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• Is Child No. 3 a Luxury Good?

  If there's one person who has made the child/commerce connection, it's Pamela Paul. She's the author of Parenting, Inc. and Babble contributor with a dispatch this week that, and perhaps I'm speaking only for myself here, reassured those of us parents who never managed to follow through on the baby sign language classes, thereby condemning our children to low IQs and drool. Well, she's digging in deeper to the idea of kids and cost in a recent Washington Post essay, where she's talking about the status of the third child, particularly for those raising their families in expensive cities. Apparently, Baby No. 3 is something of a luxury good.  Read More... Posted Apr 09 2008, 03:31 PM by Madeline Holler with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: parenting, family size, Pamela Paul, big families, third child, three kids, middle class families, Inc., poor, rich

• Only Children: Spoiled and Selfish? (The answer may surprise you.)

  Growing up, there were times I wanted to be an only child. Just the title, Only Child, seemed to denote something special, and since nearly everyone I knew, including myself, had at least one brother or sister, it was something special. Then I had a child of my own and for twelve years had to listen to the lamenting of my daughter as she decried her Only Child status. But it was a bit of a relief to finally remove her from that status and provide her with siblings, since I knew I was assured of her happiness. But was I? Is the prevailing thought about only children as lonely, spoiled brats simply a myth? Read More... Posted Aug 20 2007, 10:04 AM by Karen Murphy with | with 7 comment(s) Filed under: kids, parents, families, only children, family size, siblings