children
Children: Our most valuable natural resource.
The perfect chocolate substitute. Naturally sweet for your little explorer
Take a seat, and first of all, use this space to give yourself the credit you deserve. We often talk about careers, degrees, and external achievements, but we rarely stop to acknowledge the work of raising children for what it truly is: the most demanding, complex, and vital job there is.
By Veronica Ruizabout 3 hours ago in Families
Anna Dorosh, Supporting War-Affected Children in Ukraine: Grassroots Impact and Public Service
Anna Dorosh is a Ukrainian public-sector professional working in the Cabinet Secretariat of Ukraine, with expertise in European integration and strategic communications. She is a former assistant to the Deputy Minister of Justice of Ukraine. She is the initiator of an independent charitable project supporting children in difficult life circumstances, especially families affected by war and disability, SvyatKYOU. Dorosh has drawn on earlier experience in project management, stakeholder engagement, communications, and fundraising, including work connected to the Chernivtsi City Council, to build partnerships and expand practical support for vulnerable children in Ukraine.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsenabout 6 hours ago in Families
Oksana Ivanets on Military Journalism, War Trauma, and Witnessing Russian Crimes in Ukraine
Oksana Ivanets is a Ukrainian military journalist and lieutenant colonel who served in both the State Border Guard Service and the Armed Forces of Ukraine. She has been a special correspondent for ArmyInform. She has reported from the frontline and recently de-occupied areas, especially in the Kharkiv region, documenting war crimes, occupation conditions, returning prisoners, and the experiences of soldiers and civilians under attack. Her work combines military communications, field reporting, and witness-based storytelling. In this interview, she reflects on service, trauma, propaganda, frontline ethics, and the moral burden of recording violence while preserving Ukraine’s war testimony for future history.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsenabout 7 hours ago in Families
Separate Bedrooms
The Controversial Choice That Saved Our Relationship THE SECRET NOBODY TALKS ABOUT 🤫 My husband Daniel and I have slept in separate bedrooms for four years, and when people learn this they react with a mixture of concern, judgment, and morbid curiosity that reveals how deeply the cultural assumption that married couples must share a bed is embedded in our collective understanding of what marriage means, because sleeping separately is associated in most people's minds with relationship failure, with the cold war stage of dying marriages where physical distance reflects emotional distance and where the retreat to separate rooms is a prelim to the retreat to separate lives. But our experience has been the opposite of this assumption: separate bedrooms have produced more intimacy, better communication, improved physical affection, and dramatically better individual health than shared sleeping ever provided, and the decision which initially felt like a concession to failure has proven to be one of the most relationship-enhancing choices we have ever made 🏠💕
By The Curious Writerabout 14 hours ago in Families
Marriage
How Losing Everything Revealed What We Actually Had THE MORNING WE LOST IT ALL 📉 The phone call came at 7:43 AM on a Wednesday morning while my husband Robert and I were eating breakfast with our two children who were arguing about whose turn it was to use the iPad, and the normalcy of this scene, the cereal bowls and the sibling bickering and the coffee growing cold while I refereed, made what followed feel like it was happening to someone else in a movie I was watching rather than in my actual kitchen in my actual life, because Robert's business partner called to inform him that their construction company was insolvent, that the bank was calling their loans immediately, that their largest client had filed a lawsuit for breach of contract, and that the personal guarantees Robert had signed on the business loans meant that our family was liable for approximately 1.7 million dollars in debt that the company could not pay, and in the approximately four minutes of that phone call our financial life which had been comfortable and secure and built on fifteen years of hard work and careful planning collapsed into a crater so deep that climbing out seemed not just difficult but genuinely impossible 📞😰
By The Curious Writerabout 14 hours ago in Families
The Voicemail My Son Left
Seven Words That Became My Reason to Breathe THE MESSAGE I ALMOST DELETED 😢 My son Marcus left for his second deployment to Afghanistan on a Tuesday morning in March, and somewhere between the airport and the military transport that would carry him into a war zone he called my phone knowing I would not answer because I had told him the night before that I could not bear to say goodbye again because the first deployment had nearly destroyed me and I did not have the emotional reserves for another farewell that might be the last, and so he called knowing the call would go to voicemail and he left a message that I did not listen to for three days because seeing his name on my missed calls made my chest constrict with the specific dread that military families carry constantly, the awareness that every phone call could be the one that changes everything, and when I finally gathered the courage to press play his voice filled my kitchen with seven words that became the most important sentence I have ever heard: "Mom, I'm brave because you were first" 💔
By The Curious Writera day ago in Families
Easter in the Mountains
When I was growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina, Easter came along with a promise that things were about to feel a little brighter, if only for a while. We didn’t have much in those days, and everybody knew it, but somehow Easter had a way of making you forget all that. For one Sunday out of the year, we felt like the richest people in all of Appalachia.
By Tim Carmichael2 days ago in Families
Why Good Intentions Make a Bad Legal Standard
Why Law Reaches for Intent in the First Place Legal systems lean toward intent because it feels humane. Motive appears to reveal character, and character feels like a stable guide for judgment. In emotionally charged domains like parenting and custody, intent offers something comforting: the belief that outcomes can be understood, and even forgiven, by examining what someone meant to do. Courts frequently ask whether a parent acted out of love, fear, confusion, or malice, as though the answer to that question can reliably predict what the child will experience over time.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast4 days ago in Families
Professor Carlton Jama Adams and the Lasting Impact of Routine on Child Development. AI-Generated.
Professor Carlton Jama Adams is a licensed clinical psychologist and professor of psychology whose work centers on family systems and child development. His academic and professional experience reflects a deep focus on how parenting practices shape long-term outcomes for children. Through his teaching in areas such as human services, community justice, and the psychology of oppression and liberation, he offers a well-rounded perspective on the environments children grow up in. His approach often highlights the importance of consistency, emotional awareness, and structure as key elements in supporting healthy development.
By Carlton Adams5 days ago in Families
A Parent Who Didn’t Know What to Expect From a CAFCASS Call
I kept checking my phone even when it wasn't ringing. That particular kind of anxiety, the one that makes you pick up your mobile mid-sentence while someone's talking to you, the one that made me sleep badly for a week, was all because of one scheduled call from a CAFCASS officer.
By Family Law Service5 days ago in Families
