Robin Marantz Henig's Blog, page 9
January 18, 2013
Confusion Loves Company
One young man struggling with decisions about his life wrote to my daughter to thank her for the book we wrote. "I've been struggling to make the process feel "right,"" he said in an email. "I often think about what's coming next," Our book was "a relief," he said, because it showed him that he's not the only young person plagued by thoughts like these.
January 8, 2013
Every Stage Is The Toughest Stage
"We’re a self-absorbed species," writes columnist Frank Bruni in today's New York Times, "and one wrinkle of our self-absorption is our tendency, reflected in our art and entertainment, to believe that there’s no passage of human existence as fraught with perils and as peculiarly significant as the one we just so happen to be going through."
January 4, 2013
An Abortion-Rights Advocate Talks About Millennials
The outgoing president of NARAL, the abortion-rights lobbying group, had a wide-ranging interview with an editor at Salon that ended with an assessment of whether young people care about abortion. Are they apolitical? Not exactly, Nancy Keenan said. They're suffering from something she called an "intensity gap."
December 26, 2012
Parenting is Good for Your Health
After a holiday of excessive family togetherness, the findings of a recent study from Denmark might be met with a certain amount of skepticism -- that having children actually makes their parents live longer. Or at least keeps them from dying young.
December 18, 2012
Growing Up Means Closing a Few Doors
In an MIT lab, undergraduates are getting paid money to open and close doors: real money, virtual doors. The students are navigating between rooms on a computer screen, part of a game devised by MIT psychologists to simulate how young people feel when their options slowly disappear.
December 11, 2012
Delaying Parenthood May Come at a Cost
A remarkable cover story in this week's The New Republic says that our great natural experiment in late-life parenthood is not necessarily going to end well.
December 9, 2012
You'll Know You're An Adult When . . .
There tends to be an "aha" moment when you realize you're not a kid anymore, and finally have to cop to being an adult. When was yours?
December 3, 2012
The Noisy Lives of Young People
I love when an old piece of writing seems as if it could have been written yesterday, and could as easily be applied to today’s twenty-somethings as to the young Baby Boomers about whom it was intended.
November 27, 2012
Generation Fill-in-the-Blank
If it seems like every week you're seeing a new label applied to today's twentysomethings, you're not far off. Generation Screwed, Generation Limbo, the Me Generation, Generation Sell—the labels keep coming, testament to our endless fascination with the golden 21-to-35-year-old demographic.
November 20, 2012
What's the 'Best Age' to Have a Baby?
John Mirowsky, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, has asked what the best age is to have a baby, noting the troubling disconnect in timing between being ready versus feeling ready. As he put it, “Humans mature reproductively about a decade before Americans mature socially.”
