Looking for the right way to encourage your adult children to develop a deep marital bond? Have you considered luring them home under false pretenses, holding them hostage, and forcing them to marry?
Dr Humayra Abedin, from east London, flew back to Britain this week after being freed by the courts.
She went to the High Court […]

From a heartbreaking profile of a recently retired family court judge in Australia:
After the mother’s death, Mullane had to examine the parenting capacities of all the disputing parties. A dispiriting picture emerged. The maternal grandfather and his partner, according to court reports, lived in a filthy dwelling on a property littered with rubbish, with an […]

People, getting away from your hovering smothertude is probably the only reason your kids went to college in the first place:
Once upon a time, Facebook was a gathering place for college kids. No one had access to the social networking site, started at Harvard in 2004, without a university e-mail address.
But two years ago, Facebook […]

What other explanation for this stunning bit of caloric cluelessness?
“We’re seeing too much food and not enough activity,” agrees Pauline Williams, who oversees the Live program. She offers an extreme example of a 5- or 6-year-old in the course who was drinking up to three 2-liter bottles of orange soda a day. The mother “didn’t […]

And their demeaning daily grunts are permanently damaging their increasingly furry progeny, says a U.K. think tank:
Children as young as five should get lessons in anger management, coping with stress, solving social problems, communication and making friends, it is claimed.
Researchers said youngsters from deprived backgrounds needed more help to develop social awareness amid claims they […]

This:
For beating his 23-month-old son with a belt, Fred Banks won’t have to go to prison – but he will have to stay away from all of his children and wife for five years.
That was part of the sentence handed down Tuesday by Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Norbert Nadel after Banks pleaded guilty in […]

… or a very sick custody game?
Football tough guy Brian Urlacher dresses his son in pink Cinderella diapers and paints the 3-year-old’s toenails blue, the child’s mother charged in Will County court Tuesday.
The mother, Tyna Robertson, threatened to block Urlacher from seeing the boy if the beefy linebacker keeps it up.
Urlacher’s attorney, Anita Ventrelli, filed […]

It’s bad enough that this Tampa Tribune columnist, learning nothing from her own 15-month-old’s frightening encounter with a shopping-mall Santa, proceeds to offer six ways to “handle this emotion-fraught meeting” — none of which is don’t freaking do it at all.
But then the paper’s online staff manages to leave her insensitivity in the newly […]

Or something like that, according to the head of a Dutch clinic that treats compulsive gaming in teens:
Keith Bakker is the founder and head of Europe’s first clinic to work with young gamers. He and his staff prefer to consider compulsive gaming as a social rather than a psychological problem in the young people they […]

From Tuesday’s Times, a revealing look into the I-am-what-I-buy psyche of Facebook-generation parents facing their first recession:
Come Christmas, McKenna Hunt, a gregarious little girl from Safety Harbor, Fla., will receive the play kitchen and the Elmo doll she wants. But her mother, Kristen Hunt, will go without the designer jeans she covets this season.
For Ms. […]