Babies

Monday

Kristina Murkett

Motherhood is tougher and lovelier than I could imagine

My son’s first birthday has arrived, which feels like a much bigger milestone for us than it is for him. I had to let go of any expectations around motherhood early. At eight months pregnant I learnt that I could not have the calm, candlelit water birth I had planned (does anyone actually have one of those?). It transpired that I had a condition called placenta previa, and so would need a planned caesarean. The midwife cheerily told me not to worry about him ‘coming out the sunroof’ – a rather grating expression as it implies an easy way out, when I am, as it happens, a car without a

Wednesday

The Spectator

Is the rest of the world still working from home?

Scout’s honour Thousands of teenagers were evacuated from the World Scout Jamboree in South Korea as flooding, a heatwave and then the threat of a typhoon affected the event. What exactly is a ‘jamboree’? – Lord Baden-Powell adopted the word for the first gathering of scouts at Kensington Olympia in 1920. But the word itself can be traced back to the mid-19th-century American West, when it was used for a drunken revel – presumably not what Baden-Powell nor subsequent heads of the scouting movement would encourage. – The first documentary evidence for use of the word is in the report of a murder trial in the New York Herald in

Friday

Philip Patrick

Is Japan doomed?

Japan is heading for trouble, the country’s prime minster Fumio Kishida has suggested. ‘Our country is on the brink of being unable to maintain the functions of society,’ he said in a speech earlier this week. Japan’s birth rate, the average number of children a woman will have, is too low, and still falling. It’s 1.3, and needs to be 2.1 to keep the population stable. With every year that passes, there are hundreds of thousands fewer Japanese people.  Economics is mostly to blame. Once, there was a secure and predictable life was for the average Japanese person. The men would toil away at a big company in return for the assurance of

Wednesday

Brian Boutwell

Do parents really matter?

Parenting does not have a large impact on how children turn out. An incendiary claim, to be sure, but if you can bear with me until the close of this article I think I might be able to persuade you — or at the very least chip away at your certainty about parental influence. First, what if later today the phone were to ring and the voice at the other end informed you that you have an identical twin. You would have lived your entire life up to that point not realising that you had a clone. The bearer of this news says arrangements have been made to reunite you