My husband and I don't have sons, so we never had to ask ourselves how we'd have felt about them playing football.
— Nancy Gibbs
Years later, nothing makes me more grateful as a parent than my daughters' encounters with classroom wizards.
Time dissolves in summer anyway: days are long, weekends longer. Hours get all thin and watery when you are lost in the book you'd never otherwise have time to read. Senses are sharper - something about the moist air and bright light and fruit in season - and so memories stir and startle.
The real luxury travel of the modern age is not through space; it's through time.
It's the experts in adolescent development who wax most emphatic about the value of family meals, for it's in the teenage years that this daily investment pays some of its biggest dividends.
Our children will outwit us if they want; for when it comes to technology, they hold the higher ground. Unlike other tools passed carefully and ceremonially from one generation to the next - the sharp scissors, the car keys - this is one they understand better than we do.
We want laws to be applied predictably.
A runner's stride is not perfectly efficient.
In the case of the classic Western helicopter parent, it starts with Baby Einstein and reward charts for toilet training, and it never really ends, which is why colleges have to devote so many resources to teaching parents how to leave their kids alone.
All our efforts to guard and guide our children may just get in the way of the one thing they need most from us: to be deeply loved yet left alone so they can try a new skill, new slang, new style, new flip-flops. So they can trip a few times, make mistakes, cross them out, try again, with no one keeping score.
Americans are grateful for the connection and convenience their phones provide, helping them search for a lower price, navigate a strange city, expand a customer base or track their health and finances, their family and friends.
Emotional life grows out of an area of the brain called the limbic system, specifically the amygdala, whence come delight and disgust and fear and anger.
High achievers, we imagine, were wired for greatness from birth. But then you have to wonder why, over time, natural talent seems to ignite in some people and dim in others.
The millennials were raised in a cocoon, their anxious parents afraid to let them go out in the park to play. So should we be surprised that they learned to leverage technology to build community, tweeting and texting and friending while their elders were still dialing long-distance?
What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start.
Members of royal families are born into a world of indulgence and entitlement, and the princelings who grow up that way may never have to develop any discipline.
As long as people have been making little people, they've wanted to know how not to.
Rand Paul does not like being compared to his father Ron any more than sons named Bush like to dance in their father's shadow, but the crucial difference is that while the Bushes all hail from the relative mainstream of the GOP, the Pauls have an ideological tributary virtually to themselves.
Sometimes justice is at its most merciful when it's blind.
A lot of camps and summer programs for kids seem to have discovered that among the most valuable things they offer is what they don't offer. No Wi-Fi. No grades. No hovering parents or risk managers or parents who parent like risk managers.
Family dinner in the Norman Rockwell mode had taken hold by the 1950s: Mom cooked, Dad carved, son cleared, daughter did the dishes.
Just because we eat together does not mean we eat right: Domino's alone delivers a million pizzas on an average day.
Anyone with the right mix of parental paranoia and entrepreneurial moxie can make a fortune by selling parents the equipment we think will keep us one step ahead of our kids.
Inflicting emotional distress has typically been treated as a civil action. How 'substantial' does the distress have to be for it to turn criminal?
Some people are born strong or stretchy, or with a tungsten will.
We are bombarded with reasons to stay inside: we're afraid of mosquitoes because of West Nile and grass because of pesticides and sun because of cancer and sunscreen because of vitamin-D deficiency.
Maybe we adults idealize our own red-rover days, the hot afternoons spent playing games that required no coaches, eating foods that involved no nutrition, getting dirty in whole new ways and rarely glancing in the direction of a screen of any kind.
A typical smart phone has more computing power than Apollo 11 when it landed a man on the moon.
It is actually the neuroscientists and evolutionists who do the best job of explaining the reasons behind the most unreasonable behavior.
All great rebellions are born of private acts of civil disobedience that inspire rebel bands to plot together.
Today's kids aren't taking up arms against their parents; they're too busy texting them.
Bill Clinton left office with a more than 60% approval rating.
There was a time when researchers imagined that Plan B, or the morning-after pill, might become not an emergency form of contraception but a routine one; women would take it once a month to induce a period and never even know whether they had gotten pregnant.
The 1950s felt so safe and smug, the '60s so raw and raucous, the revolutions stacked one on top of another, in race relations, gender roles, generational conflict, the clash of church and state - so many values and vanities tossed on the bonfire, and no one had a concordance to explain why it was all happening at once.
Calling Rand Paul 'the most interesting man in politics' is an invitation to an argument - but one we suspect he'd love to have.
Making distinctions is part of learning. So is making mistakes.
It's always been a luxury to be able to hop a plane to Paris, to Venice, to the Grand Canyon.
Back in the really olden days, dinner was seldom a ceremonial event for U.S. families. Only the very wealthy had a separate dining room. For most, meals were informal, a kind of rolling refueling; often only the men sat down.
Most of us were probably less than immaculately honest as teenagers; it's practically encoded into adolescence that you savor your secrets, dress in disguise, carve out some space for experiments and accidents and all the combustible lab work of becoming who you are.
I have two daughters: One an open book, one a locked box. So the question of privacy is a challenging one. How much do kids need? How much should we give? How do we prepare them to live in a world where the very notion of privacy opens a generational chasm?
Adolescence, that swampy zone between safety and power, is best patrolled by adults armed with sense and mercy, not guns and a badge.
Democracy presumes that we're all created equal; competition proves we are not, or else every race would end in a tie.
Be bored and see where it takes you, because the imagination's dusty wilderness is worth crossing if you want to sculpt your soul.
Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends.
Whatever people thought the first time they held a portable phone the size of a shoe in their hands, it was nothing like where we are now, accustomed to having all knowledge at our fingertips.
There may be no less original idea than the notion that our hearts hold dominion over our heads.
If boomers were always looking to shock, millennials are eager to share.
When National Guardsmen shot four unarmed students at Kent State, virtually the entire system of higher education shuddered and stopped.
Enter politics, and you enter the glass house; there are no secrets and no places to hide.
The typical white American woman in 1800 gave birth seven times; by 1900, the average was down to 3.5.
