Council on Contemporary Families

CCF’s Weekly Media Roundup by Steve Mintz, June 5, 2019

CCF Briefing

  1. Seeking Refuge, Legally, and Finding Prison
  2. Are We Fighting a War on Homelessness? Or a War on the Homeless?
  3. Could Prostitution Be the Next Vice to Be Decriminalized?
  4. A boy, a chicken sandwich and a federal case over dinner at Colonial Williamsburg
  5. How Successful Are the Marriages of People With Divorced Parents?
  6. Let’s Hear It for the Average Child
  7. The Scripps Spelling Bee Is Broken. Please Don’t Fix It.
  8. The ‘Gravity Knife’ Led to Thousands of Questionable Arrests. Now It’s Legal.
  9. ‘Become My Mom Again’: What It’s Like to Grow Up Amid the Opioid Crisis
  10. An Army Veteran Comes to Terms With Not Having PTSD
  11. Everything a Drag Queen Taught Me About Parenthood
  12. Clarence Thomas’s Dangerous Idea
  13. Colorado Bans ‘Conversion Therapy’ for Minors
  14. Did I Need to Know What Gender My Nonbinary Interviewees Were Assigned at Birth? Maybe Not.
  15. School’s out
  16. Leann Birch, Who Knew How to Get a Child to Eat Peas, Dies at 72
  17. In China, Public Talk of Sex Is Rare. Could a ‘Pleasure Community’ Change That?
  18. Let’s Hear It for the Average Child
  19.  ‘Screen Time’ Is Over
  20. Choosing Whether or Not to Have a Baby
  21. When We Talk About Abortion, Let’s Talk About Men
  22. More Americans Are Living Solo, and Companies Want Their Business
  23. How Much Does Your Education Level Affect Your Health?
  24. Biggest Offender in Outsize Debt: Graduate Schools
  25. When Social Media Is Really Problematic for Adolescents
  26. On YouTube’s Digital Playground, an Open Gate for Pedophiles
  27. Their Children Were Conceived With Donated Sperm. It Was the Wrong Sperm.
  28. The Subtle Ways Cities Are Restricting Abortion Access
  29. College Degrees Widens the Gender Pay Gap
  30. Why Some Americans Won’t Move, Even for a Higher Salary
  31. “I Got Mine”
  32. Canada finally acknowledged the genocide against Indigenous women. It’s time to act.
  33. Can Menopause Ever Be Sexy?
  34. The Scariest Part of Kids’ Relationship With Tech: Parents
  35. I’m a Disabled Teenager, and Social Media Is My Lifeline
  36. One Hospital’s Plan to Reduce C-Sections: Communicate
  37. This Drug Could End H.I.V. Why Hasn’t It?
  38. Who Can Adopt These Navajo Children? A Tale of Two Mothers and a Bitter Constitutional Fight
  39. Becoming a Digital Grandparent
  40. A 40-Something Looks Back at ‘Thirtysomething’
  41. When a Child’s Surgery Goes Wrong
  42. Deadly Falls in Older Americans Are Rising. Here’s How to Prevent Them.
  43. The Tricky Politics of Abortion
  44. Japanese Women Want a Law Against Mandatory Heels at Work
  45. The Struggles of Rejecting the Gender Binary
  46. Sweden Finds a Simple Way to Improve New Mothers’ Health. It Involves Fathers.
  47. Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
  48. Practical Ways to Improve Your Confidence (and Why You Should)
  49. Is Burnout Real?
  50. When Police Officers Vent on Facebook
  51. James Ketchum, Who Conducted LSD Experiments on Soldiers, Dies at 87

  1. Seeking Refuge, Legally, and Finding Prison

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/opinion/power-asylum-seekers.html

Power is condemning lawful asylum seekers to a system designed for criminals.

  1. Are We Fighting a War on Homelessness? Or a War on the Homeless?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/nyregion/homelessness-shelters.html

The issue is dire, and yet politicians stay away from addressing it and many progressives are happy to see the homeless live anywhere else

  1. Could Prostitution Be the Next Vice to Be Decriminalized?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/nyregion/presidential-candidates-prostitution.html

Presidential candidates and state lawmakers are all debating whether to remove penalties for prostitution, a proposal that used to be taboo in most political circles.

  1. A boy, a chicken sandwich and a federal case over dinner at Colonial Williamsburg

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/a-boy-a-chicken-sandwich-and-a-federal-case-over-dinner-at-colonial-williamsburg/2019/05/31/4fc7763c-83d6-11e9-95a9-e2c830afe24f_story.html

After a child with a gluten allergy was told he could not bring his own gluten-free sandwich into a restaurant, judges ruled in his favor, citing disability protections.

  1. How Successful Are the Marriages of People With Divorced Parents?

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/05/divorced-parents-marriage/590425

Marital instability can be inherited—but less often than it used to be.

  1. Let’s Hear It for the Average Child

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/opinion/average-child.html

In this season of prizes and trophies, we salute all the students whose talents lie outside the arena.

  1. The Scripps Spelling Bee Is Broken. Please Don’t Fix It.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/opinion/contributors/the-scripps-spelling-bee-is-broken-please-dont-fix-it.html

Too many winners is not always a bad thing.

  1. The ‘Gravity Knife’ Led to Thousands of Questionable Arrests. Now It’s Legal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/nyregion/ny-gravity-knife-law.html

Black and Latino men had often been charged under New York’s unusual ban on the knives, which are opened with a flick of the wrist.

  1. ‘Become My Mom Again’: What It’s Like to Grow Up Amid the Opioid Crisis

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/us/opioid-children-addiction.html

Call them Generation O, the children growing up in families trapped in a relentless grip of addiction, rehab and prison.

  1. An Army Veteran Comes to Terms With Not Having PTSD

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/magazine/army-veteran-ptsd-trauma.html

A reminder that popular tropes and easy assumptions about how trauma affects people often do not fit, and we all still have much to learn.

  1. Everything a Drag Queen Taught Me About Parenthood

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/opinion/sunday/gay-pride-drag.html

The first lesson was pride.

  1. Clarence Thomas’s Dangerous Idea

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/opinion/sunday/clarence-thomas-abortion.html

Does anything link the eugenics of the past to abortion today?

  1. Colorado Bans ‘Conversion Therapy’ for Minors

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/us/gay-conversion-therapy-colorado.html

Colorado on Friday became the 18th state to ban “conversion therapy,” a discredited practice that aims to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender expression.

  1. Did I Need to Know What Gender My Nonbinary Interviewees Were Assigned at Birth? Maybe Not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/reader-center/nonbinary-teens-reporting.html

To write about the debate over adding an “X” option to state IDs, I was trying to better understand how the issue plays out in everyday life.

  1. School’s out

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2019/05/30/feature/charter-schools/

Charters were supposed to save public education. Why are Americans turning against them?

  1. Leann Birch, Who Knew How to Get a Child to Eat Peas, Dies at 72

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/obituaries/leann-birch-dead.html

She was a pioneer in bringing developmental psychology to the study of nutritional issues facing young children and moved the science of nutrition beyond its narrow focus on foods and nutrients to consider why children eat and how eating habits are established in early life.

  1. In China, Public Talk of Sex Is Rare. Could a ‘Pleasure Community’ Change That?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/world/asia/china-beijing-sex-education-women.html

Strangers gathered in Beijing to discuss a subject rarely addressed publicly in China: how to satisfy a woman. These workshops come at a fraught time for Chinese feminists.

  1. Let’s Hear It for the Average Child

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/opinion/average-child.html

In this season of prizes and trophies, we salute all the students whose talents lie outside the arena.

  1.  ‘Screen Time’ Is Over

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/health/screen-time-mental-health-screenome.html

The phrase can’t remotely capture our ever-shifting digital experience, social scientists say. Say hello to the “screenome.”

  1. Choosing Whether or Not to Have a Baby

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/opinion/letters/abortion-births.html

One reader, “an I.V.F. baby,” says every child deserves to feel “chosen”; another is grateful his unwed mother did not abort him.

  1. When We Talk About Abortion, Let’s Talk About Men

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/opinion/abortion-laws-men.html

Since women don’t have unwanted pregnancies without them.

  1. More Americans Are Living Solo, and Companies Want Their Business

https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-americans-are-living-solo-and-companies-want-their-business-11559497606

Consumer-products firms are catering to single-person households, upending generations of family-focused marketing. Now they are offering smaller appliances, individual packaging and giant toilet-paper rolls

  1. How Much Does Your Education Level Affect Your Health?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/upshot/education-impact-health-longevity.html

Some clever studies have teased out causal effects by taking advantage of natural experiments.

  1. Biggest Offender in Outsize Debt: Graduate Schools

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/upshot/student-debt-big-culprit-graduate-school.html

The market for master’s degrees behaves in strange and erratic ways, new data reveals.

  1. When Social Media Is Really Problematic for Adolescents

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/well/family/teenagers-social-media.html

Underlying problems may make some young people particularly vulnerable to what they find on social media, an expert says.

  1. On YouTube’s Digital Playground, an Open Gate for Pedophiles

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/world/americas/youtube-pedophiles.html

The site’s automated recommendation system, at times drawing on home movies of unwitting families, created a vast video catalog of prepubescent children.

  1. Their Children Were Conceived With Donated Sperm. It Was the Wrong Sperm.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/health/sperm-banks-fertility-artificial-insemination.html

As genetic testing becomes more widespread, parents are finding that sperm used in artificial insemination did not come from the donors they chose.

  1. The Subtle Ways Cities Are Restricting Abortion Access

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/06/abortion-access-provider-city-where-allowed-zoning-roe-wade/590095

Using zoning laws and land-use codes, anti-abortion city leaders are shutting down clinics. Can reproductive rights activists beat them at their own game?

  1. College Degrees Widens the Gender Pay Gap

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/05/college-degree-widens-gender-earnings-gap.html

The gender pay gap is wider among men and women with a bachelor’s degree than among those without.

  1. Why Some Americans Won’t Move, Even for a Higher Salary

https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/05/moving-location-new-city-how-much-cost-mobile-rooted-stuck/590521

A new study identifies powerful psychological factors that connect people to places, and that mean more to them than money.

  1. “I Got Mine”

https://slate.com/business/2019/05/california-housing-crisis-boomer-gerontocracy

Like college debt and climate change, the housing affordability crisis is generational warfare.

  1. Canada finally acknowledged the genocide against Indigenous women. It’s time to act.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/04/canada-finally-acknowledged-genocide-against-indigenous-women-its-time-act/?utm_term=.77835af0df96&wpisrc=nl_opinions&wpmm=1

The report affirms what Indigenous people have long understood — that the violence they experience is a product of settler colonialism.

  1. Can Menopause Ever Be Sexy?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/style/menopause-women-beauty-product-marketing.html

Enterprising beauty companies are targeting menopausal women in a way that’s frank, luxurious and, sometimes, even sexy.

  1. The Scariest Part of Kids’ Relationship With Tech: Parents

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/opinion/children-internet-privacy.html

Fears about troubling videos and excessive screen time are legitimate. But the real threat is adults’ disregard for their children’s rights and best interests.

  1. I’m a Disabled Teenager, and Social Media Is My Lifeline

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/learning/im-a-disabled-teenager-and-social-media-is-my-lifeline.html

  1. One Hospital’s Plan to Reduce C-Sections: Communicate

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/opinion/hospital-cesarean-section.html

There might be fewer unneeded cesarean sections if doctors learned to keep mothers informed at every stage of labor.

  1. This Drug Could End H.I.V. Why Hasn’t It?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/podcasts/the-daily/hiv-aids-truvada-prep.html

A solution to the AIDS epidemic may be at hand. But not everyone who needs it has access to it.

  1. Who Can Adopt These Navajo Children? A Tale of Two Mothers and a Bitter Constitutional Fight

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/health/navajo-children-custody-fight.html

Is a law meant to protect the best interests of Native American children based on the child’s tribal ties or on race? A federal appeals court is deciding whether to strike it down.

  1. Becoming a Digital Grandparent

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/well/family/kids-screen-time-grandparents.html

When it comes to warnings about limiting kids’ screen time, grandparents are, well, grandfathered in.

  1. A 40-Something Looks Back at ‘Thirtysomething’

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/arts/television/thirtysomething-tv-rewatch.html

As a teenager, a writer secretly viewed the ABC drama in her basement, trying to learn about marriage. Rewatching it now, she is surprised at the actual lessons she’d absorbed.

  1. When a Child’s Surgery Goes Wrong

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/opinion/letters/childen-surgery-unc-hospital.html

Doctors, including Mehmet Oz, and a health researcher offer suggestions for improvement.

  1. Deadly Falls in Older Americans Are Rising. Here’s How to Prevent Them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/health/falls-elderly-prevention-deaths.html

The rate of deaths after falls is rising for people over 75, a new study shows. But falls are avoidable for most seniors. We have some tips.

  1. The Tricky Politics of Abortion

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/opinion/abortion-democrats-2020.html

Public opinion isn’t where either side wants it to be.

  1. Japanese Women Want a Law Against Mandatory Heels at Work

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/world/asia/japan-high-heels.html

Thousands of supporters have rallied behind the hashtag #KuToo, a pun based on the words for shoe and pain.

  1. The Struggles of Rejecting the Gender Binary

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/magazine/gender-nonbinary.html

Not everyone identifies as male or female. This is what it’s like to be nonbinary in a world that wants to box you in.

  1. Sweden Finds a Simple Way to Improve New Mothers’ Health. It Involves Fathers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/upshot/sweden-finds-a-simple-way-to-improve-new-mothers-health-it-involves-fathers.html

The flexibility to have an extra person at home, even for a few days, offers significant postpartum benefits, new research shows.

  1. Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/well/mind/sleep-hospital-patients-doctors-fatigue.html

What if sleep were considered a continuous infusion of a medication that helped patients heal faster?

  1. Practical Ways to Improve Your Confidence (and Why You Should)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/smarter-living/how-to-improve-self-confidence.html

Self-confidence is just one element in a triad of things that make up our overall “confidence.” Here’s what you can do to boost yours.

  1. Is Burnout Real?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/opinion/burnout-stress.html

The World Health Organization says so. But it’s in danger of medicalizing everyday stress.

  1. When Police Officers Vent on Facebook

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/us/politics/police-officers-facebook.html

Emily Baker-White’s systemic look at officers on social media found thousands of racist, Islamophobic or otherwise offensive posts. Here’s how (and why) she did it.

  1. James Ketchum, Who Conducted LSD Experiments on Soldiers, Dies at 87

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/obituaries/james-ketchum-dead.html

An Army psychiatrist, he spearheaded a Cold War project to test whether recreational drugs could be used in chemical attacks to disable enemy troops.

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