Tom Hickey, a PhD student from NUI Galway, has written the most extraordinary article on school patronage for The Irish Times today in which he repeatedly refers not to children, but to ‘child citizens’. The article bristles with hostility towards denominational schools, religion, and is even suspicious of the influence parents have over their children....
A new poll from the prestigious Pew Research Centre issued to coincide with Father’s Day, shows that 70 percent of Americans believe women having children without a dad to help raise them is bad for society. President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron would agree. To coincide with Father’s Day both men wrote articles...
Writing in The Irish Times yesterday, law lecturer Ronan McCrea argued that immigrant laws must give preference to people who are committed to ‘tolerance’. Depending on what he means, this could be deeply problematic, or not. If he has in mind immigrants who would impose Sharia law on their new societies given a chance, then...
Study after study has been produced showing the negative effects of divorce on children. But even when the children of divorce manage to keep up their school grades and so on, divorce can still affect them in ways that are not directly measurable. I came across a very relevant quote on this point the other...
At our conference on Women, Home and Work a fortnight ago, speaker Jonas Himmelstrand said the Swedish day-care model should not be followed by other countries because it is failing both children and parents in his country. An article in The Irish Times yesterday defended the ‘Nordic Model’ without really addressing the arguments against it....
As mentioned in my previous blog on the topic, at the recent Iona Institute conference, I was shocked by some of Jonas Himmelstrand’s descriptions of family policy in Sweden. As I understood, it aimed, among other things, to “liberate mothers from motherhood instincts,” so they could continue their careers. My own career would indeed be...
At the Iona Institute’s family policy conference late last month, we heard Jonas Himmelstrand’s sometimes jaw-dropping description of Swedish family policy. It was interesting to hear, on the one hand, how government policy and media so strongly promote the Swedish model of full-time daycare and full employment for parents as early as the child’s second...
Here is a research brief produced by US think-tank, the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy (iMAPP) on the 10th anniversary of same-sex marriage in the Netherlands and the overall state of marriage there. It provides some food for thought on the possible impact of legalising same-sex marriage on the institution of marriage generally. There...
As you may have read, a Canadian couple is not telling the world the sex of their baby. To do so, they believe, would impose all kinds of stereotypes about boys and girls on the child. Therefore they won’t tell anyone if he/she is a boy or a girl so he/she can be free to...
I have recently finished reading Victoria White’s book Mother Ireland – why Ireland hates motherhood (which was referred to at the Institute’s conference last week on Women, Home and Work). One point that the author makes is that many of the founding mothers of Irish feminism had very bad experiences of husbands or fathers, and...
