Family Articles | Chronicles

April/May 2020

#MeToo for Me, But Not for Thee

By Taki Theodoracopulos

Human nature does not change, at least not where the Hollywood types who hung around with Harvey Weinstein are concerned. Hypocrisy, not talent, is the number one commodity in Tinseltown.

Must We Kill the Economy To Kill the Virus?

Blog

March 2020

Must We Kill the Economy To Kill the Virus?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

President Trump is said to be privately expressing a deepening concern at the damage the coronavirus shutdown is doing to the U.S. economy and debating whether it can be safely reopened. Though castigated for his remark, Trump has a point.

Trail Life: A Christian Answer to the Boy Scouts

Society & Culture

January 2020

Trail Life: A Christian Answer to the Boy Scouts

By Michael Leaser

When Boy Scouts of America (BSA) announced their decision to welcome and validate openly homosexual boys six years ago, Cub Scout mom Theresa Waning saw the writing on the wall. Shortly after BSA’s announcement, the church chartering her son’s...

Correspondence

September 2019

In Fair Verona, a Fight for Family

By Nicole M. King

My husband and I touched down in Venice in late March, rented a Fiat 500, and drove through a rolling Italian countryside spotted with vineyards. Our destination was the medieval town of Verona. Verona has become something of a political...

Reviews

September 2019

Spying on the American Remnant

By Wayne Allensworth

As a boy, your author lived in a working-class neighborhood just outside Houston’s city limits. My parents were the children of rural people who had come to Houston looking for work during the Great Depression. They lived in frame houses sitting...

Columns

March 2019

Life Is Not a Fantasy

By Scott P. Richert

The reality of place has weighed heavily on me from a very young age. My knowledge of self has always been inseparable from the place in which I live.

Editorials

February 2019

Tucker Carlson’s Firebell

By Aaron D. Wolf

Tucker Carlson shook the punditariat, liberal and conservative alike, with his incisive analysis, delivered during one of his show monologues, of the breakdown of the American family, a genuine four-alarm crisis that cannot be exaggerated.

Society & Culture

July 2018

The Unmet Mentor

By Joshua Doggrell

Life changed forever for me and my family on June 19, 2015, when tragedy struck suddenly. In the aftermath, I turned to an old mentor. In the ashes of our loss and dismal emptiness, I opened A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. The first...

Columns

July 2018

Families

By George McCartney

On July 18, 1969, Sen. Edward Kennedy infamously drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island. He had left a late-night party with an aide named Mary Jo Kopechne supposedly to take her to the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard.

Too Steep a Price: Why the Liberal Family Died

Society & Culture

November 2017

Too Steep a Price: Why the Liberal Family Died

By Allan C. Carlson

Over half a century ago, the family system advocated by John Locke and modeled on Lockean liberalism seemed to have triumphed completely in the United States, in Western Europe, and globally.

A City on a Hill—With Transgender Toilets?

View

March 2017

A City on a Hill—With Transgender Toilets?

By Allan C. Carlson

As Carle Zimmerman argued, moral implosions and civilizational collapse have happened before, and they have always been followed by periods of renewal. People stumble their way back to the “fundamental mother-source” of civilizational strength:...

Correspondence

March 2017

Never and Always

By Wayne Allensworth

I turn down the soothing voice of “Gentleman Jim” Reeves. He looks at me from the CD case, a face thought of as handsome in his day, though Jim seems too mature and, maybe, just a bit innocent, even naive, for our jaded time.

Columns

February 2017

Dope Fiends of the West

By Aaron D. Wolf

What underlies all of the social science about the effects of smartphone addiction is an assumption about the good—what is right versus what is harmful for society.

View

October 2016

The Stork Theory

By Allan C. Carlson

Business Insider recently reported “a mind-blowing demographic shift” that is about to occur. Considering the globe’s whole human population, the number of adults age 65 and older will in a few years be greater than the number of children under...

Reviews

October 2015

Mechanical Nihilism

By James Kalb

This is a book about life in a society from which higher goods have been expelled, leaving no place for love, wonder, or beauty.

Correspondence

May 2015

Paterfamilias

By Egon Richard Tausch

In America today, we seem to face two alternatives: accepting hordes of invaders with alien cultures and ideologies, who are unwilling to assimilate and whose presence endangers the vestiges of our civilization; or homogenizing America into a...

Perspective

May 2015

Family Tradition

By Thomas Fleming

Michelle Parker, a young mother of two, disappeared from her Florida home in 2011 and has never been seen again. The only suspect in her disappearance is her husband, who has left the state with the two children.

American Proscenium

April 2015

Dabbling in DAPA

By William Watkins Jr.

In mid-February, U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen issued an injunction enjoining the Obama administration from implementing the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents program (DAPA).

Perspective

October 2014

Rebuilding the Family Castle

By Thomas Fleming

A police officer stops two black teenagers sashaying down the middle of a public street. According to law enforcement and at least one noninvolved witness, one of the two—a six-foot four-inch, 300-pound behemoth—charges the cop and goes for his...

Perspective

June 2014

Virtual Neighborhoods

By Thomas Fleming

“We’ve turned into a nation of TV watchers, video-game players, and virtual sex addicts,” observed the cheerful old cynic.

Correspondence

March 2014

Suicide State

By John C. Seiler, Jr.

“We don’t divorce our men; we bury them,” instructs Stella Bernard, played by a loony Ruth Gordon, in Lord Love a Duck (1966). That’s certainly better social policy than America has pursued since 1970, with no-fault divorce shattering...

Correspondence

December 2010

Prosperity

By Clyde Wilson

Declining prosperity is now a settled fact of American life. Prosperity is not measured by the day’s average of stock speculation, or the profits of bankers, or the munificence of government subsidies and salaries, or the consumption of luxury...

Perspective

September 2010

Break out the Booze?

By Thomas Fleming

No healthy boy has ever wanted to go to school. I know I did not. Parents who are confronted with a son who has played hooky or feigned a stomachache will sometimes try to reason with him, explaining why it is important to get a good education....

Child Abuse, the State, and the Russian Family

Correspondence

June 2010

Child Abuse, the State, and the Russian Family

By Wayne Allensworth

It was another episode in a series of shocking crimes against children. Little Sasha, just three years old, was pulled from the frigid waters of the Pekhorka River in January 2009.

View

May 2010

Adopting Indecency

By William Murchison

It’s not normal anymore to talk about normal. Yet, in so speaking, Scott Brown was 1,000 percent right. It really, truly, honestly is not normal for two people of the same sex to undertake the vital and holy estate of parenthood.

Vital Signs

May 2010

A Poverty of Spirit

By Paul F. Kennedy

A little-known federal program called Supplemental Security Income (SSI) fosters dependency and destructive behavior among our nation’s poor. SSI was begun in 1974 with the intention of helping aged, blind, and disabled people of little or no...

American Proscenium

January 2010

Janie's Got a Gun

By R. Cort Kirkwood

The bodies were barely cold at Ft. Hood when Slate.com writer William Saletan unlimbered his guns. It is, he announced, time for the military to lift its policy exempting women from combat.

Columns

June 2009

The End of the Chain

By Philip Jenkins

The global decline of fertility rates may well be the single most important trend in the contemporary world, a phenomenon that will transform our societies into something radically different from anything in recent history.

View

January 2009

A Home Is for Living, Not Flipping

By Greg Kaza

Did academics count the homes in Levittown? No, they were too busy deconstructing suburbia after World War II. But one tends to notice such minutiae in real neighborhoods where everyone knows his neighbors, including their strengths and weaknesses.

Vital Signs

December 2008

Europe’s Self-Jihad

By Roberto De Mattei

The Report on the Evolution of the Family in Europe 2008, published by the Institute for Family Policies in Madrid, suggests that the family is being closed down and sold off at bargain-basement prices.

View

April 2008

The End of the American Middle Class

By John Lukacs

We have now entered a new age which will not have a name or a designation until, I think, at least one or two centuries from now: But then, such is the evolution of historical terminology.

Vital Signs

January 2008

The Failure of “Family Policy”

By Stephen Baskerville

Welfare reform was supposed to discourage unmarried childbearing. However, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) recently disclosed that out-of-wedlock births are at a record high.

“Family Values”: Illegal Aliens and Their Sex Crimes

Vital Signs

April 2007

“Family Values”: Illegal Aliens and Their Sex Crimes

By R. Cort Kirkwood

Whatever President Bush says about the “family values” of the growing horde of illegal Mexican immigrants, chilling newspaper accounts and cold data tell a different tale.

Columns

March 2007

A Threat to Our Very Way of Life

By Aaron D. Wolf

Here’s a heresy for you. A grave danger is lurking among us, caused by certain people who are spreading lies—and in the name of Christianity! So grave is this danger that it threatens our very way of life.

Cultural Revolutions

November 2005

Attacking the Traditional Family

By Rep. Walter B. Jones

The traditional family is being attacked with an unconventional weapon: children’s story books. As books promoting a pro-homosexual ideology have slipped into public elementary-school libraries across America, unsuspecting children as young as...

News

September 2005

Outsourcing Parenthood

By Beverly K. Eakman

Two categories of parents emerged in the 1970’s: those who wanted to rear children and those who merely wanted to have them.

News

January 2005

Measuring Our Culture of Death

By Christopher Check

One side is celebrating, the other rending their garments, but both sides are wondering if the outcome of the November presidential election might signal a springtime for traditional moral values in America.

View

December 2004

Finding Eden

By Fr. Hugh Barbour

I have been a citizen of the sovereign state of California for most of my life. I can guarantee you, Alta California is not merely a result of the proverbial dreamin’, a state of mind, but an actual place.

View

July 2004

What Kind of Freedom?

By Doug Bandow

When family and culture are under constant attack, there sometimes seems to be no greater enemy than the American Civil Liberties Union.

View

July 2004

The Myth of an Antiglobalist Left

By William Hawkins

As I write, Washington has just been subjected to a weekend of left-wing protests that even the conservative-oriented Washington Times estimated brought 500,000 demonstrators to the nation’s capital.

Perspective

July 2004

Hatemongers

By Thomas Fleming

What do you call a man who loves his country but is not so enthusiastic about the government that confiscates half of his income?

Vital Signs

October 2003

Remembering the Covenant

By Harold O.J. Brown

During his term as president, Jimmy Carter, then a Southern Baptist, called for a White House Conference on Families in order to redefine family as any group of humans living together—so general a definition that college roommates or even a...

Vital Signs

September 2003

Real Education Reform

By Beverly K. Eakman

Over the years, the NEA has amassed some 300 policy positions, itemized as annual resolutions and set out in a published legislative agenda. The publication purportedly reflects all educators’ beliefs on assorted issues, from homosexual advocacy...

View

November 2002

The Family Against the Globalists

By E. Michael Jones

I once knew a lady who ran for governor of the state of Pennsylvania on the promise that, if elected, she would run the state like a family. Unfortunately, she lost the election, so we will never know what that would have been like.

View

November 2002

Molecular Families

By Douglas Wilson

As we look around at the pandemonium that characterizes the circus maximus of our once-great culture, there are few things as striking as the large number of what we might call “disconnected pockets of sanity,” otherwise known as nuclear families.

View

November 2002

Pro-Family, Pro-State?

By Doug Bandow

Freedom is under serious assault today. Government takes and spends nearly half of America’s income. Regulation further extends the power of the state in virtually every area of people’s lives.

Perspective

November 2002

In Praise of the Clan

By Thomas Fleming

A new Dark Age is already upon us, and perhaps we might learn a few lessons from the last one.

Vital Signs

November 2002

God, Man, and Family

By Harold O.J. Brown

The first chapter of the Bible forms the basis of the Christian understanding of the nature and dignity of man—and woman: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27).

Columns

August 2002

Ethnic Cleansing

By Scott P. Richert

Family traditions often get started by accident—especially, perhaps, those that center on food.

Cultural Revolutions

April 2002

Influence on Behavior

By Beverly K. Eakman

Dartmouth Medical School has published the results of research concerning parental influence upon children’s behavior in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Lo and behold: Parents’ “preaching” works!

Columns

December 2001

Something Both Brighter and Darker

By George McCartney

I went to see director Scott Hicks' Hearts in Atlantis not having read the Stephen King novel on which it is based. The little I knew of King's other fiction was not encouraging. I expected another excursion into bump-in-the-night...

Vital Signs

November 2001

Hell Is Other People

By Marian Kester Coombs

Robin N—wasn't sure what was wrong. The suburban Milwaukee mother of three had experienced a pang upon turning 35, but these "pangs" seemed to be intensifying as the months passed.

View

September 1999

My Son, the Sociopath

By Andrei Navrozov

A few years ago, before my son was born, I spent a weekend in the Hamptons at the country house of a moderately hip American investment banker. There were about 20 of us to dinner that evening, with all the usual cosmopolitan strains amply...

View

May 1999

Family Formation in America

By Virginia Deane Abernethy

Parents, some say, are people who use the rhythm method of family planning. One might better say that parents are optimists, people who think that the present is good and the future probably better.

View

May 1999

Family Policy Is Not Welfare

By Jean-Didier Lecaillon

Family policy is strangely absent from debates in Europe (the word "family" plays no part in the treaty of European Union signed at Maastricht). In France, however, it has become the object of numerous controversies.

View

May 1999

Mommy's Little Monster

By Philip Jenkins

Monsters are an ancient phenomenon in human history: There have always been individuals whose characters are marked by brutal, sadistic cruelty, who lack any redeeming instincts of compassion or mercy.

Perspective

May 1999

Defending the Family From Its Defenders

By Thomas Fleming

The phrase "family values," as it is used by politicians, marks one of the official borders between left and right in the United States.

Columns

May 1999

Values Clarification

By Humpty Dumpty

"Family values" is one of those political slogans that promises much and delivers nothing. It is a first cousin of such equally equally meaningless Bill-bennetisms as "Western values" and "Great Books." The primary problem with such expressions...

Cultural Revolutions

March 1999

Recent Run of Multiple Births

By Christopher Check

Professional pro-lifers have praised the courage of mothers who, faced with real threats to their health or the health of their unborn children, have rebuffed the modern medicine men offering "selective reduction."

Vital Signs

December 1998

Gingerbread Joshua

By Laurel Van Maren

I was baking gingerbread men. It was my three-year-old's idea, but his 13-year-old brother thought it would be a great thing to have on his own birthday the next day. I had to go out and buy the cookie-cutters because, at the age of 40 and as the...

Why Asian Population Growth Is Grinding Down

Vital Signs

October 1998

Why Asian Population Growth Is Grinding Down

By Virginia Deane Abernethy

Asia's currencies will not be the only things plummeting. Look next for a decline in fertility rates (the number of births per woman) in the countries affected by Asia's financial meltdown.

Vital Signs

January 1998

Courtesy

By Joyce Bennett

It does not take a commune to raise good children, but if, even in private schools, they are not taught to control themselves and parents are too preoccupied to do their duty, what kind of future are we sowing?

Abortion, Adoption, and President Clinton

Vital Signs

December 1997

Abortion, Adoption, and President Clinton

By Janet Scott Barlow

Last year, in a span of less than six months, President Clinton vetoed the congressional ban on partial-birth abortion, thereby positioning himself, based on public-opinion surveys of the procedure, as an abortion extremist; and spoke publicly,...

Vital Signs

May 1997

Estrogen Poisoning

By Marian Kester Coombs

A first-grade teacher in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., concludes that while some of her pupils suffer various degrees of parental neglect, others seem to be experiencing the opposite extreme.

View

October 1996

Habla Therapy?

By Janet Scott Barlow

Instruction #1: "Gather the following materials: a pair of scissors, paste or glue to use on paper, and a piece of construction paper, lightweight cardboard, or a plain piece of paper (in that order or preference) at least 8" x 10" and no larger...

Neonatal Circumcision: Preventive Medicine or Mutilation?

View

October 1996

Neonatal Circumcision: Preventive Medicine or Mutilation?

By Thomas Szasz

During most of human history, religious explanations and rituals imparted meaning to people's lives and justified controlling their conduct. Today, medical explanations and rituals often perform those functions.

Vital Signs

October 1996

Morticia of the Homestead

By Isabel Lyman

Eagle Forum, the national political organization headed by Phyllis Schlafly, once selected me Massachusetts Homemaker of the Year. My husband nominated me by filling out an application form.

Cultural Revolutions

August 1996

"Child Care"

By Scott P. Richert

Childcare is back in the news, thanks to a new study conducted by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a division of the National Institutes of Health.

View

October 1995

Our Global Parents

By Christopher Check

Many defenders of the family are more worried about world government than the terrific power their own local child savers wield, which is surprising.

Correspondence

May 1995

The Necessity for Ancestor-Worship

By Derek Turner

If we do not know about the history of our own families, we should attempt to find out about them. However unremarkable, or even ignoble, these histories may be when seen in isolation, they have become woven into the national being, like...

Vital Signs

May 1995

Licensing Parents

By Christopher Check

Licensing Parents, a new book by University of Wisconsin psychiatrist Jack C. Westman, bewails a recent surge in "incompetent parenting," a phenomenon which he defines as depriving a child not only of sufficient food, clothing, and shelter, but...

Cultural Revolutions

January 1995

National Retreat From Marriage

By Christopher Check

Bill Bennett seems determined to illustrate the old saw that generals are always fighting the last war. As the infantry struggles to arrest the invasion of special privileges for sodomites, now comes the order from the rear to give up the current...

Cultural Revolutions

July 1994

Wind in Their Sails

By David M. Wagner

Pro-Family lobbyists on Capitol Hill had a strong wind in their sails last March: the phrase "H.R. 6" had become a verb, meaning "to unleash a tsunami of angry phone calls, letters, and faxes from concerned citizens."

View

February 1994

My Old Man

By Thomas Fleming

"Sometimes it's hard to be a woman." God knows, Tammy Wynette had hard times to complain of, but if being a woman is difficult at the end of the millennium, becoming a man has always been hard.

Cultural Revolutions

March 1993

A Family Business

By Marshall Fishwick

The Schwinn Bicycle Company, which was run by the same family for 97 years, has gone bankrupt. No more Schwinn bikes? I remember mine, and brother Jack's, and those I bought my children in the 50's—visions of delight with their balloon tires,...

Cultural Revolutions

March 1993

Holding On Tight

By T. Padraig Higgins

New Jersey children better hold tight to their allowances because those legislative nannies in the Garden State are at it again. As of last July, kids under 13 who ride their bicycles without wearing a helmet are breaking the law.

Correspondence

January 1993

Family, Films, and Fallacy

By William Baldwin

There's something about a book sale. The blood quickens, the nostrils flare, the eyes narrow. Anyway, it's for a good cause. The "Friends of the Library" are putting it on, and somewhere among those one hundred thousand used books is at least one...

Vital Signs

October 1992

My Former In-Laws

By Thomas O. Jones

My former in-laws in the United States are direct descendants of Christopher Columbus. This is fact. It will now be demonstrated. No other family in North America can make this claim.

Reviews

October 1992

Gradgrind in Love

By David Gordon

Richard Posner has a complaint against many of his fellow judges. Owing to their lack of up-to-date information and their conservative backgrounds, his colleagues often decide cases that touch on sex in an ignorant and benighted manner.

Vital Signs

September 1992

In Loco Parentis, Part II

By Laura Rogers

My ten years of research have finally paid off. My article in the February 1991 Chronicles, "In Loco Parentis: The Brave New Family in Missouri," has led to nationwide opposition to the Parents as Teachers (PAT) program that began here in Missouri.

Vital Signs

April 1992

Noni

By Clinton W. Trowbridge

"Whew-whew! Whew-Whew!" I looked past my mother through the half open taxi window. An old man in a grey flecked, tweed jacket was walking a Scotch terrier on a leash.

Perspective

March 1992

Marriage—the Real Right to Privacy

By Thomas Fleming

The 150-year-old crusade for women's rights in America has, in the different phases of its history, devoted its energies to diverse causes. In the decades before and after the War Between the States, the principal cause was the right of married...

Reviews

March 1992

A World Safe for Democratists

By C. Winsor Wheeler

From one point of view, Who Owns the Children? is a manifesto of educational freedom, an exhaustively researched broadside aimed at the pseudo-academic pretensions of our federal and state governments.

View

February 1992

Social Security as Family Policy

By Christina F. Jeffrey

Almost two years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan did the nation a great service by making Social Security safely controversial.

View

February 1991

On the Study of History

By Forrest McDonald

American society is in trouble, and not only because our traditional values and institutions are under siege. The nuclear family is crumbling as a result of government policies that are ruthless when they are not mindless.

In Loco Parentis: The Brave New Family in Missouri

Vital Signs

February 1991

In Loco Parentis: The Brave New Family in Missouri

By Laura Rogers

Many people are concerned about the problems that face our nation today, and the good folks at the Missouri Department of Education are no exception. In an attempt to reverse the decline in enrollment and the high dropout rate, and to win back...

Reviews

October 1990

Inventing History

By John Wauck

If there were an award for the most successful revolutionaries of the 20th century, two relatively unsung yet worthy candidates would be Gunnar and Alva Myrdal.

Reviews

October 1990

Engines of Decline

By Allan C. Carlson

Disturbing the Nest is among the finest and most readable works of comparative sociology published in the last ten years, and the most effective critique of the Swedish welfare state now in print.

Vital Signs

October 1990

Alone Among Strangers

By Anne Marie Morgan

At the moment the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of states to enact parental consultation abortion statutes, the abortion-advocacy organizations went into high gear.

View

October 1990

Restoring Family Autonomy in Education

By Edwin G. West

Mark Twain once confided that he received public schooling as a child but never let it interfere with his education. Millions today are not so fortunate; for their education is being interfered with.

View

October 1990

Freedom and Morality

By Leonard P. Liggio

F.A. Hayek, in The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, offers us one insight into the nature of freedom and morality. Hayek argues that the major world religions have succeeded and endured because they reinforce the weak and imperfect points...

Cultural Revolutions

August 1990

Exposing Paradoxes

By Theodore Pappas

Children are dying in an increasing number of ingenious ways, and the only thing more disturbing than this trend is the even more ingenious way in which society is rationalizing and legally justifying their deaths.

View

May 1990

Leviathan's Children

By Allan C. Carlson

Washington apparatchiks have spent the last two decades in a frustrating search for a theme that could carry the sagging American welfare state. There are signs now that they have finally identified a, two-headed creature slouching toward...

Cultural Revolutions

May 1990

Childocentric

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Europeans accuse Americans of being childocentric, and I guess I'd have to plead guilty. My nine-year-old daughter is the apple of my eye. I want her to live in a society that is moral and free, that looks as much as possible like the old...

Cultural Revolutions

May 1990

A Defense of Drug Addicts

By Katherine Dalton

A defense of drug addicts another one, in the pages of our family magazine? But defend them we must; this time from prohibitionists who would carry on the fight in utero.

Reviews

January 1990

The Family Way

By John Wauck

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I've always thought that Tolstoy underestimated the variety of happy families, but his dictum definitely holds true from at least one point of view, that of family law.

Perspective

October 1989

A Prayer for My Daughters

By Thomas Fleming

In recent months both San Francisco and New York have been the scene of triumphs for the homosexual rights movement's efforts to legitimate single-sex liaisons. . . . Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, appearing on The McLaughlin Group, summed up the...

Reviews

October 1989

The Ties That Bind

By Jean Bethke Elshtain

Allan Carlson is a humane man, an effective polemicist, a dedicated familialist, and a scholar trained in macroeconomic theory with its panoply of techniques and its characteristic lingo—opportunity costs, utility curves, and the like.

Reviews

July 1989

Family Finances

Once a social ideal for many Americans—progressive reformers, labor leaders, enlightened businessmen like Henry Ford, and some New Dealers—"the family wage" has fallen into disrepute in recent decades.

Cultural Revolutions

October 1988

Day Care and Illegal Drugs

By Allan C. Carlson

Day care and illegal drugs are hot political issues. Yet there has been little public discussion of the relationship between changing family patterns and the use of illegal drugs.

View

August 1988

Charity Begins At Home

By Allan C. Carlson

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, when she was asked her opinion of her cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt, described him as "One third mush and two thirds Eleanor." The same could be said of FDR's creation, the welfare state: one third mush; two thirds Eleanor.

Reviews

July 1988

Sexual Habits

By Thomas Fleming

In writing of sensual pleasures, Thomas Hobbes observed that "the greatest" is "that by which we are invited to give continuance to our species, and the next by which a man is invited to meat, for the preservation of his individual person."

View

July 1988

Homosexuality and the Family

By Edward M. Levine

For nearly two decades, homosexuals and their sympathizers have increased their efforts to persuade opinion leaders, educators, clergy, government officials, and the public that their sexual lives, though different, are as normal and natural as...

Reviews

July 1988

Recovering the Medieval Family

By Bryce J. Christensen

Hatred of the past ill becomes a historian. Yet it is hard not to detect this disfiguring animus—paired with an overweening love of contemporaneity—in the works of many modern historians of family life.

Cultural Revolutions

June 1988

Discipline By the Wayside

Brats—now we call them hyperactive children—used to be disciplined; these days they are given drugs.

Cultural Revolutions

September 1987

Plummeting Rates

By Bryce J. Christensen

America's fertility rates plunged in the early 1970's, falling well below the minimal Zero Population Growth (ZPG) of 2.1 children per American woman. Never before has this happened to the nation while enjoying peace and relative prosperity.

View

October 1986

Fad Fatherhood

By Janet Scott Barlow

Participatory fatherhood. Shared parenting. The new American dad. By whatever name, the phenomenon has been two decades in the making, and we should have seen it coming.

Correspondence

September 1986

Save the Children

By Jane Greer

Joining a particular church is like marrying: One doesn't get a divorce just because one's husband's relatives lack aplomb—and the Bridegroom is ever constant.

Reviews

June 1986

Shotgun Marriage

By Carol McMillan

Reproductive control and genetic manipulation have been making the headlines for years. One day new developments in birth control herald a freer, happier world for women.

Reviews

June 1986

An Untimely End

There used to be two Daniel P. Moynihans. One wrote interesting essays on the foibles and pitfalls of crafting public policy. While seldom mistaken for a rigorous social scientist, this Moynihan had a gift for translating the esoteric findings of...

Reviews

June 1986

Selling Out the Kids

By Edward D. Snow Jr.

Most parents, especially those with teenagers, know the increasing costs of having children, but in Pricing the Priceless Child, Viviana Zelizer investigates the declining economic value of American children during the past century.

Equal Opportunity and the Limits of Liberalism

View

May 1986

Equal Opportunity and the Limits of Liberalism

By James S. Fishkin

The last two decades have seen a remarkable revival in academic political philosophy, particularly in the English-speaking world. A subject which was widely pronounced dead in the 1950's has recently produced thousands of articles and numerous...

Reviews

May 1986

Parent Abuse

As tales of child abuse are screamed out on the nightly news, pressures mount for a national policy.

Typefaces

December 1985

A Woman's Dreams

By Bryce J. Christensen

"Most women have no Characters at all," wrote Alexander Pope: "Good as well as ill, / Woman's at best a Contradiction still." The contradiction of womanhood will perhaps never be fully solved, but it has generally been considered manageable...

Opinions & Views

July 1985

Comparable Worth?

By Steven Hayward

Biographers of two tough ladies are bent on keeping their subjects out of the marriage bed and on the Procrustean bed of feminist ideology.

Perspective

July 1985

Friends of the Family

By Thomas Fleming

Chris Dodd and Pat Moynihan want the government to work to help the family-just like the Myrdals in Sweden and Joseph Stalin in Russia.

Music

September 1984

A Family Affair

By

One of the little-remarked phenomena of modern popular music is the fact that the familial tradition evident 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s (e.g. the Mills Brothers, the Andrews Sisters, Steve and Edie) continues on.

Opinions & Views

April 1984

Of Death and Diapers

By Bryce J. Christensen

Without promising greater self-fulfillment or enhanced self-esteem, the grave continues to enforce its traditional claims, even upon the most liberated rebels against all tradition. All militantly asserted rights to choose among innovative...

Reviews

February 1984

Waste of Money

An Empty Shell Game, Misbegotten 'Conservatism', Avarice and the Other Six

Family

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