meals, "basic doesn't mean bad".

What does this mean for supporting families?

Health professionals working with parents need to know many struggle to feed their family. It's not just a matter of budgeting or cooking; parents already do that. The high mental load parents experience needs to be recognized. Programs and support should be accessible, brief and realistic.

Common advice, such as offering food many times and providing variety to children, may need to be adapted. Variety could be sourced from foods on special, and food waste reduced by offering small amounts of new foods at first.

We also need to ensure the food offered in childcare centers is adequate and healthy. Providing good-quality school meals would relieve the pressure on parents to supply a healthy lunchbox, or give money for the canteen. This would give all Australian children the chance to enjoy a variety of nutritious foods, regardless of their situation at home.

We would like to thank the families who so generously shared their time and stories with us. We also acknowledge our research team: Smita Nambiar-Mann, Robyn Penny and Danielle Gallegos.

Kimberley Baxter, Research Fellow, Centre for Childhood Nutrition Research, Queensland University of Technology and Rebecca Byrne, Dietitian and Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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This week, a study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics found that children who watch television before the age of two may be more likely to exhibit “atypical sensory behaviors,” such as being disengaged in activities, seeking more intense stimulation or being overwhelmed by loud sounds or bright lights. The researchers looked at data on TV and DVD watching by babies and toddlers between 12 and 24 months provided by the National Children’s Study of 1,471 kids. They also looked at sensory processing outcomes that were assessed at 33 months, using data from the Infant/Toddler Sensory Profile (ITSP) questionnaire.

The researchers found that any screen time exposure by 12 months of age, compared to no screen time, was associated with a 105% greater likelihood of those kids exhibiting “high” sensory behaviors instead of “typical” sensory behaviors at 33 months. At 18 months, an additional hour of daily screen time was associated with a 23% increased chance of the child exhibiting high sensory behaviors. The more children were exposed to TV by their second birthday, the more likely they were to be less sensitive to respond to stimuli, like their name being called, by 33 months.

This study adds to a list of growing concerns about screen time and developmental outcomes, according to the researchers.

“This association could have important implications for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism, as atypical sensory processing is much more prevalent in these populations,” lead author Karen Heffler, MD, associate professor of psychiatry at Drexel’s College of Medicine, said in a statement. “Future work may determine whether early life screen time could fuel the sensory brain hyperconnectivity seen in autism spectrum disorders, such as heightened brain responses to sensory stimulation.”

If toddlers exhibit these symptoms, Heffler recommends a reduction in screen time and possibly occupational therapy.

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So, I’m kind of an old dad – like the person among my childhood friends that isn’t a grandparent or doesn’t have an adult offspring and yes, they make fun of this every chance they get, saying things like, “You’ll be 90 at your daughter's high school graduation!” I was 39 when my first child was born, my wife was 36, and the doctors even called her pregnancy geriatric.  

And like the geriatric parents we were, we gifted our daughter every single last toy in the world, over a dozen Barbies, with multiple Barbie accessories, American Girl dolls, the American Girl-looking doll they sell in Target, all kids of LEGOs, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Heads, a fleet of Build-A-Bears and everything else. And that’s just us. 

My daughter is one of three grandbabies or her mother side, and the youngest and only girl on mine, so yes, yes, yes – they spoil her as well, to the point where she can open her own toy store and didn’t really appreciate the value of a good loyal sturdy doll. How could she? We gave her too much, too soon.

So, my wife and I vowed to implement the rule of three. Three gifts, and that’s it. This works if you tell the kids that the gifts are coming from you, or if Santa gets the credit for the purchases you make. 

(Gifts are for well-behaved kids who listen to their parents, perform well in school and have integrity. Disrespectful children who act up in school deserve lumps of coal – and I’m not exactly sure where you’d get a lump of coal but I’m guessing Amazon.) 

Stick to these three categories, and I guarantee Christmas shopping for your children will become a lot easier. Happy holidays. 

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