Every Mothers Day, millions of American women receive cards from their children. In 2005, more than 150 million Mothers Day cards were sent to the 82.5 million American women who were mothers, and today there are 300,000 more mothers than there were then. (Those numbers come from U.S. Census reports that can be found here and here.)

Some Mothers Day cards are funny, some are bland, and some are handmade and sincere. And then some, this year at least, address marijuana legalization.

The source of these particular cards is a group called Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation, or SAFER, a national non-profit that tries to educate people about the relative harms of marijuana and alcohol. More specifically, they argue that our laws should reflect the fact that while alcohol kills 20,000 people a year, no studies have found a link between marijuana overdose and death (at least according to this post on the blog Momlogic). SAFER’s idea was that Mothers Day could also become “Tell your Mothers Day.”

The pro-legalization Mothers Day e-card, put together by the Women’s Marijuana Movement, a SAFER project, starts innocuously enough. Alongside a picture of a pink carnation, it reads, “Thank you for raising me to be thoughtful and compassionate.” But from there it quickly moves to the card’s real point. “I want to share some news that might surprise you, but should not upset you: I believe marijuana should be legal.”

As an AP article about the e-card points out, mothers are considered one of the nation’s most powerful lobbies, and the idea behind the card is that if enough moms start supporting marijuana legalization, laws could change quickly. However, the AP article also mentions that even pot activists admit that they “sometimes find it easier to attend protests or lobby lawmakers about pot than to tell their mothers they smoke weed.”

But of course while some parents remain adamantly against marijuana (a full 63% of American women, and 48% of men, still do not support legalizing pot), on the other end of the spectrum are the parents who smoke pot themselves, perhaps even with their kids.

Jezebel, in its recent post about mothers and marijuana (it really did seem to be sort of a trend this year), linked to a website called The Weed Blog, whose Mothers Day post was titled Moms Like Marijuana Too. It reiterated a number of the core beliefs of a group called Mom’s for Marijuana, among them that children should be fully educated about both the risks and the benefits of marijuana and that marijuana should not be used by kids with “developing minds under the age of legal consent” except with parental guidance. Jezebel took up this “thorny issue” of parents smoking pot with their kids, whether casually or to offer “parental guidance,” and added that many people knew a kid in high school whose parents “ascribed to the ‘I’d rather have them do it at home philosophy.’” I certainly knew kids whose parents were like this in high school, but these days, twelve years later, I still have no idea what ends up being better for kids.

I imagine some of the ideas on The Weed Blog feed into some of the negative stereotypes people might have about mothers who support legalizing drugs—that they are potheads who do drugs with their kids, something that most Americans probably don’t support.  However, these people might be surprise to learn that one of the leaders of the Women’s Marijuana Movement is, in fact, a self-described conservative lawyer who believes strongly in legalizing marijuana even though she doesn’t use it herself. So take that, stereotypes.

As would be abundantly clear to anyone who’s been reading the news for the past decade, we have a problem with obesity in this country. A problem so serious, in fact, that the U.S. surgeon general has called it an “epidemic.”

The Atlantic’s recent cover story, “Beating Obesity,” sums up the scope of the problem with a number of statistics. Author Marc Ambinder writes that by 2008, “68 percent of American adults were overweight, and 34 percent were obese.” Not only that, “roughly one in three children and adolescents was overweight, and nearly one in five was obese.”

Ambinder delves into out the social, individual, and technological factors that  impact how people choose to eat and exercise, and also looks at the many ways these choices intersect with public policy. As Thomas Frieden, the director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, tells Ambinder, “If you go with the flow in America today, you will end up overweight or obese.”

Many people think of obesity as simply resulting from a lack of self-control (Ambinder makes a number of strong arguments against this) but regardless of whether one thinks of obesity as a social, political, or personal problem, when it comes to children, who have so little control over what they eat and how they spend their days, obviously they cannot be held responsible. It is also obvious that they need help, and fast. An overweight child between the ages of 10 and 15 has an 80 percent chance of being obese by the time they are 25. Being overweight also takes a huge toll on a developing body, and can lead to problems for everything from the bones to the brain. Which is not even to mention all the ways it impacts self-esteem. A recent study reported that overweight children, regardless of the gender, race, socioeconomic status or social skills, are much more likely to be bullied than children of average weight.

It is no surprise that all of this has large implications for our health care system. But I did find it a bit unexpected that childhood obesity has now also become a defense issue. At the end of April, a group of retired officers released a report detailing their concerns that children’s current eating habits and lack of exercise will make them incapable of joining the military.

According to the report, 9 million young adults—27 percent of all Americans ages 17 to 24—are currently too fat to join the military. The ex-officers are concerned that these numbers will increase when today’s children come of age. The report was released in an attempt to built support for a nutrition bill that aims to make school lunches healthier. “When over a quarter of young adults are too fat to fight, we need to take notice,” said one of the officers, using the term—too fat to fight—that the report has subsequently been linked with, over and over.

At first it seemed a bit odd to imagine the military getting involved with school food. But it turns out there is a precedent—during World War II, recruits were getting turned away because they had grown up with inadequate nutrition, and as a result military leaders pushed to establish the national school lunch program. It also seemed a bit harsh to be calling children “too fat to fight.” But it also seems like whatever could bring attention and resources to this situation is probably a good thing.

According to the journal Pediatrics, the average young American is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements a day. This is a lot! It is so many it is almost hard to fathom. I can hardly remember three advertisements I saw yesterday, and this makes me feel like the 2,997 other ads I saw but don’t remember must now be sitting in my brain silently, just waiting to be activated.

I found that statistic in a paper that is about the way advertising affects children and adolescents, and it is filled with  lots of other interesting information, too. For example, that research shows children younger than 8 are “cognitively and psychologically defenseless against advertising.” Also, that every year teenagers spend about $155 billion, children younger than 12 years spend another $25 billion, and both groups influence roughly $200 billion of their parents’ spending. This is a ton of money! And where are 10-year-olds getting $10 billion? After learning all this I wasn’t surprised to learn that certain European countries (Norway and Sweden, for example) forbid all advertising directed at children under 12.

All of this means that groups like the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (tagline: “Reclaiming Childhood from Corporate Marketers”) are up against a lot. But this particular group, it turns out, has come up with a pretty good marketing strategy of their own.

In response to the Toy Industry Association’s TOTY (Toy of the Year) Awards, the CCFC now has the TOADY (Toys Oppressive and Destructive to Young Children) Award for worst toy of the year. The way it works is that CCFC has selected what they call “five exceptional finalists,” and now anyone gets to vote on which one they think is actually the worst.

The choices include the Barbie Doll’d Up Nails Digital Nail Printer, a machine that produces manicures “for any occasion” and costs $280 (!), and the Little Tykes Young Explorer, which retails for $2,599 (!!!) and seems to encourage the exact opposite of exploring—it appears to be a sort of mini-cubicle, with an IBM computer on a desk and little plastic slats on the sides to keep the child’s eyes glued to the screen. And then there is my personal favorite, the EyeClops Mini Projector ($64, which is at least a little more reasonable), which lets kids project movies, TV shows, and video games onto any flat surface. For example, say, on your tent, while you’re camping (see picture above.)

Voting (which you can do here) was sort of satisfying, by the way. I highly recommend it. You’ve got until May 10. Also, what do you think about all this? Are these toys actually the worst or could the CCFC have done better? Do you wish we could ban childhood advertising like in Sweden, or does that seem ridiculous?

Parenting expert Penelope Leach has a new book, and it’s already making waves for its claim that so-called “cry-it-out sleep training” can cause brain damage. According to Dr. Leach, scientific tests show that when a baby’s cries go unanswered, his brain begins to produce the stress hormone cortisol. This is apparently very bad for brain development—Leach told the BBC, “Some neuroscientists describe it as toxic.”

Before we go any further I should probably disclose that “cry-it-out sleep training” was exactly the method my parents chose to use on me, and as my mom explained it, things seem to have gone pretty smoothly. The first night I cried for over an hour,  long enough that my mom finally had to take a break and walk around the neighborhood while my dad kept watch. The next night I cried for 30 minutes, the night after that, only for 5 minutes, and then that was it.

(This marked the beginning of what turned out to be a relatively short-lived period of parental bedroom privacy, since as soon as I was big enough to walk, I started regularly making my way back to my parents’ bed every night around 2 a.m., a situation that lasted for years. I suppose we were “co-sleeping” in the “family bed,” except that those terms weren’t around back then. But all of that is a whole different story.)

Leach told the BBC that she’s not “getting at parents” in the book, The Essential First Year-What Babies Need Parents to Know, just trying to provide them with good advice grounded in science. But honestly, her claims seem to be more an attempt to drum up some controversy in the interest of marketing than anything else.

Strollerderby recently posted something about this, and as many of the commenters pointed out, it is unclear exactly which studies Leach is referring to. She’s not that clear about the details in the BBC interview, but my guess is a baby would have to cry regularly over at least a period of a few weeks before it became problematic. I am sure that if a baby’s cries regularly go unanswered this has a negative impact on her, and not just physically, either. But it is hard to imagine that letting a well-cared for baby to cry herself to sleep a few nights in a row could be damaging. If crying for half an hour had a life long impact on all children, wouldn’t we all be scarred? Besides, having a worn out, dead tired mother can have a negative impact on children, too.

But hey, as I mentioned, letting me cry it out for a few nights was my mom’s method of choice, and since I don’t consider myself brain damaged, I am probably a bit biased. What about you? Which side of the debate do you fall on? And (probably most importantly) do you have any good advice for parents trying to help their kids sleep through the night?

Photo by Brandon Baunach

There are many disturbing things about the widely reported story of the Tennessee woman who adopted a boy from Russia only to send him back seven months later. Among them, that the 7-year-old boy flew back to Russia unaccompanied, and that he was picked up at the airport in Moscow by a man the adoptive mother found on the Internet.

Also, there is this chilling last line in the note the boy was carrying from his adoptive mother:

“After giving my best to this child, I am sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends, and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child.”

The more you read about the situation, the worse it gets. The boy’s adoptive grandmother told the AP (find the article here) that the boy said he had been beaten with a broom handle at the orphanage. And then, during an interview with the boy that was broadcast on Russian state television (find the article about that here), the boy said his adoptive mother had often pulled his hair. Adding insult to injury (in my opinion) the interviewer then asked the boy if he cried when this happened, and when the boy replied that he had, the interviewer gave him (a 7-year-old, don’t forget) this ridiculous bit advice: “You are a man, you shouldn’t cry.”

In response, Russia has decided to suspend all U.S. adoptions, which has in turn been devastating for families at the tail end of the adoption process.

So yeah, the articles about this whole situation tend to include a lot of disturbing anecdotes. Including this one: that part of the reason Russian authorities reacted so strongly was that since 1996, fourteen Russian children adopted in the U.S. have died of abuse.

Maybe I’m being naïve, but I found this pretty shocking. As far as I understand, adopting children from another country is not at all easy, so basically this means that there are adults out there willing to go through a whole lot of trouble to adopt a child, only to kill them a few years later.  It also means that whatever screening process we have for prospective adoptive parents clearly does not always work the way it should.

This Tennessee mother didn’t kill the boy she adopted, though, she just sent him back. According to that note the boy was carrying, the mother claimed he was “violent with severe psychopathic issues,” and said she believed she had been lied to by the Russian orphanage.

According to a recent New York Times article, approximately 1 percent of adoptions don’t work out.  It feels easy to decide that all parents who adopt a child only to decide later on that they “no longer wish to parent this child” are negligent or at least lacking some essential moral code. But then I read a post by a guest writer named Anita Tedaldi on the blog Motherlode that made me question that assumption. Tedaldi tells her story of adopting a little boy only to realize that the child was not attaching to her (nor she to him), which, along with some other problems, made her feel she was not parenting him well. Eventually, after a lot of anguish on Tedaldi’s part, a social worker helped find the boy a family that seemed to be better fit and Tedaldi agreed to let that family adopt the boy instead.

The idea of a family giving up an adopted child (or a biological child) is very hard to swallow. But in the case of Tedaldi, it seemed that she really was trying to do what was best for the boy. And after thinking about it more, I started wondering if maybe we’d all be a bit better off if more parents were able to take a good hard look at the circumstances they provide their children, and worked to find their children something better if the situation called for it. Besides, it started to seem unfair that we condemn mothers who don’t seek help if they do something terrible, but we also condemn those who do.

Which is not to say that this necessarily applies to that Tennessee woman. We might never know exactly what she was dealing with—her family seems to have basically gone into seclusion—but the fact that she didn’t even try to find the boy a different home in the United States does make it seem like she wasn’t acting in his interest. Instead, she seems to have been operating under the assumption that if one adopts a child that turns out to be difficult, one should in effect return that child back to the orphanage like a defective product. And that is very hard to swallow indeed.

Those French people, they’re so accepting of certain things—extra-marital affairs, high taxes, universal health care. Also, a child-rearing philosophy that involves smoking your way through pregnancy, just saying no to breastfeeding, and shipping your children off to boarding school at the earliest possible opportunity. These, at least, are some of the ideas espoused in the recent bestselling book in France, Le Conflit, La Femme et La Mere (The Conflict, the Woman and the Mother).

It is by Elisabeth Badinter, a feminist philosopher, and while it’s not available in the U.S., with all the press it’s been getting it’s a fair guess that it might be sometime soon. Basically, as the Times of London puts it in an article about the book, Badinter is advocating “a return to the old French model, which involved whatever necessary—powdered milk, baby minders, nurseries, you name it—to prevent les enfants from taking over their mothers’ lives.”

Or, in Badinter’s words: “Today, we’re told we’re not allowed to smoke, to eat unpasteurised cheese or seafood or even to a drink a glass of wine when we are pregnant. It’s time to stop all that.”

Needless to say, some people find these ideas somewhat controversial.

Jezebel, in its post on the subject, points out that “Badinter’s send-’em-to-boarding-school (she actually kind of says this) ethos is somewhat refreshing in this era of maternal judgment, but one recent study contradicts her view of babies as ‘tyrants.’ ” They’re referring to a study conducted in Taiwan that discovered having children greatly reduced a woman’s risk of suicide, and the more the better. Two children reduced the risk by 39%, while three or more reduced it by 60%. But of course, as Jezebel goes on to point out, this could just be guilt.

Then again, maybe mothers don’t have as much say as one might think in what kind of mother they turn out to be. The Times of London also recently published a story about some scientists at Richmond University in Virginia who claim that women have a set of neurons that operate sort of like “bad mother/good mother” switches.

The researchers claim that women with fewer of the “good mother” neurons are more likely to neglect or abuse their offspring. The hope is that at some point in the future, brain scans could help detect mothers more at risk of abusing their children, and that services could then be provided to these women to help prevent abuse before it starts.

Not that Badinter seems like she’d be too interested in this line of research. “We’ve always been mediocre mothers here,” she told the Times of London about France. “But we’ve tended to live happier lives.”

A few days ago I was at a Barnes & Noble when I heard the telltale sounds of a tantrum-in-the-making. The child’s words were somewhat unintelligible, but his guardian’s (the mother’s, I assumed) were not. “Get. Over. Here. Now,” she was saying, with increasing hostility, at a number of volumes. None of which seemed to have any affect whatsoever on the child.

The public tantrum is an abiding child-rearing fear of mine, not for the tantrum itself so much as for the potential it offers of losing complete control of one’s child in public. Which is exactly what happened next to that woman in the Barnes & Noble. A few minutes after I heard her start yelling at the child I looked up to see him streak by, waddling as fast as he could on his short little legs, giggling. He was a full aisle ahead of the woman by this point, who was marching quickly behind him and yelling, “Stop that right this instant!” Instead, he ran faster. Finally, with a little slipped expletive, the woman started running, and caught him just behind the New Paperbacks table. Once she did she swept him up and started walking out of the store while he, of course, started crying.

Ugh. I felt for her. I also wondered why the child wasn’t just a little bit more afraid of breaking her rules. But how does one teach such a thing? I rarely remember too many occasions when I was  overtly punished as a kid, but I certainly wouldn’t have had the gall to push the limits so far as that child did, and force my mother to throw her bag over her shoulder and actually start running after me in a public place. In fact, I would have been terrified to do that. But why? How did my parents teach me this ? And if things do get to such a point, how is one to handle it?

I was thinking about this today after reading a short interview with Melissa Rivers at Babble, who had this to say about public meltdowns:

Nobody forgets their first official public throwdown. Ours was in the Salt Lake City airport just past security. There was something he wanted in the store, something he already had. I [told him no], and he threw himself down in the middle of the concourse. I stood there, put one foot on either side of him so nobody would step on him, and people walked by, saying, “Oh, you too?”

I feel like maybe the first step is just not being embarrassed. For some reason this often seems to make things a lot worse, maybe just because it lets kids know they have the upper hand. I’m sure that losing control of yourself doesn’t do anyone any good, either, although I also imagine this is easier said than done.

Rivers’ response sounds sensible enough, at least as far as she describes it. But then again Rivers, when asked in that same interview to sum up her parenting philosophy, just offers one word—Xanax—and it’s easy for pretty much anyone to stay calm on Xanax. Ideally, in my mind, it’s probably best if you don’t need drugs to do so.

Photo by Divine in the Daily/Joe Green

In 2006, a researcher in Austin recruited a few hundred white families with children between 5 and 7 to do a study about race. She gave the kids a survey then divided the families into groups. One group was asked to watch videos with multicultural themes, and another group was asked to watch the videos and have conversations with their children about racial equality. At this point, something strange happened—five of those families quit the study abruptly. They were that unwilling to discuss race with their children.

This story is from the book NurtureShock, which argues that a number of commonly accepted ideas about raising children often backfire. For example, giving kids lots of praise doesn’t necessarily help them (sometimes it can lead to a lack of effort, or an emphasis on results over effort), and not talking about race, it turns out, can lead to racism. (Newsweek excerpted the section on race, which you can find here.)

Back to that study, the writers recount how the parents in the study all considered themselves individuals who embraced diversity. Almost none of them, however, had talked to their children about race. Instead, they had asserted statements like “Everybody’s equal.” The idea was that by ignoring race, their children would be less likely to be aware of racial differences, and therefore less likely to be racist. However, things didn’t work out this way.

They wanted their children to grow up colorblind. But [the researcher's] first test of the kids revealed they weren’t colorblind at all. Asked how many white people are mean, these children commonly answered, “Almost none.” Asked how many blacks are mean, many answered, “Some,” or “A lot.” Even kids who attended diverse schools answered the questions this way.

As for the study’s results, watching the videos, it turned out, didn’t make much of a difference, and neither did the conversations about race. The researcher was surprised about this last part. But looking through the parents’ study diaries, she started to discover why. Even many of the parents who said they talked to their kids about race hadn’t actually managed to do so, but instead reverted back to those vague statements like “Everybody’s equal.” Only six families actually managed to speak openly about race and interracial friendship. Of those, their children’s racial attitudes dramatically improved in a single week.

This lack of conversation about race is nothing specific to Austin, either. NurtureShock also mentions another study done of 17,000 families with young children. Of those families, 45% had never spoken about race. And of the white families, this was true of a whopping 75%.

A big part of the issue, it seems, is that while parents hope that by not speaking about racial differences their children will be unaware of them, children notice them on their own-even babies as young as 6-months have been found to be aware of race.  (You can find more about that in this article about the book.) And it is leaving children to come to their own conclusions about these differences that often leads to prejudice.

The book also argues that while many parents try to wait as long as possible to speak to their children about race, it is best to start this conversation very young.

Several studies point to the possibility of developmental windows-stages when children’s attitudes might be most amenable to change. In one experiment, children were put in cross-race study groups, and then were observed on the playground to see if the interracial classroom time led to interracial play at recess. The researchers found mixed study groups worked wonders with the first-grade children, but it made no difference with third graders. It’s possible that by third grade, when parents usually recognize it’s safe to start talking a little about race, the developmental window has already closed.

As a blogger at the site Cocoamamas points out in a post about NurtureShock, “Something I’ve believed for a long time is that you cannot teach anti-racism or even have successful integration if you can’t talk about race.” This makes a lot of sense to me.

But about those parents in Austin, it seems they wanted to discuss race with their kids, they just didn’t know how. Many came to the researcher later, it turned out, and told her “they just didn’t know what to say to their kids, and they didn’t want the wrong thing coming out of the mouth of their kids.”

So for anyone reading, what would you advise them? Have you spoken to your kids about race? What are some things that worked, or didn’t work? I’d love to hear.

For girls, Autumn was the 89th most popular, Genesis was 95th, and Brooklyn was 47th (Brooklynn was 182nd). For boys, Caden was 95th, Josue was 182nd, and Nehemiah was 364th. At least these were the rankings back in 2008, the most recent year for which the Social Security Administration has released information about baby names.

I don’t know anyone with these names, but apparently, according to the researchers who analyzed the SSA data all the way back to 1880, this is no surprise. Because while in 1880s, 40 percent of boys received one of the 10 most popular names, these days that’s only the case for 10 percent of boys. And while up until the mid 1950s a little less than half of all girls had one of the 50 most popular names, these days that’s only true for about one in four girls.

It’s not that names like Anthony or William are disappearing (they are currently still the 7th and 8th most popular names for boys on the SSA list), but they are becoming less common. And if Itzel is the 383rd most popular girls name (it is) that means that the names that don’t even make the list must be very unusual indeed.

(For anyone curious to learn more about baby names’ popularity by year check here and scroll down to the box titled “Baby Name Popularity by Birth Year.”)

I started thinking about such things after reading this article, which talks not only about baby naming trends but also discusses some other conclusions drawn by those researchers who analyzed all the SSA data. Their take on the trend toward more unusual baby names is that it is representative of parents these days valuing individuality over obedience and conformity.

Study researcher Jean Twenge sees this as an indication that our culture is becoming not just more individualistic but narcissistic. The positive side of individualism, she points out, is that there is less prejudice and more tolerance for minority groups, but when individualism is taken too far, the result is narcissism. (That last part is sort of obvious though, right?)

It turns out Twenge has even written a book about this—The Narcissism Epidemic, which you can read more about here. (Clearly Twenge is pretty into this topic, her last book was called Generation Me.)

I don’t know, though. Personally, I don’t think that wanting your children to stand out or have unusual names necessarily means you are narcissistic. And is narcissism currently a widespread disorder (Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or NPD)? Twenge claims nearly 1 out of 10 Americans in their twenties have experienced the symptoms of NPD. Either way, even if it turns out we are dealing with a narcissism epidemic, if I had to choose between having a few more narcissists around and living in a culture of conformity with less tolerance and more prejudice, I would definitely choose the narcissists.

Take this scenario: a decade ago you signed up as an anonymous sperm donor. You gave the sperm bank some basic information about you but not much more than that. Years go by. You forget that for all you know there could be dozens of mini-yous growing up with dozens of women you’ve never met. When one day you get a phone call from one of these women, and it turns out that anonymity clause in that contract didn’t actually mean much at all.

Or this one: you and your wife are raising a child together, but you have your doubts. You love the child, but you just aren’t totally sure she is yours. So you get a paternity test, and it turns out you’re not the father. What then?

The first scenario was detailed in a recent Slate article. And while DNA tests didn’t directly connect the mothers with the donor, they did connect some of the mothers with each other. The donor then came into the picture after one of the mothers read an obituary about a baseball manager and had a hunch he was the donor’s father (the donor had disclosed that his father was in the Baseball Hall of Fame)—she was right.

Increasingly, donor anonymity is becoming a thing of the past. The article quotes Wendy Kramer, the founder of the Donor Sibling Registry, explaining that donors only continue to choose anonymity because they are not educated. “If they were properly educated on the consequences,” she told Slate, “then many would choose not to donate.”

The second scenario was the subject of a New York Times magazine article that looked at the legal and emotional implications of discovering, through a DNA test, that the child you’d thought was yours is not. It also outlined the scope of the situation—paternity tests have jumped 64 percent in the last decade, and 30 percent of them reveal that the man who thought he was the father, in fact, is not. About 400,000 tests are taken a year, so that’s happening to about 120,000 men.

It seems to me that if a woman chooses an anonymous sperm donor, she should let him remain so, even if she has the means to discover his identity. However, as the Slate piece points out, a child produced from such a union isn’t bound to do so. The article’s situation has a happy ending, though. One of the mother’s contacted the sperm donor, who agreed to meet her and the daughter (although he has not wanted to be in touch with his other children).

The situations described in the New York Times article seem much more devastating. In one, a man has to continue paying child support for a daughter who isn’t biologically his, even though his ex-wife has ended up marrying the biological father of the girl. In another, a man abruptly drops out of a young girl’s life after discovering she isn’t his biological daughter, which ends up being very damaging for the child.

Obviously, knowing one’s genetic background helps inform a person about what diseases they might be prone to. Other than that, however, it’s hard to see if the benefits of a DNA test actually outweigh the downsides. Regarding sperm donors, it allows someone to be found who doesn’t want to be found, and who has a right not to be, in my opinion. And regarding paternity tests, it helps a father discover something that will certainly hurt him but will probably hurt the child most of all. The man, obviously, has a right to know, but it’s hard to see what good ultimately comes from it.

Photo by SantaRose OLD SKOOL