Today, I'm proposing a refundable Family Leave Tax Credit that will put $2,500 in the pockets of working families with newborns. That's more money than most Americans take home in a month. The Family Leave Tax Credit will give millions of parents their first chance to take real time off when they have a baby. This credit offers more than a chance for leave; it will give parents the power to make important decisions about how to help their children best. Parents who work part-time or stay at home can get the credit.

The more families can afford to do, the more their time is spread thinly over an ever-enlarging array of activities. It was a Swedish academic, Staffan Burenstam Linder, who in a landmark study, The Harried Leisure Class, first drew attention to a peculiar paradox of affluence. As a society produces more and more goods, people require correspondingly more time to enjoy them fully. But there are only 24 hours in a day. You could see this paradox expressed in the lives of the women's three children. Between the television, the computer and the PlayStation, it was hard for the children to choose how to allocate their "free" time: so many toys, so little unstructured time. Since Linder's paper was published in 1970, the "leisure class" of its title has virtually disappeared. Work hours have increased, not fallen, as was widely expected 30 years ago. In some ways it's the worst of all possible worlds: more affluence, more consumer goods but less time to enjoy it all. No wonder the middle class whinge about feeling rushed.

It seems the 20-something generation leaves home about the same age their parents and grandparents did, with the change over 50 years remarkably small. The surprise findings were presented to a conference in Melbourne this week. The conference heard a range of papers all based on a landmark data set called the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. The study on leaving home canvassed people from 15 years to over 80 and found only slight variations in the story. This was despite the younger generations having stayed in education longer and found partners later. "The idea that kids are never leaving home simply has to be discarded," said Paul Flatau, a co-author of the study. "Young people have a natural urge to leave and be independent. That's part of life." The difference now may be that young people leave the parental home but return in hard times. With relationships and the labour market less stable, they treat the parental home as a refuge, he said.

The Plus supermarket chain feels that it is now in a good position to woo some of the 400,000 couples who marry in Germany every year. But traditional wedding businesses, which have seen their profits dive over recent months, have hit back. "A discount wedding can't possibly work," said Sabine Stehle, of Creative Wedding Service. "A wedding is an emotional experience and you can't just pick it up at your local supermarket."

"We're all dads so we all had a little bit of an idea. It was a privilege when he came out. I was in the right place at the right time. He shot out into my hands and I was the first one to hold him.

Team Metro has been using the bus since June for its "Government on the Go" program, which takes passport applications and various simple permits out to the far reaches of the county. But Friday -- parked outside the Caleb Center -- was its first time as a divorce court on wheels. Within an hour, 18 marriages were dissolved.

Once we cross the border into legalized multiple parenthood, we have virtually arrived at the abolition of marriage and the family. The logic of gay marriage leads inexorably to the end of marriage, and the creation in its place of an infinitely flexible series of contracts. Monogamous marriage cannot function if it is just one of many social arrangements. Marriage as an institution depends for its successful functioning upon the support and encouragement that the ethos of monogamy receives from society as a whole. If anything can be called a marriage � including group marriage � then the ethos of monogamy that keeps families together will have been broken, and the social reinforcement that is the essence of marriage itself will be gone. Again, it is children who will pay the price.

Whittle also proposed the idea of The Family Contract. This would not take sex into account when considering an individuals rights involving civil marriage. He stated the family contract would allow, "a new understanding of family law and hence marriage, opening it up to new family constructs in which the family becomes a place of social obligation rather than blood and sexual ties."

But there is also another much darker reason women in their 30s and early 40s are alone. And perhaps this is of our own making. The mating rules have collapsed. And we, women and men, have allowed it to happen. Those unwritten rules that drive romance, courting, love and an oath to commitment have disintegrated. And we've largely given up on the structures that once supported these rituals, such as engagements, marriages, vows "for better or worse, till death do us part", and so on. The problem is we haven't really replaced the old-fashioned stuff with anything better. Living with a lover is as simple as shifting a bit of furniture. Leaving can be just a matter of handing your keys back. We've made it easy to walk out, walk away and move on: each time steeling ourselves against further disappointment. In the end, the lesson is a selfish one about individual preservation and the protection of "me". All of which is fine, if we want to remain alone, or in the transit lounge of commitment.

Nationally, 43 percent of unmarried couples living together are raising children, nearly matching the 46 percent figure for the nation's married couples. And the trend is climbing for unmarried couples, while it is becoming less common for married couples to have children living with them.

The Queen of Pop said of her relationship with Guy, 34: �I actually think marriage is a very important thing. I had to work hard to get a good marriage. Everyone does. �You have to make a lot of efforts and compromises. I knew Guy was the right person in five minutes but it took me several years to actually make it happen.�

Those familiar media images of husbands and wives bidding each other tearful farewells on docks and airfields tell only part of the story. According to the Pentagon, the number of single moms and dads in the military has nearly doubled since the last gulf war from 47,685 in 1992 to almost 90,000 today. Despite the dramatic increase, however, the Pentagon has no special programs in place for them. Military officials aren�t even sure why the numbers are up. �That�s not something we could speculate on,� says Lt. Col. Cynthia Colin, a Pentagon spokeswoman. �We recruit people, and the people in the military reflect society.�

U.S. couples aren't very "touchy-feely" in public, Field says. Her studies in U.S. and Parisian cafes show that French couples spend about three times as much time touching as Americans.

Dr Duxbury has recently completed a major study on how Canadian employees balance their work and family responsibilities, which involved nearly 32,000 workers from 100 public, private and not-for-profit organisations. She is in Australia to take part in the Federation Dialogue Series, a program arranged by the Canadian High Commission and the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand.Canada's parental leave scheme gives new parents up to 50 weeks of leave, paid by the government at a rate of 55 per cent of average weekly earnings. Employers can top up the payments to 100 per cent of an employee's wage. Dr Duxbury said Canada was now planning a scheme in which employees may take several months' leave - paid at the same rate - to care for ageing parents.

Police are to examine the scale of "honour crimes" in the Asian community amid growing evidence that women are being subjected to violence and sometimes murdered for refusing to obey the traditions of their culture.Those working with young women across British Asian communities have charted a number of cases in which they have been subjected to violence by family members for choosing to follow an independent path.Their perceived crimes can include wanting to go to university, refusing an arranged marriage or having a boyfriend.

"Yes, there are rap videos that are particularly violent or sexual, but let's look at what is more important in whether or not these kids act out of behaviors -- their family structure and the type of parenting they get," says Cheryl Keyes, PhD, associate professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA and author of Rap Music and Street Consciousness. (emphasis added)

HAVANA, Mar 7 (IPS) - The Catholic Church is concerned about the growing number of female-headed households in Cuba, although others see the phenomenon as just one aspect of a trend towards more flexible models of the family.

''In Cuba a matriarchy is taking shape, and the 'crisis of fatherhood' is increasingly affecting'' our children, said the Archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, in a recent pastoral letter.

The family is suffering the ''devastating weight'' of the ''extraordinary number of divorces and couples living together out of wedlock,'' and the paternal figure ''is becoming more and more ill-defined and blurry,'' due to physical absence or a lack of authority, he wrote.

But Manuel Cuesta, the head of the Democratic Socialist Movement (CSD), said Cuban society was moving towards ''a new kind of family,'' in the framework of new forms of social organisation, and that ''this does not necessarily have to be negative, as many other nations have demonstrated.''
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''Rather than a crisis of ethics, couples who live together without being married reflect a new conception of the family,'' said the head of the Centre for Population and Development Studies of the National Office of Statistics, Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga.

For her part, university Professor Olga Mesa, a jurist, maintained that the high divorce rate is part of ''the archetype of the new family, free of all hypocrisy and authentically based on new conceptions of how life should be lived.''

You've said that your band's new album, ''Elephant,'' is about the ''death of the sweetheart.'' What does that mean?
JACK WHITE: The sweetheart, the gentleman -- it's the same thing. These ideas seem to be in decline, and I hate it. You look at your average teenager with the body piercings and the tattoos. You have white kids going around talking in ghetto accents because they think that makes them hard. It's so cool to be hard. We're against that.

So are you proposing that people embrace the values of a previous era?
JACK: No, I don't want to be considered old-fashioned or a Luddite or conservative. But it's sad to see young kids today -- they're sitting around listening to hip-hop or new metal, with a Sony PlayStation, a bong of marijuana. This is their life. It's a whole culture. And the parenting is so relaxed about that.

In other words, kids need discipline. That sounds counter to the rock 'n' roll ideal.
JACK: It's not counter to us. It's what our band is about. �

It's especially true for husbands and wives. Women with little status or education have almost no recourse against perceived grievances brought by in-laws. Death remains a punishment for adultery, although it isn't known whether such sentences have been given out since the Taliban's fall. While Afghan legal officials talk about improvements in the quality of justice -- such as ensuring the right to a fair trial and appeal -- they hold that Islamic-based law will continue to form the basis of the system.

Children can't set limits for themselves, of course; they need adults to do that. Fred Rogers was of a time and a tradition in children's television (and in child rearing) in which adults were thought to be the best teachers for young children. And Mister Rogers was the kindest of teachers, and of authority figures. He is irreplaceable � not that anyone has tried very hard to replace him. Oh, there are Steve and Joe of Nickelodeon's preschool show "Blue's Clues," but they're more like big brothers than true grown-ups. Very young kids can spend an entire morning in front of the tube with otherwise worthwhile shows like "Bob the Builder," "Arthur" and "Dora the Explorer" and not see a human adult face. On shows for older kids and on primetime sitcoms, adulthood is ridiculed more often than not and dads are buffoons (d'oh!). It's kiddie anarchy out there.

"When you look at the millions and millions of single moms," she says, "we should have something for them to hold on to. There should be a message that is encouraging to the single mom. Show them some role models." Instead, she says, there is a steady drumbeat of negativity from her ranks -- statistics and studies and dire warnings about how much more likely the children of single parents are to mess up in school, get hooked on drugs, grow up to divorce their spouses. "The message from Democrats is very encouraging to single parents," says Buchanan. "It's something very natural for them. Not conservative Republicans. You get the message, 'You already failed; it's too late.' "

"Have you ever wondered," she writes, "why it takes a bride months and months to plan a wedding, but a good funeral can be pulled together in two days? The elements are all the same -- church, minister, music, flowers, guests, food." Lori is absolutely right. What we need is a law prohibiting brides from planning their weddings more than, say, a week in advance. A bride caught violating this law would be subject to severe punishment, such as being forced to walk down the aisle to the tune of "I Shot the Sheriff." Wouldn't that be great? Brides -- and their loved ones -- would be spared months of insanity. Weddings would be simpler, cheaper and more relaxed. Everybody would win! Except of course the people who put out the bridal magazines.