Young women in the United States are choosing not to have children in numbers that demographers have not recorded in generations – and the data documenting this change are growing sharper and more specific by the year. The question of whether to have children has always carried personal weight, but something has changed in the...

The village was never supposed to be a metaphor. Somewhere along the way it became one – the kind of warm phrase that gets said at baby showers and in parenting books and means almost nothing by the time the actual work of raising a child falls on one person, one income, and one set...

Every serious baker’s kitchen has a drawer, or a shelf, or a little cluster of vials somewhere near the workspace, and to anyone glancing at it, the contents look more or less interchangeable. Small containers of powder in metallic golds and silvers and bronzes, some labeled “edible,” some labeled “for decorative use only,” some with...

Nobody sets out to raise a bully. You read the books, you attend the school meetings, you have the “be kind” conversation in the car on the way to drop-off. You are, by most available measures, paying attention. And yet there’s a particular kind of vertigo that comes with getting a call from a teacher,...

Texas is a state that tends to believe in itself. And fair enough: it has the economy, the land, the pride, and enough bumper stickers to fill a warehouse. It also has some of the fastest-growing cities in the country, a booming job market, and a cost of living that, for a while at least,...

Twelve years is a long time to want something you can’t have. Long enough to grieve it in cycles, to stop and start hoping again, to sit through other people’s baby showers and smile in the right places while something inside you quietly closes a door. Bedriya Adem, a 35-year-old subsistence farmer from Ethiopia’s Harari...

You’ve probably looked at your child’s face and played the guessing game. The nose is yours. The ears are definitely his. The stubborn habit of refusing to ask for directions is, honestly, anybody’s guess. We tend to think of genetic inheritance as a 50/50 split, a tidy deal struck at conception where each parent chips...

Heart disease is supposed to announce itself. That’s what we’ve been taught, or at least what we’ve absorbed from years of TV dramas where someone grabs their chest and collapses. The reality, for most women, is far more complicated and far quieter. Heart disease can sit inside the body for years without a single dramatic...

Somewhere in America right now, a pregnant woman is staring at a baby name app at 2 a.m. and scrolling past names that sound like software products and minor characters from dystopian fiction, thinking: there has to be something better than this. She’s not wrong. The names that ruled the 1940s – the ones that...

Most parents aren’t cruel. They love their kids fiercely, and most days they’re doing the best they can – operating on not enough sleep, too much pressure, and a running mental list of things nobody warned them about. Yet some of the most psychologically damaging things said to children come not from bad parents, but...

Your forties arrive without much fanfare. One morning you’re squinting at a restaurant menu in decent lighting, and somewhere in the back of your mind you’re wondering if the font has gotten smaller or if this is just… you now. The answer, frustratingly, is probably both. Your body doesn’t send a memo when it starts...

There’s a quiet generational reckoning happening at kitchen tables, school drop-offs, and parent group chats across America. Gen X parenting is getting a second look, and not just from the parents doing it. Family psychologists are paying attention too. Because while the cultural conversation about how to raise kids has been dominated by a push...