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If you’re just starting school, you’re probably thinking about a lot – perhaps you’re picking classes to add or drop, choosing a major, starting independent work, or thinking about life after graduation. If you’re a Love and Fidelity Network student, you may also be wondering how to start or grow your student group, organize orientation activities and schedule events. Whether you’re at the beginning or end of your college journey, we want to help you discover and refine your personal mission this semester. We also hope to inspire you, as a friend of our network, to dream up new ways of sharing your beliefs about family, marriage, and sexual integrity with peers.

Glimpse the “family planning” aisle at your local pharmacy, and you may get the impression that the phrase strictly refers to contraception, enhancement, or pleasure. This would be on par with the dictionary definition of the term, which is “the practice of controlling the number of children in a family and the intervals between their births, particularly by means of artificial contraception or voluntary sterilization,” and its secondary definition, “artificial contraception.” Whether you associate family planning with contraception or not, everyone can agree that family planning is ultimately about relationships, what we do in them and for them. Therefore, we should learn to view family planning as more than just deciding whether or not to get pregnant, and consider it in the full scope of its relational meaning.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, a third of parents with children under age five entrusted grandparents with childcare responsibilities. Significant expense of daycare programs aside, it seems that parents would rather their children spend more time in the presence of extended family members than be watched by unrelated others. The increase in grandparent childcare suggests that the pandemic trend toward intergenerational living may be grounded in something more enduring besides mere economic considerations.

Since the 1960’s, an increasing number of mothers and fathers have favored “time-intensive, child-centered” parenting approaches. Intensive parenting is a favored approach for parents who want to be involved with their children’s lives by guiding them, spending time with them, and preparing them for adulthood, with the understanding that these are also lifelong relationships. Though this hands-on vision of parenting has at times strengthened family unity, the stakes have been so raised much for family relationships to succeed at a time when there is a rapidly-expanding generational gap in values, politics, and expectations.

Looking ahead to this upcoming fall semester, the Editorial Board of the Harvard Crimson has published an article calling on students to help build a “new normal” once they return to campus. Students, parents, and teachers know better than anyone else the toll that pandemic lockdowns have taken on young people’s academic and social lives. Understanding that returning to campus life will occasion a “hard reset,” the Editorial Board suggests taking the the opportunity to build a better campus culture. They offer two suggestions: turning “transactional relationships” into “genuine relationships” and “canceling cutthroat culture.”

We’re so grateful for our students who keep us abreast of on- and off-campus issues regarding relationships. One of our student leaders recently pointed us to an article in the Wall Street Journal on the rise of “co-parenting” subscription sites PollenTree and Modamily, which promise to match “would-be parents who want to share custody of a child without any romantic expectations.” According to the author, “it’s a lot like divorce, without the wedding or the arguments.” Jim Daly from Focus on the Family is cited as saying it is “an affront to marriage,” while practitioners like Jenica Andersen, then 38 and pregnant with her second child, admit that while co-parenting is controversial, the alternative “idealized version of a man and woman falling in love is shortsighted.” Or is it?

Happy Thursday! Last week, Princeton Pro-Life and our Princeton Anscombe Society chapter hosted their annual Reunions event for pro-life, pro-family students and alumni. Professor Robert P. George, a stalwart defender of pro-life, pro-family activities on Princeton’s campus, spoke with Patrick T. Brown, a Princeton alumni and policy fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, on crafting a conservative family policy as debates regarding paid leave, universal child care, and child tax credits gain prominence in DC.