Free Republic

'After adjustment for demographic and socioeconomic factors, the group most likely to attend selective colleges were students in male breadwinner-female homemaker families.'Teens whose mothers worked part-time or not outside the home were significantly more likely to be admitted to and attend a highly selective college or university than teens whose mothers worked full time, finds a study out today from the Institute for Family Studies. The study controlled for external factors including family income, parental education, the child’s sex, race, and family composition.“Students are more likely to be accepted by and attend highly competitive colleges when their mothers are at...

Bulls and Bears show on Fox News this Saturday - (supposedly a conservative show) attacks stay at home moms. Five panelists criticize liberal proposal to spend $90 billion on child care but their solution is that good jobs should be created so mothers can afford better child care in the hands of strangers.

Eight working mothers from the Virginia Run development in Centreville went together to the Palin-McCain rally yesterday because Sarah Palin is "just like us." This is something new. Nobody ever accused Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan of being just like us.

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (Reuters) - Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton courted female voters on Tuesday with a plan to expand paid family leave, boost child-care funding and fight workplace discrimination against pregnant women. In a speech peppered with anecdotes from raising her 27-year-old daughter Chelsea, the former first lady who would be America's first woman president said her plan would cost $1.75 billion a year and be paid for by shutting down certain kinds of tax shelters without expanding the deficit. "The struggle to balance family and work can be simply overwhelming," the New York senator told a gathering of about...

Maryland's daycare providers are banning together. Dennis Edwards reports the effort to unionize involves more than 2,000 daycare providers state wide, and they believe what's best for them is what's best for the families they serve. Children play outside a daycare center; their parents watch with pride as they stand in support of daycare providers who are taking the first steps toward forming a union. "Today I am proud to announce that Maryland Family Child Care Providers have voted 75 percent to form our union with SCIU Kids First," said child care provider Maydee Green. In May, hundreds of daycare...

Virginia Tech Tragedy is a Wake-Up Call to Parents (Ventura, CA) - Researcher and bestselling author George Barna says the current public debate about the implications of the Virginia Tech tragedy is missing the point. "The animated conversations about gun control, campus security, counseling standards, campus communications, drug abuse and mental health funding do not address the core issue raised by this event. This situation is not primarily a challenge to politicians, educators or police. It’s a dramatic wake-up call to parents." Barna indicated that he was sympathetic toward the parents of the college student who murdered 31 classmates and...

So why do thousands of career women nationwide opt to put their careers and salary-earning potential on the back burner to stay home to care for their children? A Labor of Love "I had zero experience taking care of children before I had my own," said Laura Mercer, mother of two boys and professional stay-at-home mom outside of Las Vegas, Nev. "Being a career woman most of my adult life, the thought of being a stay-at-home mom didn't even occur to me."

WASHINGTON, D.C., FEB. 27, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Less time with Mom and Dad has contributed to more problems for more kids over the last few decades. So says Mary Eberstadt, a part-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and author of "Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes" (Penguin). Eberstadt shared with ZENIT how this separation of children and their parents is producing unforeseen negative consequences. Q: If children are better off materially than ever before, why are they beset by so many troubles such as psychiatric problems, obesity and sexually transmitted diseases?...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Parents looking for the culprit behind their child's allergy to house dust and cockroaches should consider their child's day care center or school as a possible source of exposure to such allergens, study findings suggest. "Our results indicate that day care centers and schools should be considered as targets for environmental interventions aimed at decreasing allergen exposure," write lead study author Dr. Vera E. V. Rullo of the Federal University of Sao Paulo in Brazil and her colleagues. Rullo and her team assessed the level of house dust mite, cockroach, cat and dog allergens in...