Fathers Day dart to the L.A. Times

File this under: Newspapers wondering why they are losing readers.

The Los Angeles Times' political blog reprints President Obama's inspirational, and rather bland, Fathers Day proclamation. The proclamation doesn't make news, but why not post it, as the Times did, and pause a moment on Fathers Day for a little inspiration?

But the Times isn't content to leave things there. At the end of the proclamation, it tacks on extra language (in the same type face as the proclamation) that presumably didn't come from the White House.

"Your father would want you to click here to receive Twitter alerts" of the Times's political blog, it says.

The White House Fathers Day proclamation was nothing more to the Times' editors than an opportunity to promote its Tweets?

Sheesh. Another case of old media being tone deaf.

FDA panel backs antipsychotic drugs for kids

An FDA advisory panel has concluded that three antipsychotic drugs already widely used in children--Zyprexa, Seroquel, and Geodon--are safe and effective in treating children with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, according to news reports.

The FDA is late to the game here--combined sales of the three drugs reached $10 billion last year, according to Reuters.

The drugs are approved only for adults, not for children. But doctors can legally prescribe them for children.

The advisory panel, made up of experts outside the FDA, cautioned that the long-term effects of the drugs on children is unknown. No long-term studies have been done.

That's of particular concern in children, who might have to take the drugs for a lifetime.

The FDA can now consider whether to approve the drugs for children, which would allow the drugs' makers to begin actively marketing them for children--something the companies cannot do now.

Parental leave: U.S. vs. world

This chart is based on Sakiko Tanaka’s 2005 article “Parental leave and child health across OECD countries” ([p F7-F28] Economic Journal Volume 115 Issue 501), by way of Matthew Yglesias.

Don't worry about the details, if they are difficult to read. Here's what you should take away: All of the countries on this map offer at least 14 weeks of parental leave, with one exception: the United States of America, the world's richest nation.

Things lost when families dissolve

A divorce can offer opportunity, but it almost always involves loss. Loss of the kids. Loss of the house. Loss of friends, loss of a familiar routine, maybe loss of a job.

Sometimes the things that are lost are oddly sentimental, or of emotional value only to the person who loses them. On rarer occasions, unique and truly valuable items can sadly disappear.

That's what happened to Rudy Mancuso, who took one of baseball's most famous photographs (above) and never received proper credit. It was taken on Oct. 3, 1951, during the final playoff game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, the game that included the home run known forever after as "the shot heard round the world."

As my friend Josh Prager beautifully recounts in the Wall Street Journal, Mancuso was unable to sell the photo the next day, and he quickly fell into obscurity. A year later he and his wife separated. The priceless negative disappeared. And as the years drifted by, even his family came to doubt whether he had taken the picture. It became a "family legend," Prager reports.

In January, Mancuso's wife's sister died. While her nieces were sorting through her possessions, they found an envelope marked "baseball." Inside was the negative. They gave it to Mancuso, who was 89 years old and had not seen it for 57 years.

Mancuso transferred ownership to his sons, hoping it would provide for them.

It was timely; Mancuso died on May 10th.

When Mancuso lost his wife, he also lost the tangible record of the crowning accomplishment of his professional life. Happily for him and his family, he recovered it before he died.

Should stepmothers get Mothers' Day cards?

The Council on Contemporary Families thinks so. It's impossible to know how many stepmothers there are in America, because the census bureau doesn't count them. But there must be quite a few, because 46 percent of marriages include at least one partner who's been married before.

The legal system has, however, failed to take note of this group.

Stepmothers, the Council on Contemporary Families says, "often feel ignored, both by society at large and by their stepchildren."

More from the council's release today:

In many states, stepmothers have custody responsibilities for their stepchildren but no legal rights regarding them. Even if they drive kids to games, play Monopoly endlessly, and help with brushing teeth every night, they are considered "legal strangers." If there is an injury at one of those games, a stepmother cannot sign
her stepchild into the emergency room without written permission from her partner or the other legal parent. Oregon is one of only a few states that protects the rights of a stepparent who has formed a relationship with a minor child...

I agree with the council that we ought to send 'em a card. No harm done, and it's a good thing to recognize what they do for their stepchildren--even if society at large doesn't recognize it.

I look forward to a release from the council in June, extending the same consideration to stepfathers.

The U.S. is stealing immigrants' children

Encarnacion Bail Romero, a native of Guatemala, has lost all parental rights to her two-year-old boy, Carlos. Legally, he is no longer her son.

Why did this happen? Because she abandoned him, according to a ruling by a judge in Jasper County, Missouri.

That might seem to be a reasonable outcome, until we consider the reason why she "abandoned" him: She was jailed by immigration authorities two years ago and is still there, awaiting deportation.

The deportation might be justified. But can there by any possible justification for then saying that she abandoned her child? Or for the penalty she paid--to lose all parental rights, with the likelihood that after she is deported she will never be able to visit him, and probably never see him again? An article in the New York Times says cases like this are popping up across the country.

When Romero is shipped home to Guatemala, she can tell her family, friends, and neighbors that because she slipped into the United States illegally, the Americans felt they were justified in stealing her child.

And she would be correct.

Are Humans Monogamous?

An interesting question came up today while I was doing research on my fathers book.

Are humans monogamous?

I would have said yes without giving it much thought. Apparently researchers disagree on this question. Think about people you know who have had children with more than one partner. Are they monogamous? Serially monogamous? Or polygamous?

The answer has implications for how we think about fathers, and how families have been shaped by evolution--and by their environments.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Sunshine Cleaning

Two daughters lose their mother early, leaving them with a gruff, kindly, but ineffectual father. Neither is able to come to grips with her life. But they keep trying. They get lucky, and unlucky. Life is complicated.

Sunshine Cleaning, from some of the same people responsible for Little Miss Sunshine (do all their movies need the word "sunshine" in the title?) is a sad, interesting movie about people who are getting by, but whose emotional lives are a wreck. It's a story about how they try come to terms with their emotional loss, many years later. There are many strong, honest moments in this film. I recommend it.

The choking game

It's a new one on me--the choking game, or the fainting game. I came across a blog post by a distraught father whose son died this way. The post didn't explain the choking game very well, but I found an interesting entry on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia references a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found that 82 children 6-19 years old died while playing this game between 1995 and 2007.

Those numbers are far too small to show up on any broad assessment of health risks to teens.

But each one of those deaths represents a devastated family, with parents and sibilings who might never entirely recover.

Where are the fathers?

Time and again, I've noted studies and situations in which I was surprised to find little or no discussion of fathers. But I'm still surprised and, shocked, I guess, when I see new examples of it.

The American Bar Association, according to the University of Houston's Children and the Law blog, is holding two meetings in Washington in May: The First National Parents' Attorneys Conference, and The 2009 National Conference on Children and the Law.

I did not do a sophisticated study of the programs; I merely searched the titles and abstracts for the word "father." I found only one instance, on a long, long web page. It was in a session about getting fathers more involved in welfare cases. In other words, the only mention of fathers was in a situation where fathers are delinquent.

I must add a very important caveat; the word "mother" does not appear at all in the document, which talks mostly about parents. So this isn't the clean example I'd like it to be. Still, I worry. Is the ABA, in its deliberations and discussions about children and the law, including fathers as a resource?