The common cuckoo bird engages in a brutal behavior scientists call brood parasitism1. The female cuckoo lays her eggs in other birds' nests. Quick-hatching cuckoo chicks hatch before their nestmates. They push the other bird eggs out of the nest to the ground below, leaving the foster bird mom to feed only the cuckoo. From the cuckoo we get the ...
Good parents provide homes they intend to empty. If you did a good job parenting, your adult children visit but do not stay. Your kids are never too old to be beyond your reach. What about when they’re high schoolers ready to study abroad though? What if that time away from the nest coincides with your parenting time? The Benefits ...
More than 168,400 special needs children were enrolled in Virginia's public schools in 2016, according to the Virginia Department of Education. For 2013 (the most recently available year) Virginia recorded over 29,400 divorces. Those two typical statistics intersect far more often than most people realize. If you are contemplating a divorce and you are the father of a special needs child, ...
The legal word "consent" is often associated with intimate matters like sex, statutory rape and marriage. It also extends, though, to the often-inevitable outcome of sex: pregnancy. Women in Virginia have powerful rights to give or deny consent to the fathers of their unborn children, such as consent to attend prenatal appointments, consent to hear information from their obstetricians, and ...
When you divorce your wife, you also divorce her family. That moment is a huge reset button for relationships. Any veneer of cordiality is ripped away. Any pretense to continue tolerating one another is sundered. After the divorce's legal clauses come out, the claws come out. What if your ex-wife's parents or siblings are deliberately trying to drive a wedge between ...
In Virginia, some parents have an interesting (if inaccurate) view of court documents. Apparently, they feel they are optional, as in, the parent can ignore the specific directions of a court. These same parents may feel "Shampoo, Rinse, Repeat" is a little bossy, or that advice not to look at solar eclipses is just fear-mongering. Imagine their surprise, then, to ...
You don't usually think of children as property, but in a strange legal sense, they are. If you and your wife have children, you have a legal right to see, be with, and enjoy the company of your children. That simple legal fact means your wife cannot legally deprive you of them by taking them from you. Your children also ...
The mother of your children may have left your life, but you are committed to keeping the relationship with your own kids healthy. Unfortunately, the guy your ex-wife or ex-partner is now seeing is, well, a creeper. He unsettles you, says inappropriate things, and makes a point of displaying his control of your ex. Worse, he sends out the wrong ...
Throughout the annals of medicine, a stark reality has been a prevailing pattern: doctors are merely human, after all. They sometimes dispensed bad advice. Doctors do have, though, one vital tool in their armamentarium: education over years of long hours, hard work and hands-on learning. So while any parade of social media gurus can blather on about breastfeeding do’s and ...