If, after our physical welfare, our wellbeing is what matters most, then personal or national economic growth should cease to be the primary goal of the majority of people or politicians in developed nations. The ecological case against such growth is already overwhelming. But on top of that there is a psychological one: we should make the meeting of the needs of children, especially infants, a higher priority than economic growth. Scientific evidence (as set out in my book) suggests it is the care we receive in the first six years, not our genes, that primarily determines our capacity to enjoy our unprecedented affluence in adulthood. The earlier a child is neglected or abused, or had parents who divorced or suffered financial misfortune, the greater the likelihood of later disturbance.

If you are looking for a roadmap for your third term, Tony and Gordon, here it is: a total rethink of our society's goals and shape based on meeting the needs of small children. The scientific paper on which this article is based is published at www.bps. org.uk/publications.the psychologist.org.

We had a neighbor whose daughter was conceived by donor sperm. As the daughter anticipated 9th grade, she reflected on the absurdity of her life and as I recall, her monologue sounded something like this: "My father ... has 3 children of his own and three children by donor sperm. The weird thing is that I'll be in high school next year. What if I meet a guy and start dating him, and then realize he is my brother?" Imagine that. Imagine being a teenager and thinking that only a blood test could positively ensure that your boyfriend is not your brother.

I live in the Chicago area and read the newspaper version of this on the train to work the other day. I was struck by how often Ms Salem says that it "would be nice" to have a husband, and I note that she didn't say that there will be times when it "would be nice" for her children to have a father. So the message here is: Expectant single mothers, there are times when it would be nice to have a husband, but your kids won't suffer for lack of a father.

I first thought of becoming a single mom when I was 36 years old. Mr. Right was nowhere in sight and somehow the idea of conceiving and raising a child by myself was much less intimidating than the idea of dating. I viewed an anonymous sperm donor as the least complicated option. The donor selection process was somewhat like I imagined a dating service to be. I selected a popular sperm bank and was able to do much of my search on the Web. I entered the features I desired in a donor, focusing on eye and hair color, race and ethnicity, and other features similar to those of my own family. But there were many other choices, such as religion, years of education and occupation. Yes, you can actually select an aerospace engineer or that Jewish doctor your grandmother always hoped you�d marry. The Web site provided brief summaries of the donors who met my basic qualifications�a little bit regarding their mathematical and artistic abilities; their favorite colors, animal and foods; their life goals ... Once I finished the initial screen, I was able, for $12 per donor, to order longer reports, including histories of recreational drug use, allergies, a three-generation family medical history and the essential: SAT scores. For a little more money I received a physical description, along with an attractiveness rating from one to 10. I consulted with friends and families, and when I selected Mr. Right, it turned out he was on back order and would be in the deep freeze for another four months. So, I went with bachelor No. 2.

Is paying off a mortgage now taking priority over having children? For some, says the British sociologist Catherine Hakim, who examines the impact of housing on women's fertility and work patterns in a new book to be published next month. Hakim suggests the substantial debt required to finance a home purchase means that some women delay child-rearing while others, who'd prefer to be home with their children, are forced into full-time work. Hakim's new book, Models of the Family in Modern Societies (Ashgate), contains evidence surveying 2345 couples of working age about their work/lifestyle patterns and preferences which shows a link between housing choices and women's work patterns. Hakim finds a majority of wives (two-thirds) paying off their own homes are in work, with one-third of those working full-time. In contrast, less than half of wives in public rented homes work, and only 15 per cent work full-time. But the full-time work rate is pushed up or down according to women's work-lifestyle preferences, says Hakim, who argues women fall into three groups according to these preferences - home-centred women who prefer to be home with their children, work-centred women who centre their lives on their careers, and the large middle group of adoptive women, who prefer to shape their working lives around family responsibilites.

Random Family is something rare: a scrupulously honest description of life in the inner city. Avoiding the damp swamps of Jonathan Kozol-style sentimentality, Le Blanc makes no effort to underplay the cruelty, betrayal, and neglect that her subjects�people whom she has clearly come to like�visit upon each other and, most awfully, upon their children. With the exception of a few scattered passages of interpretation, LeBlanc has released Jessica, Coco, and the rest of her characters from what must have been her own powerful desire to explain and excuse their behavior. She has allowed them to walk through her book as fully rounded, independent actors.

If debate on this page over the past few weeks has made anything clear, it is that motherhood has driven a red-hot stake through the heart of the sisterhood - if such a thing ever existed in the first place ... Yet despite the difficulties women and the women's movement have talking about motherhood - or, more precisely, the nature of the conflict mothers experience between work and family and how it should be resolved - it remains a major issue for contemporary women.

Why not eliminate marriage as a legal category altogether, and leave it as a religious one? Farrow notes that "the state did not invent marriage." I say this often myself: Marriage is, as the homophobes consistently and vociferously point out, fundamentally a religious tradition. That's exactly why I personally don't want to have much to do with it. And we have, at least nominally, a separation of church and state here. We don't issue legal certificates for confirmations, circumcisions or bar mitzvahs. Why not leave marriage to the churches and temples and covens? They can exclude anyone they want, for whatever sacred reason, from their magic rituals. And people can choose, for their part, whether they want to belong to the religion. Why does the government have to be involved at all? I don't see why people living together in whatever union they choose should get tax breaks or administrative categories because of it. Sure, the state should not discourage procreation, as it is a natural human impulse, and children need to be protected. But the state already does this, in the form of child-support benefits and tax breaks for parents. Again, this has nothing to do with marriage. Maybe it's time for the state to get entirely out of the business of sanctioning or defining religious rituals. Maybe marriage is a legal category we no longer need.

Teenage girls from single-parent families without fathers become sexually active earlier and are more likely to get pregnant, researchers said on Wednesday. Psychologist Bruce Ellis at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand suspects girls brought up without fathers undergo personality changes when they are young which make them more likely to interact with males. He and his team studied 7,000 girls from pre-school to age 18 and found teenage girls raised without fathers were more likely to suffer from depression, drop out of school and have other behavioral problems. "But while these problems were clearly linked to psycho-social stress, it was the presence or absence of a father that had the biggest impact on the girls' early sexual behavior," New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday.

Overall, the report makes clear in several places that it is concerned with justice issues for children when it comes to the natural environment, the economy, and the larger society. The authors of the report have no problem stating what is wrong with each of these domains and how these problems negatively affect children. However, when it comes to the family, they make clear that if we form judgments about what is good and bad for children, then we are "stigmatizing" these children and their families.
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The blindness to children's suffering is the most glaring problem with the report, but it also contains many assumptions that irritate some of us who research and study the family. It portrays divorce as a normal part of the family life cycle (as something that happens to families just like other transitions do, such as children leaving home, family members dying, and so forth). It says that "negative terms" contribute to stigmas, so we should use new terms such as "blended families"(as if the words are what cause suffering for children, rather than the experience itself). It frequently compares our current situation to the 1950s, saying that we cannot go back to that decade (as if any of us who are critical of changing family structures ever claims to want to do that). It says that marriages used to end early because a spouse died, and now they end early because of divorce (as if, in a society that has managed to extend the lifespan for most people, we should be satisfied with trading divorce for death, because the number of broken families ends up being about the same). ... It says, "Social science data shows there is no predominant family form in the U.S." (which is one of the clear errors in the report - married couples with children are still the predominant family form in the U.S., but that's not really the point, is it?) Finally, it suggests that any weaknesses in families are always due to economic forces, never to cultural changes or individual choices.

So what is the problem? Why is "Living Faithfully with Families in Transition" implicitly elitist? The answer is this: by minimizing the consequences of family disruption, it does not help Presbyterians handle these trends within their own ranks and it does not equip Presbyterians to reach out to the working classes, the poor, and various minorities who do indeed experience family disruption more profoundly, partially due to the less favorable social, economic, and educational conditions of their lives. These groups want more than superficial acceptance and the vague language of inclusiveness; they want concrete help and a theological framework that acknowledges, rather than minimizes, the challenges they face.
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[C]hurches attracting true ethnic and family diversity are those holding out powerful family ideals that simultaneously emphasize marriage, equal respect between wife and husband, programs for children built on these values, and also address the needs of single parents, stepparents, pregnant teenagers, and even cohabiting couples (often by positively and joyfully helping them move toward marriage). ... The best Black, Asian, and White churches - the ones that are also growing - have simultaneously strong marital preparation programs, divorce avoidance programs, relationship and marriage programs for youth, and support groups for single parents, stepparents, blended families, and the divorced. ... Sometimes the needs of gay and lesbian parents are addressed as well. These churches talk less about inclusiveness but actually end up attracting and including more diversity. They face contemporary family issues more directly and end up having more to offer.

Does Family Structure or Reduced Income Make the Difference? [Both matter.]

Is It Marriage Itself or the Kind of People Who Marry (and Stay Married) That Makes the Difference? [Both matter.]

Doesn�t the Quality of the Relationship Matter More Than the Piece of Paper? [Yes, of course marital quality matters.]

What is the Relationship Between Marriage and Poverty? [�Poverty is both cause and effect of single parenthood.�]

The legal basis and public support involved in the institution of marriage help to create the most likely conditions for the development of factors that children need most to thrive�consistent, stable, loving attention from two parents who cooperate and who have sufficient resources and support from two extended families, two sets of friends, and society. Marriage is not a guarantee of these conditions, however, and these conditions exist in other family circumstances, but they are less likely to.

In "Government as Family Therapist," Stephen Baskerville writes that something's gone wrong when moderate liberals defend President Bush's Healthy Marriage Initiative. Baskerville is one of the most prominent spokesmen for fathers' rights activists, divorced men who believe they are victimized by ex-wives and family courts. They are a small but vocal group. Write something they don't like and you'll be flooded with angry e-mails. But I'll take that risk, because Baskerville is wrong. Bipartisan support for promoting healthy marriages and responsible fatherhood suggests that something's gone especially right. ... ...

However one phrases it, to insist that children are intrinsically better off with fathers regardless of who the fathers are or how they behave is to suggest that no single mother can adequately raise a child. About boys [David] Blankenhorn made this claim explicitly. A mother cannot raise a healthy son on her own, Blankenhorn decreed, because �the best mother in the world can�t tell her son what it means to be a man.�

Nobody in the responsible fatherhood movement would ever argue that an awful father is better than no father at all. All Glassner demonstrates is that he himself is afraid of something that doesn�t exist.

Sociologists Alan Booth and Paul Amato investigated this question in a 1994 article in the Journal of Marriage and the Family. They found that children with nontraditional parents actually had slightly poorer relationships with their fathers. Why? They write:

[O]ur analysis suggests that the association between nontraditionalism and lowered closeness to fathers is due to the fact that nontraditional marriages are more likely to end in divorce than are traditional ones. It is well known that divorce weakens long-term ties between children and their fathers.

We must also celebrate new-school moms, often forced to balance parenting with career and who often parent without a partner. It's tempting for some of us to point fingers and indict these mothers, often young and unplanned parents. But we can't afford to act superior.