One expectation, in the days of larger families, was that the older siblings would take care of younger ones. (Children's books from the 19th and early 20th centuries often feature families of sisters and/or brothers who play together, with older siblings taking a semi-parental role. This is something you rarely see in more recent kids' books.)

Trends in baby-sitting probably have some interesting correlations with changes in family size.

Cry me a river...

This whole topic makes me feel like a hopelessly Luddite curmudgeon. Feh. I'm going to log off and ... you know what, I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do!

In 16 Candles, Jake's girlfriend gets raped, but it's okay because she's a slut and she deserved it for being drunk, and besides, she doesn't really mind.

I can't forgive Hughes for that.

It seems to me that HBO and the other cable networks specialize in shows about "edgy" topics that the writers know nothing about. Who do they think they're fooling?

The poll numbers cited aren't overwhelming. Certainly not enough to accuse an entire generation of being selfish on this issue. The Annenberg numbers, for example, show that older people are less likely to favor increased health insurance spending for children, but still, 75% of them favor an increase in spending (or did in 2000). Sure, the curve for favoring increased spending on Medicare is flatter, but only because young people are less sanguine about it; in fact, if you look at the percentages instead of just the shape of the curve, fewer elderly people in that survey favor increased Medicare spending than increased spending on health insurance for children.

"Few things send me into a tizzy quite as quickly as hearing someone say they are so colorblind, they wouldn’t care if someone were brown or green or purple. Besides the obvious issues – equating brown skin with those not found in nature..."

Amy, have you ever heard of hyperbole? It's a useful concept for a writer to know about; you should probably look it up.

Okay, let's say you menstruate 12 times a year for 35 years. That's 420 menstrual periods (more if you hit menopause late or menarche early, fewer if you have a couple of pregnancies). 11,400 tampons would be about 27 tampons per period, which seems excessive.

I hope I'm not the only one who appreciates the irony of someone urging Joan to "grow up" while going on and on about her big-girl panties.