Youdh’s Insights

I pictured family life as: falling in love, marrying once, raising children, and easing into old age. This week’s exploration of divorce, remarriage, and blended families forced me to trade that to a tangled network of winding roads. I learned that divorce is seldom a single clean break; instead, it becomes a lengthy emotional, financial, and spiritual process whose aftershocks can rumble for years. That helps explain why nearly a third of divorced adults, about two years after signing the papers, say they wish they had fought harder for their marriages. When the optimism of a “fresh start” wears off and the realities of operating calendars, legal bills, and lonely Friday nights set in, regret often arrives uninvited and heavy. Yet the impulse to pair up again remains strong: roughly 70 percent of divorced people eventually remarry, and men generally do so more quickly than women, making remarriage less a rare Plan B and more the statistical norm. These second unions, however, do not e...

Man, I can still hear my dad’s 6 a.m. whistle in my head, slicing straight through the early morning dreams. That sound is honestly seared into my brain, and it always signaled the start of our day. Even when we begged for “just ten more minutes,” our pleas were futile; by seven o'clock, we were already lacing up our shoes for a jog or a badminton match, still half-awake and trying to process the morning. While we tried to process that, Mom was already making breakfast on the griddle and packing our lunches for the day. These routines never felt like punishment. In fact, they never even described it as a “screen detox,” despite the popularity of that concept in today’s parenting blogs. Instead, my parents simply filled our days with genuinely engaging activities, naturally turning our phones off. It wasn’t until much later that I recognized their unique discipline style, which especially stands out in my memory, and now I describe it as a three-point gut check. First, connection wa...

In our home, every expense turns into a lesson. The moment a big cost appears, Dad rolls out his whiteboard, sketches the numbers, and calls a “family finance meeting.” Rather than making us nervous, he asks each of us to suggest ways we can adjust and reminds us where our family finances stand. Mom supplies background, my siblings and I debate with different-colored markers, and together we settle on a plan. What felt routine when I was a teenager quietly rewired both my view of money and my understanding of a father’s role. That lived experience came rushing back while I read a meta-analysis by Nada Lazović and colleagues that merged nine studies on father involvement and child achievement. Their conclusion is blunt: when dads read aloud, attend conferences, and solve problems with their kids, grades rise and dropout rates fall, even after researchers account for mothers’ education and warmth. Mom is undeniably present and organized, yet Dad’s habit of narrating each trade-off, why w...