Family

iFidelity: Interactive Technology and Relationship Faithfulness

Mapping Family Change and Child Well-Being Outcomes

"In the end, the questions and doubts that generate so many crises of faith for so many can be met by sustained and careful reflection on the premises and perspectives from which such struggles spring."

In the 1920 book Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens (“Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life”), jurist Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Höche coined the phrase Lebensunwertes Leben or “life unworthy of life.” The book was a pseudoscientific argument for the systematic elimination from society of those who were deemed to be unfit, disabled, mentally defective, and racially suspect. It was not an unusual work for the times, nor was it outside the mainstream of thinking in the worldwide eugenics movement that began in earnest with the writings of Francis Galton in the late 1800s. Binding and Höche’s book did serve, however, as a mainstay resource for Nazi racial science over the following two decades.

In 1992, New York became the 18th state to ban paid surrogacy[1](Belkin B1). At that time an estimated “40 percent of all surrogate births in the United States [occurred] in New York” (B1). But in the U.S., the trend towards banning surrogacy has now reversed.

Catherine Pakaluk, an economist at the Catholic University of America explains the value of marriage as an institution in personal lives of heroism and the public good.

Ryan Anderson from The Heritage Foundation gave the Wheatley Roundtable on Family Keynote Address on the importance of marriage today.

Most sex education, however well-meaning, has failed to achieve its dual purpose: 1) Promote the understanding that personal growth, development, character, relationships and sexual interaction all relate to the quality of life most people long to experience; and 2) prevent negative, harmful, self-destructive choices which undermine the quality of an adolescent’s family relationships and future opportunities.

In this Roundtable on the Family, Wheatley Fellow, Jenet Erickson Ph.D, tackles a unique perspective on children: instead of why do children need their parents, she looks at all of the positive ways parents are affected and transformed by their children.