The family minister of Germany, arguing that both boys and girls benefit from having men as well as women in their lives, is seeking to get men on kindergarten staffs, The Local reports.
If your parents decide to leave their marriage, you’re more likely to consider leaving your life — especially if you’re male, according to a new study, The Huffington Post reports.
Why the gender difference? The study’s author suggests:
Probably loss of the male role model, the father figure. The majority of children of divorce are raised by their moms. There are a portion of children who have very limited contact with their dad. The loss of a male role model is very significant for young men who are developing their gender identities. When you look back at the general literature, that seemed to be the one that popped up, but we don’t know for sure.
Another possible factor: A boy living with the mother who divorced his father is a potential father whose life has been shaped by a decision — made by the two most powerful authorities in his life: his custodial parent and his government — to take his father out of his daily life. This implies that either his father didn’t love him or, more likely, his father was unable to protect his values.
A new study that followed 1,000 people for more than 30 years links the ability to control one’s impulses early in life to health and wealth in adulthood, Maia Szalavitz writes in Time.
Improving your self-control as you grow can help too, one of the study’s authors says in a lengthy press release.
Jan 242011
It’s hard to comment on a film I haven’t seen, but this looks interesting:
A concerned mother turned filmmaker aims her camera at the high-stakes, high-pressure culture that has invaded our schools and our children’s lives, creating unhealthy, disengaged, unprepared and stressed-out youth. . . . Race to Nowhere points to the silent epidemic in our schools: cheating has become commonplace, students have become disengaged, stress-related illness, depression and burnout are rampant, and young people arrive at college and the workplace unprepared and uninspired.
The film is called Race to Nowhere. And “nowhere” is indeed where you’re racing if you focus on creating a resume through fake achievement. But if that’s what it takes to get what students are being told they must get, the students aren’t the only ones to blame.
H/T Adam S. Baldwin
Jennifer Thieme argues that pro-choicers cannot maintain that abortion is a difficult decision. But they can: Contrary to Ms. Thieme’s statement, there’s no inconsistency in defending a right to abort a merely potential person — in fact, there’s a famous argument that abortion is OK even if the fetus is an actual person.
Pro-choice people can certainly say a fetus is a potential person, that is, the sort of thing that in the ordinary course of events will, or at least can, become a person. They merely hold (most of them) that it is not an actual person. Indeed, some philosophers hold that since a fetus is a potential but not actual person, it is permissible to abort it, but not permissible to inflict lesser harm on it, because in the latter case it may become an actual person who is less healthy than the actual person it would otherwise have become. Because it is a potential person, they may say, it has a value that makes abortion emotionally difficult, yet does not override the right to control one’s own body.
There is also a pro-choice argument that entirely sidesteps the question of whether the fetus is a person: Judith Jarvis Thompson’s violinist argument, which concludes that even if the fetus is a person, so long as it is biologically dependent on the mother, it may be aborted.
More importantly, nothing in the pro-choice position prevents recognizing that at least most women have a natural desire to reproduce, and that while sometimes other goals are more important, abortion does thwart this desire and is therefore painful — much as it would be painful to sell an heirloom one had wanted to pass on to one’s children, but one would do it if one had no better way to ensure that they had food.
A New York City rule requiring stores that sell cigarettes to sell the government’s anti-smoking message too — with dramatic posters showing diseased lungs and the like — has been struck down, The New York Times reports.
But not on First Amendment grounds.
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Dec 292010
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