Family

I was raised in one and have spent much of my career researching them. My findings have shown positive life outcomes—reflecting my own.

Evgenia Citkowitz’s The Shades, reviewed

A little parenting heresy on smartphones and screen time.

"I don’t agree with him on that one," my stepmother said. “It was wrong, and I don’t think he should have done it.” Usually she took my father’s side in these discussions. Not this time.

Tomorrow some people from Catholic Charities are coming to tow away the beautiful BMW 740iL that my father bought in Germany at the turn of the century. Like the vast majority of American males he was until then a car enthusiast who had never owned a nice car. He didn’t suffer from that​—​fancy…

If you have lived almost any kind of active life, after age 50 someone you know dies every day. Not necessarily someone you knew well. Not necessarily a spouse, a child, a parent—one of those whose death is like a part of yourself, crushed and torn away. But someone you knew, yes: an acquaintance,…

There's a song I’ve started to play on the piano. It’s called “Money,” a fairly straightforward arrangement by Burt Bacharach. The only problem is Liza Minnelli’s eyes. They keep staring back at me from the opposite page.

Sunday Hill Farm, Wiltshire

We are living through the golden age of the cinema of Sacramento. Oh, you didn’t know there was such a thing? There is. It’s new. Very new. In 2015, the Sacramento radio station NOW 100.5 could find only eight movies filmed in part in Sacramento over the previous 30 years, and in all of them it was…

"Fostering kids is not an easy thing to do,” Christi Dreier of Round Rock, Texas, recently told the Wall Street Journal. Dreier and her partner have fostered several children and adopted three of them. Complaining about a bill that recently passed the Texas house of representatives, she explained,…

"Fostering kids is not an easy thing to do,” Christi Dreier of Round Rock, Texas, recently told the Wall Street Journal. Dreier and her partner have fostered several children and adopted three of them. Complaining about a bill that recently passed the Texas house of representatives, she explained,…

"Fostering kids is not an easy thing to do,” Christi Dreier of Round Rock, Texas, recently told the Wall Street Journal. Dreier and her partner have fostered several children and adopted three of them. Complaining about a bill that recently passed the Texas house of representatives, she explained,…

I called my mother on her 80th birthday last month. My brothers and sister and I were emailing each other as we've done every birthday of hers since she died more than six years ago. One of them remarked, "You know her phone is still working, right? You can hear her voice on her outgoing message."

I called my mother on her 80th birthday last month. My brothers and sister and I were emailing each other as we’ve done every birthday of hers since she died more than six years ago. One of them remarked, "You know her phone is still working, right? You can hear her voice on her outgoing message."

Pope Francis spoke to Congress this morning and Ross Douthat had an observation which helps a great deal in understanding the man:

The difference between man and woman is the force that hauls life forward (as the Talmud remarks) and the origin of everything that is most beautiful in our world. I thought I understood that, but I didn’t until my father died. The whole can transcend the sum of parts, and that’s why Judaism deems…

On MSNBC today, Washington Post reporter Janell Ross hinted that Jeb Bush was covering up a major family scandal -- but she offered no proof or explanation for her comments. Even the MSNBC host made an effort to distance herself and her network from the Post reporter's comments.

Vice President President Joe Biden announced the passing of his son, Beau Biden, in a statement released by the White House.

President Obama talked about his commitment to Africa in personal terms last night at the White House. "I stand before you as the President of the United States and a proud American," Obama told the U.S.-African Leaders Summit at dinner last night.

The administration for children and families, part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), issued guidance in a memo on Wednesday regarding application of the federal government's policy on same-sex spouses/marriages to all Head Start and Early Head Start programs.  

President Obama did not attend the funeral of his late aunt Zeituni Onyango. Instead, he went golfing.

On the one hand, Barack Obama, speaking as a dad, says he "would not let my son play pro football." It's a reasonable judgment, one other parents have made and one they're entitled to make (though enforcing it on recalcitrant sons is another matter!).

Every time you think that we've finally touched bottom on Obamacare, some new problem emerges. So what began merely as a dysfunctional website became a broken and mis-designed system. When it turned out that lots of people were paying more for their plans, it then turned out that others were having…

A Census Bureau report released on Tuesday says that the number of households with children under 18 with at least one unemployed parent increased by 33 percent between 2005 and 2011 from 2.4 million to 3.2 million.  In addition, home ownership among households with children under 18 declined by 15…

President Obama likes to talk about income inequality, but what matters far more is the actual income of the typical American.  And how has the typical American household income fared on Obama's watch?  Well, the economic "recovery" has now spanned an Olympiad, and during that time the typical…

Vice President Joe Biden, speaking today at the Bombay stock exchange, claimed Indian relatives. 

'Time was when the whole of life went forward in the family,” the historian Peter Laslett once wrote, “in a circle of loved, familiar faces. .  .  . That time has gone forever. It makes us very different from our ancestors.” Laslett was writing in 1965, as he lamented the decline of the family over…

Garden City (“What a misnomer!” said cousin Betty, who’d been there) is the seat of Glasscock County, a rectangular piece of flat, dry West Texas with a population density of two per square mile. The population of the “city” fell as low as 100 early in the last century, but the 2010 census put it…

Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post writes:

In a speech near his Chicago home today, President Barack Obama got personal. He talked of the importance of family, using himself and his own experience as an example.

After delivering remarks on the "fiscal cliff" negotiations, the White House notified the press that President Barack Obama is skipping town for Christmas. The first family leaves tonight for Hawaii.

The president's reelection campaign is sending around a picture from what appears to be a family celebration of Barack Obama's 43 birthday, from 2004, in an attempt to raise campaign cash. Under the subject line, "Warning: This picture is cute," Obama for America, the campaign team, writes:

Over the weekend Jason DeParle had a long, interesting piece on marriage in the New York Times. The gist of the piece is this couplet: (1) Marriage is a key driver of economic prosperity for families and married parents are more likely to have prosperous, healthy, stable families than single…

On June 19, 1981 a vigorously healthy Justice Potter Stewart resigned from the Supreme Court at the age of 66. “I've always been a firm believer in the principle that it’s better to go too soon than to stay too long. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I wanted to have an opportunity to spend…

One aspect of President Obama's philosophically revealing — and mock-worthy — "Julia" web ad doesn't seem to have garnered as much attention as one might have expected. Just as Julia's life of government dependency isn't likely to inspire a new set of books along the lines of the celebration of…

The accession to power in Pyongyang of Kim Jong Un, son of Kim Jong Il and grandson of Kim Il Sung, is a unique achievement in world politics. How many other non-monarchical regimes have managed to retain power through immediate succession for three generations?

Mitt Romney released a new ad Tuesday that touted the fact that the former Massachusetts governor has been married to the same woman for 42 years and has been a member of the same church his entire life.