Does it help if I tell you he turns 8 in a few days?

What if I tell you that we live in a nice neighborhood in downtown Colorado Springs where everyone knows one another?

I’m not fond of most parenting trends, but I do like free-range parenting; it makes intuitive sense to me that we are raising kids for adulthood, not childhood, and so we need to let them do things on their own. A 2023 nationally representative survey found that three in four parents of a child 5 to 8 years old say they make it a point to have their child do things themselves. Worry about the child’s safety, the same survey found, is the number one reason kids don’t do things independently.

Read more

Okay, perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But honestly, I hate playing imaginary games with my children. For a long time, I thought this was a sure sign that I must be a bad mom. But I love having children. I love having them around. I love cuddling them to sleep at night. I love telling them stories.

It’s just that I would rather do almost anything—vacuum, cook, write, fold laundry, or even pay my taxes—than play princesses and dragons.

Read more

Over the past three decades, the act of raising children to adulthood—the oldest work in the world—has transformed. The amount of time parents spend with kids went vertical in the late 1990s, and there has been no relief since—so much so that a 2023 survey by the American Psychological Association found that 41 percent of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function. That’s about twice the percentage of adults without children.

Theories abound as to why. These range from plummeting birth rates (fewer kids to soak up all that adult attention) to greater economic uncertainty (parents are more likely to adopt intensive styles when the stakes of success are so high) to increased fears for children’s physical safety (a 2025 Harris poll found that an astounding 50 percent of parents thought that two 10-year-olds playing alone in a park were likely to be kidnapped).

Read more

So watching kids today—and as the Gen-Z mom of a 10-month-old baby—I feel something like grief. I know how bad it is for me, so it will be worse for them. They’ll never remember learning to operate a touchscreen; they scroll before they speak. When they grow up, their idea of friendship will be a string of emojis and TikTok dances. It’s not their fault. We gave them this world.

But now, a growing number of parents, teachers, and even former tech executives are trying to turn back the clock. The new trend in children’s toys is not more innovation, but less. Simpler, slower, nostalgic—analog.

This revival isn’t just happening in niche corners of parenting subcultures, like MAHA moms on crunchy parenting forums, or screen time–shaming Boomer blogs. It’s emerging from the very heart of Silicon Valley and expanding into a full-blown product ecosystem.

Read more

This superior method of education was well-known historically, and its effects are still seen in education research today: one-on-one tutoring.

Tutoring dramatically improves a student’s abilities and scores. This improvement is sometimes called “Bloom’s 2 sigma problem,” because in the 1980s the education researcher Benjamin Bloom found that tutored students “performed two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods.” In other words, “the average tutored student was above 98 percent of the students in the control class.”

Despite its effectiveness, tutoring is nowadays usually reserved for specific tests; the Advanced Placement tests, the SATs, and the GREs form the lucrative trinity of private tutoring. Outside of these, tutoring is mostly used as a corrective to learning gaps or losses—not the main method of actual education.

But if we go back in time, tutoring often did act as the main method of education—at least for the elite. 

Read more

Read more

Although the parents have lost in the lower courts, the Supreme Court’s current 6–3 conservative majority gives them hope that this time, the outcome will be different.

“We are eager for the Court to recognize that parents are the primary teachers of their children and that schools must work with us, not against us,” said Billy Moges, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

“We are hopeful that the Court will let kids be kids and let parents guide their religious futures,” said Grace Morrison, another plaintiff.

For more than a decade, of course, parents across the country have fought, both in court and in the political arena, with school districts as they’ve tried to ensure that their religious beliefs are not violated in the classroom. But this is the first time such a case has reached the Supreme Court. The stakes are high: A victory will enable parents—not just in Montgomery County but across the country—to engage with their local public schools without their religious traditions and beliefs being violated.

Read more

In response, we heard from Naomi Schaefer Riley, a writer and scholar who advocates for our society’s most vulnerable children. She has another story to tell, a story about the hundreds of thousands of children in this country whose parents put their lives in danger each year, and who desperately need more government intervention, not less. —The Editors

Last fall, Brittany Patterson was arrested for child endangerment because her 10-year-old son, Soren, was spotted walking alone on a road a mile from their house. The case sparked outrage over government overreach. As a Free Press story put it, “Increasingly, parents all over the country are being punished for giving their kids a bit of leash.”

Such incidents provoke justifiable outrage and calls for reform. These stories, however, are rare, isolated incidents that grab headlines—but are true outliers compared to the reality of children’s welfare in America. Unfortunately, these accounts also fuel the misconception—held by people on both sides of the political aisle—that child protective services are inherently and unnecessarily punitive.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Far fewer people have heard the story of Gavin Peterson, the 12-year-old Utah boy who died last July 9 after being tortured and starved by his father, his father’s girlfriend, and his older brother. Ten years prior, Gavin went to live with his father and father’s girlfriend after he was found as a toddler wandering outside alone and his mother pleaded guilty to exposing her children to illegal drugs.

Read more

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the book catalyzed a movement around the world. Most spec…

Read more

The trial was an international sensation—supporters gathered in a pub in Woodward’s home village to watch the televised sentencing. The case underscored class divisions as well as a simmering anti-feminist backlash: See what happens when mothers don’t stay home with their babies?

Woodward’s defense was led by attorney Barry Scheck, a co-founder of the Innocence Project, who was fresh off O.J. Simpson’s “dream team.” He put the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome itself on trial. “I literally went back and read every paper in this field that we could find and asked doctors to explain to me every term,” Scheck told 60 Minutes Australia in 2022.

Scheck’s team found that a growing number of researchers and physicians had major doubts about the theory, and several of them testified in Woodward’s defense. Their argument was that the diagnosis relied too heavily on subjective interpretation and that a generation of clinicians had been “indoctrinated” to believe that a baby presenting with the symptoms of Eappen pointed to a single cause: violent shaking. But Scheck argued, as he later said of the Woodward case, “The scientific evidence demonstrated that she did not do this.”

Read more

For most of human history, having kids wasn’t really a choice. Social expectations, a lack of birth control, and limited autonomy for women presented a simple menu of options: Have kids or join the convent. But after the 1960s ushered in easy, effective contraception and greater career opportunities for women, for the first time in history, many could choose how many children to have—or whether they should have them at all.

Fast forward to today, and more people are choosing not to have children for a variety of reasons. Some say they don’t want kids because of financial strain, or climate apocalypse, or because they simply don’t want them. Others say they do want kids, so they can heal generational trauma, or to give their first kid a sibling. A man once told me it was important for him to bear heirs so he could pass on his spectacular genes. Maybe that’s the underlying motivation, even if most would not put it quite so. . . bluntly. 

Having children is a personal choice. It’s also a choice that has broader, global implications. Everywhere across the world—in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa—fewer children are being born. And strangely enough, having kids has become part of the culture wars. You’ve got pro-natalist public figures like Elon Musk on one side saying everyone needs to procreate immediately in order to save humanity. And on the other side, people like climate activist Greta Thunberg say producing more children in an era of global warming is irresponsible.

But there’s no doubt that the fertility rate is plummeting. Presently, American women, on average, have 1.6 kids. In the 1950s, it was 3. In the U.S., the fertility rate needed for a generation to replace itself without immigration is approximately 2.1 births per woman. Around the world, between 1950 and 2021, as many countries got richer and women chose to have fewer kids, the fertility rate has fallen by more than half.

For economists—and I’m one of them—the speed of this plummeting fertility rate is cause for alarm. Economic growth partly depends on population growth. Retirees rely on younger workers to generate taxes and contributions to Social Security. With fertility rates in free fall, the math doesn’t add up.

So far, our series, Raising Parents, has focused on the state of our children. Today, we cap things off with a fundamental question: Should you even have kids—and what happens if we don’t? 

Spoiler: I won’t tell you whether or not to have kids. It’s a personal decision and also a financial one, a religious one, and for some, a political one. You’ll hear from a range of guests, all of whom I agree with, in part.

For example:

Read more

“We live at a time,” …

Read more

Accidentally ate Brie cheese while pregnant! What to do? 

What if I went in a hot tub for just five minutes at 16 weeks pregnant? Did the fetus melt?

Had turkey sandwich at the airport. Do I have listeria?

Forgot to take prenatal vitamins for three months. Will my baby be less smart?

What if my…

Read more

Read more

I’ve made six people (that takes roughly ten months …

Read more

We’re both parents of young daughters. It’s hard not to look at the state of things and wonder what kind of world we are building for our children. For those of you with older kids—and we’ve heard from so many of you—you fa…

Read more

Read more