Category: Marriage/Family

In a trend that coincided with the pandemic, marijuana use among college students in 2020 reached levels not seen since the 1980s. That’s according to the latest research from Monitoring the Future – an annual survey that looks at drug and alcohol use among the nation’s young people. Below, Jason R. Kilmer and Christine M. Lee – both University of Washington School of Medicine researchers who study marijuana use among college students – explain some of the reasons behind the trend, and some of its consequences.

The books my high school students choose to read fascinate me. Dune is back in favor, Twilight has made a resurgence, and even Stephen King’s It appeared next to a student’s iPad for a few weeks. But most unexpectedly of all, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have appeared in some students’ hands. Alas, Ayn Rand’s siren song continues to sing.

Seeing students reading these tomes recalls an earlier phase in life, when I thought that the precepts “greed is good” and “the individual is everything” answered foundational questions. Such ideas no longer ring true. My wife and I have recently experienced the blessings of being rooted in community, and our experience recalls a truth uniting Athens and Jerusalem: “Man is by nature a creature designed to live in a polis” and “It is not good for man to be alone.” Human life is best lived within strong communities.

Many parents pulled their children out of school last year for homeschooling and other private options, as schools remained shuttered due to the coronavirus response. Nationwide, homeschooling numbers tripled last year from their pre-pandemic levels, driven largely by black families who left district schools for homeschooling at the highest rate of any demographic group and are now over-represented in the homeschooling population compared to K-12 public schools. With most schools open for full-time, in-person learning this year, it seemed reasonable to assume that parents would eagerly re-enroll their children in their local district school, tabling last year’s alternative education plans.

From 2000 to 2018, nearly 300,000 minors under the age of 18 were legally married in the U.S., according to a recent estimate by the nonprofit Unchained at Last, which obtained marriage certificates from 32 states and partial data from 12 others.
Roughly 86 percent of the children were girls and nearly 60,000 of the marriages involved an age difference such that the younger spouse could have been considered a victim of a sex crime.