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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

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      Government Bans on Social Media Endanger Speech Rights

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      My entire life I’ve seen a similar pattern. Older generations reflect on the deficiencies of “kids these days,” and they find something new to blame. The latest technology and new forms of entertainment are always bewitching our children. In my time, I’ve witnessed several distinct public panics over television, video games and music. They’ve all been overblown.This time, however, I’m persuaded — not that smartphones are the sole cause of increasing mental health problems in American kids, but rather that they’re a prime mover in teen mental health in a way that television, games and music are not. No one has done more to convince me than Jonathan Haidt. He’s been writing about the dangers of smartphones and social media for years, and his latest Atlantic story masterfully marshals the evidence for smartphones’ negative influence on teenage life.At the same time, however, I’m wary of government intervention to suppress social media or smartphone access for children. The people best positioned to respond to their children’s online life are parents, not regulators, and it is parents who should take the lead in responding to smartphones. Otherwise, we risk a legal remedy that undermines essential constitutional doctrines that protect both children and adults.I don’t want to minimize the case against phones. Haidt’s thesis is sobering:Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity — all were affected.The consequences, Haidt argues, have been dire. Children — especially teenagers — are suffering from greater rates of anxiety and depression, and suicide rates have gone up; and they spend less time hanging out with friends, while loneliness and friendlessness are surging.Neither smartphones nor social media are solely responsible for declining teen mental health. The rise of smartphones correlates with a transformation of parenting strategies, away from permitting free play and in favor of highly managed schedules and copious amounts of organized sports and other activities. The rise of smartphones also correlates with the fraying of our social fabric. Even there, however, the phones have their roles to play. They provide a cheap substitute for in-person interaction, and the constant stream of news can heighten our anxiety.I’m so convinced that smartphones have a significant negative effect on children that I’m now much more interested in the debate over remedies. What should be done?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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      Does Everyone Want to Be on the ‘Mommy Track’?

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      When I caught up recently with Liz Koelsch, one of the moms that my friend Jessica Bennett profiled for our 2021 “primal scream” project — a look at motherhood during the pandemic’s peak — a lot had changed in her life. In the four years since Covid-19 was declared a national emergency, Koelsch, who was a single mom when we first met her, got married to a great guy. She completed an associate degree in paralegal studies. And she’s finally happy at work because she has moved to a job that is mostly remote and her boss is “all about time flexibility.”“I switched jobs so many times during Covid. I think I had five jobs because they just weren’t working for what was going on in my personal life,” Koelsch told me. Now, she works four days from home, one day in the office, and her life is manageable. “I can throw a load of laundry” in and “on my 15 minute break I can start soup and it’s ready by dinnertime. It’s this whole great way of living. I don’t want to give it up.” She and her new husband are trying for a child together. Remote work, and Washington State’s paid family and medical leave program, will make having another kid possible for her.When I followed up with a bunch of parents whom The Times heard from in 2020 and 2021 to find out how they’re faring these days, two topics came up most frequently. One was the negative effect of the increased volatility and outrageous expense of child care (which I wrote about on Wednesday). The other was a new flexibility, for many, around work. Parents who have increased opportunities to work remotely, or even just managers who are more understanding about their caregiving commitments, told me that these were largely positive changes in their lives.Reading through the responses of parents who said that more flexible work situations had improved their lives made me realize that a lot of the framing of the return-to-office discourse has missed the point. I’ve seen a fair number of headlines over the past few years like this one, “WFH Goes From New Path to Dead End for Working Mothers,” and this one, “‘You Are Mommy Tracked to the Billionth Degree,’” suggesting that for ambitious moms, working from home is a mistake.But while it may be more challenging for some moms to advance if they choose to work from an office less frequently (though I’m optimistic that will change over time as remote work is normalized), what I’m hearing these days from many mothers — and fathers — is that climbing the ladder is not top of mind. With those mommy-track headlines, it’s also worth remembering that working remotely isn’t just a corporate mom thing. While college-educated mothers of young children are more likely to work remotely than other college-educated women, “Looking narrowly at just college graduates, remote work patterns for women and men look more evenly distributed, with men slightly more likely to work remotely than women,” according to an analysis by my newsroom colleagues Ben Casselman, Emma Goldberg and Ella Koeze.The idea of being “mommy tracked” also sets up and cements a false binary: You’re either going straight to the top as fast as possible or you’re going to stagnate forever. More and more, parents are rejecting the notion that this is the only way to think about their work-life balance, particularly while their kids are young. They’re more concerned about having jobs that allow them to both make ends meet and still have the time and energy to enjoy their families.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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      Jennifer Crumbley’s Conviction Offers New Legal Tactic in Mass Shooting Cases

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      The guilty verdict in Michigan against the mother of a school shooter will reverberate in prosecutors’ offices around the country. But don’t expect a flood of similar cases, experts say.The guilty verdict on Tuesday against the mother of a Michigan teenager who murdered four students in 2021 in the state’s deadliest school shooting is likely to ripple across the country’s legal landscape as prosecutors find themselves weighing a new way to seek justice in mass shootings.But, legal experts say, don’t expect a rush of similar cases.“I have heard many people say they think a guilty verdict in this case will open the floodgates to these kinds of prosecutions going forward,” said Eve Brensike Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan. “To be honest, I’m not convinced that’s true.”That’s because prosecutors in Michigan had notably compelling evidence against the mother, Jennifer Crumbley — including text messages and the accounts of a meeting with school officials just hours before the shooting at Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021 — that jurors felt proved she should have known the mental state of her son, Ethan Crumbley, who was 15 at the time.Ethan pleaded guilty in 2022 and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Ms. Crumbley was convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each student her son killed. She faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison, and sentencing is scheduled for April 9.Ms. Crumbley’s husband, James Crumbley, 47, will be tried separately in March.“Could more prosecutors file charges emboldened by this kind of ruling and the verdict?” Professor Primus said. “Sure. Do I think they will be successful around the country getting charges to stick if they don’t have the requisite facts that can demonstrate real knowledge? No.”Still, Professor Primus and other legal experts who have followed the case say the successful prosecution of Ms. Crumbley, 45, provides a template for prosecutors around the country to pursue similar cases.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