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Warner's latest book is We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.
The latest entry into the American Annals of Absurdity is the story of Jessica Barba, a 15-year-old from Middle Island, New York, who created a fictitious 6-minute YouTube video and a fake Facebook page to tell the imagined story of “Hailey Bennett,” a bullied 12-year-old who commits suicide, to satisfy the requirements of a homework [...]
Is understanding human behavior as being driven, at least in part, by neurobiology, tantamount to “blaming the brain”? Does talk about genes, and brain structure and chemistry relieve us of personal responsibility for our actions, reinforcing a kind of hopeless fatalism, and allowing us such easy excuses for our bad behavior as – to borrow [...]
We like to think that the choices we make early on as parents — cry it out vs. co-sleeping, stroller vs. sling and so on — reflect deep truths about what’s best for our children. But they don’t. What these decisions do reflect, however, whether we want to admit it or not, are pretty deep-seated [...]
Dominique Strauss-Kahn is having a bit of a rough time of it these days, what with a Bronx judge rejecting his claim of diplomatic immunity against the charges of “violent and sadistic” acts brought forth in a civil suit by the hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo, an investigation continuing into his involvement in a prostitution ring, [...]
The mood has shifted considerably on last week’s Ann Romney–Hilary Rosen fracas, with poll results showing that most women don’t really care about what Washington insiders have to say about Rosen’s word choice or, for that matter, how Romney chose to spend her time once she had children. Women are shrugging off political attempts to rekindle [...]
The strangest, and most disheartening thing about the Twitter firestorm that erupted this week after Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen pointedly questioned Ann Romney’s fitness to serve as her husband’s ambassador on women’s economic issues was the speed with which her own party rushed to denounce her. Noting to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Romney — a daughter of privilege [...]
The latest statistics on autism prevalence are scary: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the disorder now affects, with varying degrees of severity, one in 88 children, and one in 54 boys. That represents an estimated 78 percent increase since 2002, the government agency reported last week. The CDC was quick to downplay [...]
The newest mom-we-have-to-hate is Dara-Lynn Weiss, the New York woman currently earning widespread opprobrium for having put her 7-year-old daughter, Bea, on a weight-loss diet and having pushed, prodded and shamed the little girl into losing 16 lb. Her account of this quest, which appears in April’s Vogue, can’t be accessed online, so I will [...]
The “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument applies to words too. We can’t pin the actions of George Zimmerman, the Florida crime-watch volunteer who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin for the crime, essentially, of walking while black in a gated community, on politicians, pundits and pastors who stoke fear and hatred of [...]
Are we approaching a new Anita Hill moment? That is to say – another moment, like the watershed period in 1991 and ’92, when women’s issues — particularly those related to women’s dignity, and privacy, and their right to work and live and function in nonhostile environments – moved front and center in American politics. It [...]
Are you a childist? The word is difficult to say, much less get your mind around. Yet Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a psychoanalyst and biographer who died this past December, felt strongly that it should become an active part of the American lexicon. Indeed, in her recently published book, Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children, she argues that childism — [...]
On Wednesday afternoon, when I asked my 14-year-old daughter Julia what she’d done that day at school, she said she’d learned about relationship violence and self-defense. This, I thought, was time well spent. Julia’s school is a short hop across the Potomac from the Landon School, the prestigious all-boys prep school in Bethesda, Md., formerly [...]
Amidst all the talk this past week about Pamela Druckerman’s new book, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, there was one phrase that immediately lodged itself in my mind. It was in a sidebar that ran with the Wall Street Journal adaptation of her book, “Why French Parents Are [...]
“Ritalin Gone Wrong,” L. Alan Sroufe’s recent op-ed in the New York Times, which argued, among many other odd things, that attention-deficit disorder (ADD) could be “especially” caused by “patterns of parental intrusiveness” like picking a baby up from behind and plopping “it” in a bath or taunting or ridiculing a frustrated 3-year-old, was like a [...]
It’s all Apple all the time these days: “astounding” earnings reports in the news on Jan. 25, lingering shots of Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene sitting near Michelle Obama at the State of the Union address the day before and, of course, ever since his death in October, near ubiquitous references to Jobs himself in pretty much [...]
The proposed change to the newest edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM5, would do away with the diagnoses of Asperger’s Disorder and Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified as distinct categories of mental illness and fold them instead into a more streamlined umbrella definition of autism. This [...]
“The Diet Factor in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder,” the much-cited study released by the journal Pediatrics this week, did not make much of a case for using dietary change to treat Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). But it did make an interesting case for using food control to treat parents’ angst about their kids’ ADHD. The study’s authors, J. Gordon [...]
Girl Scout cookie pre-orders begin in my area on Friday, and retail sales may soon be coming to a location near you. But before you ready your checkbook, hear this: • Did you know that, behind those free-enterprising, wholesome, green-clad young entrepreneurs is an organization that promotes Communism? • Did you know that their “It’s Your [...]
There’s been a delicious dust-up online this week, in the wake of Jennifer Steinhauer’s New York Times story bemoaning the presence of store-bought goods on bake sale tables and castigating their donation as “weirdly like cheating and more than a little tacky: a re-gifting that does not even try to hide the price tag.” The Times, [...]
