The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting

Raising children has become significantly more time-consuming and expensive, amid a sense that opportunity has grown more elusive.

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Parenthood in the United States has become much more demanding than it used to be.

Over just a couple of generations, parents have greatly increased the amount of time, attention and money they put into raising children. Mothers who juggle jobs outside the home spend just as much time tending to their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.

The amount of money parents spend on children, which used to peak when they were in high school, is now highest when they are under 6 and over 18 and into their mid-20s.

Renée Sentilles enrolled her son Isaac in lessons beginning when he was an infant. Even now that he’s 12, she rarely has him out of sight when he is home.

“I read all the child-care books,” said Ms. Sentilles, a professor in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. “I enrolled him in piano at 5. I took him to soccer practices at 4. We tried track; we did all the swimming lessons, martial arts. I did everything. Of course I did.”

While this kind of intensive parenting — constantly teaching and monitoring children — has been the norm for upper-middle-class parents since the 1990s, new research shows that people across class divides now consider it the best way to raise children, even if they don’t have the resources to enact it.

There are signs of a backlash, led by so-called free-range parents, but social scientists say the relentlessness of modern-day parenting has a powerful motivation: economic anxiety. For the first time, it’s as likely as not that American children will be less prosperous than their parents. For parents, giving children the best start in life has come to mean doing everything they can to ensure that their children can climb to a higher class, or at least not fall out of the one they were born into.

“As the gap between rich and poor increases, the cost of screwing up increases,” said Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who studies families and inequality. “The fear is they’ll end up on the other side of the divide.”

But it also stokes economic anxiety, because even as more parents say they want to raise childrenthis way, it’s the richest ones who are most able to do so.

New York Times by Claire Cain Miller, March 26, 2019

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in Parenting / Personal Stories / Recently Added  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Co-Parenting – One More Option For Creating Your Family

Co-Parenting is fast becoming an alternative to adoption, surrogacy and IVF for many in the LGBT community who want to have a family on their terms.

Co-parenting is quickly becoming a viable option for gay and lesbian individuals who want to be parents. Co-parenting also requires an incredible amount of care and preparation to ensure that all parties, and particularly the children, are protected and acknowledged legally.

Co-Parenting Defined

In a co-parenting relationship, two individuals who are not romantically involved come together for the purpose of having a child and parenting that child with a mother and a father. The key to understanding co-parenting is in the intention of the mother and father.  Many enter into co-parenting relationships because they do not want to be single parents and acknowledge their desire for their children to have a maternal and a paternal influence.co-parenting

Protecting a Co-Parenting Relationship: The Co-Parenting Agreement

Before entering into a co-parenting relationship, it is crucial to understand the legalities of parenting, as well as the potential pitfalls that may accompany this nontraditional parenting form. First, by becoming a parent, the mother and the father have a fiduciary responsibility to that child, and if the co-parenting arrangement dissolves, to one another in a child support proceeding.  This means that if both parties are not contributing financially to the child’s upbringing, either parent may bring a support action in family court.

Spelling out these financial terms, as well as visitation schedules, educational and religious training is the purview of the co-parenting agreement. The mother and the father will both have separate legal representation in the drafting and execution of a co-parenting agreement and the process of creating a comprehensive agreement will be very helpful for the parties to both feel comfortable with one another and the terms of their individual parenting visions.

Where Can You Meet a Potential Co-Parent?

As this new method of parenting has become more and more popular, so has an internet support industry of which I am a part. Websites such as FamilyByDesign.com, of which I am a legal consultant, and Modamily.com offer information to potential co-parents, as well as a database of individuals who are interested in becoming co-parents to find other such individuals.  Many LGBT Centers around the country now have family divisions that include information and networking about co-parenting.

Special Considerations

One very important aspect of co-parenting lies in the reality that the primary parents may have committed relationships with people other than the other co-parent.   This may be due to their sexual orientation or relationship status when entering into the co-parenting relationship.  Some states now have the ability to name more than two legal parents for a child. But more often than not, these “third party” individuals do not have legal relationships with the children of their romantic partners.  Primary parents must create these rights for their romantic partners by executing medical authorizations and guardianship provisions for the children.

For more information about co-parenting, contact Anthony M. Brown at Time for Families and speak to a specialist family lawyer to secure your and your family’s future or email Anthony at anthony@timeforfamilies.com.

in Featured Articles / Legal / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Anonymous egg donor, the secret I’m tempted to keep from my kids

I’m keeping a very big secret from my kids, that they have a anonymous egg donor, and my biggest fear is that once they find out, they will want nothing to do with me.

My preschool-age twin boys were born with the help of an anonymous egg donor. I’ve never second-guessed my decision to use IVF via donor eggs as my path to becoming a mother, but as my children get older, I’m more and more afraid of how they will react to learning the truth about their origins.anonymous egg donor

After trying and failing to get pregnant on my own in my late 20s, a preliminary blood test revealed my hormone levels were that of a post-menopausal woman. An internal ultrasound confirmed what a team of reproductive endocrinologists suspected: My ovaries had only four follicles them, and none of them were healthy enough make IVF a viable option. Devastated as I was, I took comfort in the fact that the rest of my reproductive system was perfectly healthy and more than capable of handling a pregnancy. All I needed was some donor eggs.

We looked into adoption, but in the end my husband wanted to share a biological connection to our kids, and I really wanted to experience pregnancy and labor. So after some long talks that lasted until the wee hours of the morning, a hard look at our finances and a bit of research into how much Ramen the human body can actually handle eating before it gives out, we decided to pursue a donor-assisted pregnancy.

Leafing through a binder of headshots and short biographies to choose a woman who will provide half of your children’s DNA is like a very high-stakes episode of The Bachelor. It’s bizarre to listen to your husband discuss other women he finds attractive while you try to balance any jealousy with the idea that your own children could inherit those good looks. In the end, we decided on a beautiful donor who looked nothing like me but whose application indicated she had similar interests and a personality close to my own.

We were lucky, and I became pregnant with twins on my first attempt at IVF. Through some quirk of genetics, neither of my kids inherited the donor’s red hair or hazel eyes. One favors his father’s coloring, and the other has my lighter locks. When we’re out as a family, the comment we receive most often is how we have “his-and-hers twins.”

Because we memorialized my pregnancy with tons of photos and videos, and because on the surface my children look like they could be my own, if I wanted to I could probably never tell the children the truth without them suspecting otherwise.

The idea of doing just that is tempting. Although my infertility story had the happiest of endings, the emotional pain of coming to terms with my diagnosis and undergoing the IVF process still lingers, and there’s a part of me that would love to lock it all away in a box, never to be spoken of. Not telling them would let me forget about that chapter of my life. It would also eliminate the risk of my being rejected by the kids or them feeling I’m somehow not their “real” mother in spite of carrying them and caring for them their whole lives.

But not telling them the truth is selfish. From a practical standpoint, they need to know about the donor’s medical history so they can be aware of any potential family hereditary issues. And it might be a plot line out of a soap opera, but I still want them to know they could have half siblings out in the world before they start exploring love and sex.

Knowing that telling them they were conceived with the help of an anonymous egg donor is the right thing to do doesn’t make it any less terrifying. I love my children completely.

by Anonymous – sheknows.com, January 4, 2016

Click here to read the entire article.  For more information about known v. anonymous egg donors, click here.

in Anonymous/Known Donation / Egg Donation / Ethics / Family Stories / Personal Stories  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Parenting Policies-China to End One Child Policy

As China ends its one child policy, some parents ponder the pros and cons of parenting a second child.

Parenting News from Beijing: China will allow all couples to have two children, a Communist Party leadership meeting decided on Thursday, bringing an end to decades of restrictive policies that limited most urban families to one child.

The announcement came after the party’s Central Committee concluded a four-day meeting in a heavily guarded hotel in western Beijing where it approved proposals for China’s next five-year development plan, which starts next year. The terse announcement from Xinhua, the state news agency, about the sharp shift in family planning policy gave no details.

The Chinese government has already eased some restrictions in what has often been described as the “one-child policy,” and a party conference in 2013 approved allowing couples to have two children when one of the spouses was an only child. But many eligible couples failed to take up the chance to have a second child, citing the expense and pressures of parenting children in a highly competitive society.

A summary of the decision by Chinese radio news said that officials had decided to “improve the demographic development strategy, and to comprehensively implement a policy that couples can have two children, actively taking steps to counter the aging of the population.”

The initial public reaction to the party leaders’ decision was restrained, and many citizens in Beijing who were asked whether they would grasp the chance to have two children expressed reluctance or outright indifference. Some, however, were pleased.

Still, the cost and difficulty of parenting 2 children are likely to deter many eligible couples from having more children despite the relaxed rules, Mu Guangzong, a professor of demography at Peking University, said in a telephone interview.

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by Chris Buckley - New York Times - October 29, 2015
in Ethics / In the News / International / Legal / Legislation / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments