Parenting

Your trusted source for contextualizing the news. Sign up for our daily newsletter.

Within our marriage, my wife and I have a clash of cultures, which means we talk to our kids quite differently about the state of the world and its future. We play somewhat typecast roles. I’m the upbeat dad from America; she’s the no-nonsense mom from Poland.

What parent hasn’t been there? It’s been a long day, you still have dinner to make, maybe lunches for tomorrow too, and you just don’t have the energy to wrangle your kids into a new art project or plead with them to pick up a book. Instead, you give in when they beg for more iPad time.

Yet recent research shows that many of these portrayals of only children are inaccurate. And even though the single-child family structure used to be a rarity, it’s now the fastest growing family unit in the United States.

Because of its reliance on diplomacy, GP gives children a lot of power they don’t need and aren’t ready for (power, incidentally, they’ll expect to wield in places they don’t possess it, like school and playground). But bargaining isn’t necessary for children to learn that No means No.

Data centers powering the generative AI boom are gulping water and exhausting electricity at what some researchers view as an unsustainable pace. Two entrepreneurs who met in high school a few years ago want to overcome that crunch with a fresh experiment: sinking the cloud into the sea.

There was immediate backlash when Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos created through in vitro fertilization qualified as children under the state’s wrongful death law.

Every week, columnist Alyssa Shelasky asks anonymous city dwellers to record a week in their sex lives. The Cut’s Sex Diaries column, first published in 2007, was the basis of a 2022 HBO series.

With such a vast and often bewildering assortment of skin-care products on the market, it’s hard to know if their arcane arrays of compounds or other chemicals really do what their label claims. But from a scientific perspective, one ingredient stands out among the rest: retinol.

The baby was born. I woke the next morning and felt an instant, brutal claw across the heart. I saw the baby in her little plastic cot, I saw the back of the baby’s head and thought at once: the baby is dead. The baby’s floss of hair was matted with blood.