Building a Family-first Digital Economy: New IFS Policy Brief

Artificial Intelligence and the digital economy are broken. Despite the gains in economic growth and efficiency Silicon Valley has produced, those benefits have often come at an enormous cost to American families and communities. Over the last decade, addictive digital products, like smartphones and social media, have rewired the brains of an entire generation, leaving many addicted, lonely, depressed, and diminished in their moral, social, and rational capacities.

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Your Hardest Family Question: My Husband’s Health Is Pushing Me Away

My husband and I have been married for 30+ years. In the beginning, I tried to “change” him, and ultimately discovered that I can only change myself. I realize that his life’s experiences are a part of who he is, and as we have different opinions regarding many things, we have agreed that on some topics, we will just disagree. He is a good husband and father.

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Today’s Dating App Users Aren’t Happy. Technology Is Not Our Problem.

Studies suggest that almost half of American young adults ages 18–29 have used a dating app. When millennials are included in this cohort, the slightly smaller percentage still encompasses more than a third of the population. In other words, well over half of currently unmarried people know how dating apps work, which ones to pick when looking for lasting love (versus hookups), and above all, how rarely their use has made them happier. Hand in hand with the familiarity of dating apps goes the host of issues and dissatisfaction that they cause.

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Five Relationship Myths That Refuse to Go Away

For The Gottman Institute’s 30th anniversary, we’re exploring five relationship myths that just won’t quit, and what the research actually says. After 50 years of relationship research, we know more than ever about what makes love last. Yet some relationship myths refuse to disappear. You’ve probably heard a few of these myths before. Your parents might have shared them as advice, you may have encountered one during a well-meaning conversation with friends, and movies and media are notorious for perpetuating the most cliché relationship myths.

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Lindsay Clancy’s Post-Partum Depression Doesn’t Make Killing Her Children Okay

Lindsay Clancy is on trial for strangling her three young children to death in January 2023.
Her defense claims postpartum psychosis left her unable to form criminal intent. Yet the wave of public sympathy focused almost entirely on Clancy’s suffering has drawn sharp criticism from pro-life voices who insist the children’s deaths cannot be secondary to their mother’s mental health crisis.

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The False Promise of No Contact

Family estrangement isn’t new, and sometimes, especially in cases of abuse, it’s tragically warranted. Like a healthy immune system, we need the capacity to identify and expel what threatens us. But the rising phenomenon of no contact is more like an autoimmune disease in which the body’s defenses mistake what belongs to it for a threat. Those swept up in this phenomenon can lose the ability to distinguish the dangerous from the difficult; they end up attacking indiscriminately what is in fact vital.

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Why young men are entering the world of digital distraction

Young men today are demoralized. That’s the conclusion from the Institute for Family Studies’ new report on the state of young men, based on a survey that actually talked to them. Society isn’t offering young men the pathways to success they once had, but what it is offering — easy access to sports betting, addictive video games, and porn — is leading them from one modern-day hellish environment straight into another one.

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