Word: parentes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Before the salvation of marriage can progress, society requires an encompassing consensus that there is a problem. Currently, evolving such a consensus is being waylaid by an ideological word game. As long as the term family is used to cover both the "real" family and its antithesis -- the single-parent version -- the question of whether a society can do without families is hopelessly obfuscated. Moreover, a challenging thesis is hidden: the thesis that it does not matter which social arrangements adults devise to bring up children. It is implied (rather than demonstrated) by calling single- parent households "families" that...
Here science chimes in, its voice rising. Over the past years, a growing body of evidence shows that children who grow up under the tutelage of people other than their natural parents are more likely to fail in school, have social difficulties and get arrested. To a large extent, their failings reflect the fact that single parents are economically disadvantaged as compared with two-parent families. However, this difference is also affected by the dismemberment of the family. It costs more to run two households than...
...allegations also speak to the modern preoccupation with child abuse. In an age when lurid lyrics, sniggering sitcoms and trash-talking stars work hard to rob children of innocence, the sexually abusive parent, guardian or family friend is not only a predator in his own right but also a stand-in for all the gaudy malevolence of pop culture. "There's a social hysteria about child abuse," says Professor Melvin Guyer, a psychologist and lawyer who teaches at the University of Michigan. "It began with the McMartin Pre-School case and continued with Woody Allen. There has been a feeding...
...custody cases, charges of child abuse can be the useful tool of a vindictive parent. "A contested custody battle provides fertile soil for false allegations of sexual abuses," says Guyer. "There are therapists who interview children in ways that are leading, suggestive and coercive; they are the validators of sexual abuse charges." The charges in the Jackson case smell fishy to Lynne Gold-Bikin, a Philadelphia family lawyer and chairwoman- elect of the family-law section of the American Bar Association. "You're looking at a 13-year-old child in the middle of a bitter custody fight," she says...
...Florida judge ruled that Kimberly Mays could end all contact with her biological parents, Regina and Ernest Twigg. Kimberly was accidentally switched at birth with another girl whom the Twiggs discovered was not their daughter after she died of a congenital heart defect five years ago. The judge ruled that the Twiggs have "no legal interest in or rights to Kimberly Mays," while deeming Robert Mays, who has raised the girl, to be her "psychological parent...