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      Trump to Speak at Moms for Liberty Convention

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      Last year, the former president told the group it was time to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts” in education. Does that message still resonate with voters?Former President Donald J. Trump is set to speak Friday evening to a gathering of Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group whose priorities mirror much of his own education platform.Like Mr. Trump, they have called for stricter classroom discipline and vouchers for private school tuition and home-schooling costs. They want to ban certain books and cut funding to schools that embrace progressive ideas on gender and race, while slimming down or even closing the federal Department of Education.But as his presidential campaign leans heavily on cultural divides over gender, parenting and education, there have been signs of voter weariness, and questions over whether social issues in schools are still energizing voters.“Is this a wave that’s on the decline?” asked Julie Marsh, a professor at the University of Southern California who has studied school board elections. “We’re perhaps seeing signs of parents being turned off by some of this.”Mr. Trump’s appearance in Washington, D.C., is his second time speaking at the annual convention of Moms for Liberty, which was founded in 2021. He has embraced the group’s rhetoric, telling convention attendees last year that he would “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.”In the past several months, Mr. Trump has floated provocative ideas like allowing parents to elect principals and creating an alternative credentialing body for teachers who embrace “patriotic values.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Things School Nurses Say Parents Are Doing Wrong

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      The stalwarts of children’s health shared their tips and gripes.Carren Teitelbaum, a school nurse in Ramapo, N.Y., once had a student stumble into her office with a 102 degree fever. Mrs. Teitelbaum called his mother, who said she’d given her son Tylenol that had likely worn off and that she could come give him more.“That kind of thing is extremely frustrating,” Mrs. Teitelbaum said. “And it’s not an isolated incident.”Most parents are aware that fevers are a symptom of communicable viruses, and it’s best to keep their children home when they have one. But on short notice, many parents can’t stay home from work, leaving school nurses to care for sick and contagious children.Sending feverish kids to school is just one miscalculation school nurses say parents make. The New York Times spoke with 14 school nurses across the United States who shared other common mistakes. “Some of these things are common sense,” said Mrs. Teitelbaum, “but I find that what makes sense for me may not make sense for somebody else.”They leave the school nurse in the dark.Parents might inform a new teacher about their child’s health but many forget to tell the school nurse, Mrs. Teitelbaum said.Last year, a student with a bad headache visited Anna Etlinger, a school nurse in Cook County, Ill. After calling the boy’s mother, Mrs. Etlinger learned he experiences migraines that cause vomiting without medicine. But public school nurses generally can’t administer most medications without parental consent and permission from a licensed health care provider.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Texas Parents Fed Smoothies to Sick Daughter Who Later Died, Police Say

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      Miranda Sipps, 12, suffered for four days before dying while her mother and stepfather failed to seek medical treatment for her, the authorities said. Both are charged with a felony.A Texas mother and stepfather failed to seek medical assistance for their sick daughter and instead fed her smoothies as she battled life-threatening injuries for four days before she died on Monday, according to the Atascosa County Sheriff’s Office.The parents, Denise Balbaneda, 36, and Gerald Gonzales, 40, of Christine, Texas, “basically confessed” by telling the authorities how their daughter, Miranda Sipps, 12, was injured and that they had failed to act, Sheriff David Soward said at a news conference Wednesday. They were both arrested and charged with causing serious injury to a child by omission, a first-degree felony, the sheriff’s office said in a news release.“They thought they could nurse her back to health,” Sheriff Soward said Wednesday. “We do not think they wanted the attention that this would draw to them if the little girl was injured — which is strangely ironic.”For four days, the injuries that Miranda suffered left her unconscious and she was able only to “flutter her eyes and move her hands a little bit,” Sheriff Soward said. Instead of seeking medical attention, Ms. Balbaneda and Mr. Gonzales had her lie “on a pallet” and tried to feed her smoothies which she could not swallow, Sheriff Soward added.Miranda did not have any broken bones but authorities would not provide details about how the girl was injured or the nature of her injuries. Sheriff Soward said that the charges could change as more information is revealed.Efforts to reach Ms. Balbaneda and Mr. Gonzales for comment on Thursday were unsuccessful and it was unclear if they had legal representation.At around 8 p.m. Monday, Ms. Balbaneda, who was in a vehicle with her daughter, called 9-1-1 and was met by dispatchers on the side of a highway in Atascosa County near their family’s home in Christine, about 45 miles south of San Antonio, according to the sheriff’s office. The child was alive but unconscious and died in the hospital two hours later, it said.Sheriff Soward, who confirmed there had been “calls for service” to the couple’s home in the past, said that he felt that the couple did not want the police coming to their home. He described the home as “untidy, unkept, sort of dirty.”Monday was the first day of school for the Jourdanton Independent School District, where Miranda attended junior high school and was a cheerleader.“The Jourdanton ISD is currently dealing with the tragic loss of one of our Jr. High students,” the district said in a statement. “In our Junior High library, we made counselors available for anyone who may need or want help or assistance.”A GoFundMe post apparently from Miranda’s aunt, Pricilla Chapa, has raised about $2,000 for her funeral.“She was taken from us far too soon in an unexpected way,” the post read, “leaving behind a legacy of love, laughter, and memories that we will cherish forever.” More

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      ‘I Was a Childless Cat Lady’: Women Respond to JD Vance

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      More from our inbox:Clearing Homeless EncampmentsFood and Gas PricesThe Roger Maris FireThe selection of Senator JD Vance of Ohio as former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate was supposed to appeal to women, voters of color and blue-collar voters, but a stream of years-old comments has threatened to undermine that.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Past Comments Fluster Vance as Democrats Go on Offense” (front page, July 29):JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, said in 2021, “We’re effectively run, in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”I would say this to Mr. Vance:I was a childless cat lady: three cats, no kids.I thought fertility was a given. There was no medical reason I couldn’t have children. Yet it did not happen. Three cats. A great career. No kids.I was, in effect at 38, a “childless cat lady.”I pursued fertility treatments. Treatments that many Republicans want to ban.I had painful tests, surgeries, running to the lab — five vials of blood drawn every day at 6 a.m. — then rushing to work for a minimum 12-hour day.Childless cat lady lawyer. Meow.I had one fabulous child at 38 with I.V.F. She was a triplet, but I lost my daughter’s siblings.I was pregnant three other times. I lost two other babies at four months. I needed a D and C: same procedure as an abortion. If I didn’t have the surgery, I would have died.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fewer U.S. Adults Say They Will Have Children, Study Finds

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      A new study breaks down the reasons more U.S. adults say they are unlikely to have children.When Jurnee McKay, 25, imagines having children, a series of scary scenarios pop into her mind: the “horrors” of childbirth, risks associated with pregnancy, a flighty potential partner, exorbitant child care costs.Abortion care restrictions are also on her list of fears. So Ms. McKay, a nursing student in Orlando, decided to eliminate the possibility of an accidental pregnancy. But the first doctor she consulted refused to remove her fallopian tubes, she said, insisting that she might change her mind after meeting her “soul mate.”“For some reason,” she said, “society looks at women who choose not to make life harder for themselves as crazy.”Next week, she will speak with another doctor about sterilization.Like Ms. McKay, a growing number of U.S. adults say they are unlikely to raise children, according to a study released on Thursday by the Pew Research Center. When the survey was conducted in 2023, 47 percent of those younger than 50 without children said they were unlikely ever to have children, an increase of 10 percentage points since 2018.When asked why kids were not in their future, 57 percent said they simply didn’t want to have them. Women were more likely to respond this way than men (64 percent vs. 50 percent). Further reasons included the desire to focus on other things, like their career or interests; concerns about the state of the world; worries about the costs involved in raising a child; concerns about the environment, including climate change; and not having found the right partner.The results echo a 2023 Pew study that found that only 26 percent of adults said having children was extremely or very important to live a fulfilling life. The U.S. fertility rate has been falling over the last decade, dipping to about 1.6 births per woman in 2023. This is the lowest number on record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And it is less than what would be required for the population to replace itself from one generation to the next.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dear Elites (of Both Parties), the People Will Take It From Here, Thanks

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      I first learned about the opioid crisis three presidential elections ago, in the fall of 2011. I was the domestic policy director for Mitt Romney’s campaign and questions began trickling in from the New Hampshire team: What’s our plan?By then, opioids had been fueling the deadliest drug epidemic in American history for years. I am ashamed to say I did not know what they were. Opioids, as in opium? I looked it up online. Pills of some kind. Tell them it’s a priority, and President Obama isn’t working. That year saw nearly 23,000 deaths from opioid overdoses nationwide.I was no outlier. America’s political class was in the final stages of self-righteous detachment from the economic and social conditions of the nation it ruled. The infamous bitter clinger and “47 percent” comments by Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney captured the atmosphere well: delivered at private fund-raisers in San Francisco in 2008 and Boca Raton in 2012, evincing disdain for the voters who lived in between. The opioid crisis gained more attention in the years after the election, particularly in 2015, with Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on deaths of despair.Of course, 2015’s most notable political development was Donald Trump’s presidential campaign launch and subsequent steamrolling of 16 Republican primary opponents committed to party orthodoxy. In the 2016 general election he narrowly defeated the former first lady, senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who didn’t need her own views of Americans leaked: In public remarks, she gleefully classified half of the voters who supported Mr. Trump as “deplorables,” as her audience laughed and applauded. That year saw more than 42,000 deaths from opioid overdoses.In a democratic republic such as the United States, where the people elect leaders to govern on their behalf, the ballot box is the primary check on an unresponsive, incompetent or corrupt ruling class — or, as Democrats may be learning, a ruling class that insists on a candidate who voters no longer believe can lead. If those in power come to believe they are the only logical options, the people can always prove them wrong. For a frustrated populace, an anti-establishment outsider’s ability to wreak havoc is a feature rather than a bug. The elevation of such a candidate to high office should provoke immediate soul-searching and radical reform among the highly credentialed leaders across government, law, media, business, academia and so on — collectively, the elites.The response to Mr. Trump’s success, unfortunately, has been the opposite. Seeing him elected once, faced with the reality that he may well win again, most elites have doubled down. We have not failed, the thinking goes; we have been failed, by the American people. In some tellings, grievance-filled Americans simply do not appreciate their prosperity. In others they are incapable of informed judgments, leaving them susceptible to demagoguery and foreign manipulation. Or perhaps they are just too racist to care — never mind that polling consistently suggests that most of Mr. Trump’s supporters are women and minorities, or that polling shows he is attracting far greater Black and Hispanic support than prior Republican leaders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Former Spouses Discuss Co-Parenting and Being the Best of Friends

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      “We genuinely like each other,” Alex Yaroslavsky said of his ex-wife and co-parent, Liza Cooper. They even live in the same apartment building.In Unhitched, couples tell the stories of their relationships, from romance to vows to divorce to life afterward.Liza Cooper and Alex Yaroslavsky, both from New York City, met in their late 30s, in March 2007, through a dating app; they married about a year later. Both secular Jews, the two seemed compatible on paper, yet differences in their communication styles sometimes created conflict and ultimately brought an end to their marriage.But with patience, work and a sympathetic landlord, the two managed to become dear friends and co-parents after their divorce. They now live on different floors of the same Upper West Side apartment building.Dates of marriage June 15, 2008 to Dec. 13, 2018Age when married Ms. Cooper was 37; Mr. Yaroslavsky was 38. (They are now 53 and 54.)Current occupations She is an administrator in a hospital and a dating coach; he is an executive coach with his own company.Children One son, age 14.Where did they grow up? In 1980, Mr. Yaroslavsky, an only child, immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was 10. The family had lived in Lviv, which was then part of the Soviet Union and is now Ukraine. He quickly learned English.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Are You Having a Millennial Mom Midlife Crisis?

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      Mothers have been exhausted since the beginning of time, but some difficulties are specific to the millennial generation.There was dog urine on the carpet, vomit on her blouse and a queasy 7-year-old to look after, but Dr. Whitney Casares had just a few spare moments to clean up and change so she could resume the keynote presentation she had been giving when the school nurse called.Dr. Casares, 42, a pediatrician in Portland, Ore., tried to clean up both messes and race back to her computer. “But I was completely unnerved and underperformed,” she said. “When my husband” — who hadn’t picked up when the school called — “and younger daughter came home a few hours later, the first words out of their mouths were ‘Didn’t you get anything for dinner?’ and ‘Why does it smell so bad in here?’”In that moment, said Dr. Casares, the author of “Doing It All: Stop Over-Functioning and Become the Mom and Person You’re Meant to Be,” she related to a Taylor Swift lyric: “I did all the extra credit, then got graded on a curve.”It has always been exhausting to be a mother, but each generation has had its particular pressures and ways of coping. Boomer moms didn’t expect motherhood to be anything but difficult, though the lack of social awareness around anxiety and depression meant most would never openly discuss it. Generation X moms had to prove that they could do everything men could do — and then come home and work a second shift. Some Gen Xers were children of divorce, manifested an ironic detachment from their troubles and were prescribed Prozac to deal.And then came millennial moms, the women raised on “You go, girl!” in the 1980s and ’90s and who today are in their 30s and early 40s. On average, they enrolled in college in higher numbers than men, married later and delayed having children, sometimes to prioritize careers and other times because — with student debt and less wealth than previous generations — it felt impossible not to.Still, it seemed like some things had worked out in their favor. Perhaps they could juggle work and motherhood more successfully. Maybe their male partners, if they had them, would be more attuned to gender imbalances at home.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More