Parents are Different for Each Child

We Are Different Parents With Each Child As the parent, you remember your first child well: They were the one you watched to make sure they were breathing in their crib, the baby you breastfed and/or sterilized bottles for and carried most of the time. That child is the only child that will ever have his or her parents completely to his/her self; all other children have to share. If you think about it, firstborn children enter a family of adults who are proud of their every progress and frigh...

 Workplaces Conducive to Raising Children

We could also immediately change workplaces to allow for part-time work that has similar benefits and pay to full-time work and to allow for flexible hours and career paths. Our own workplaces, the universities, provide both very good and very bad examples. For years professors have worked at home and determined their own schedules with no loss of productivity. On the other hand, the career structure of universities is deeply in conflict with the imperatives of evolution—the years when we e...

 Babies are Little Mars Rovers

Walk upstairs, open the door gently, and look in the crib. What do you see? Most of us see a picture of innocence and helplessness, a clean slate. But, in fact, what we see in the crib is the greatest mind that has ever existed, the most powerful learning machine in the universe. The tiny fingers and mouth are exploration devices that probe the alien world around them with more precision than any Mars rover. The crumpled ears take a buzz of incomprehensible noise and flawlessly turn it into m...