Every day my inbox fills with emails from public relations firms, angling for a plug for an author's book or a new study on children. I delete most of them as quickly as they appear, but I nearly always read the ones on youth and mental health.

Suffice it to say the findings are not good. I often ponder over them, as we have a whole string of ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — For the 16 years that she's owned Lasting Impressions Weddings, Sarah Trotter has counseled her clients to be flexible when picking a date for their nuptials. She's still offering that advice, although this year it has a taken on a whole new dimension.

Be flexible about the day of the week. Be flexible about the time of day. Be ...Read more

Q. My ex and I broke up three years ago. We have a daughter who is now 4. About a year and a half ago, my wife and I had another little girl. My ex is very jealous, and our daughter has told me that her mommy has told her my youngest daughter is not her sister. It’s very confusing for a 4-year-old and I’m appalled that she would do such a ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — Like most new moms, 26-year-old Veronica Gutierrez's life revolves around feeding her 3-month-old daughter, Alessandra.

For the first month, that meant mostly formula. But that formula was hard to find. She drove from store to store, so shaken by the empty shelves she began pumping her breast milk around the clock, in hopes she ...Read more

I am an over-the-moon, first-time grandmother-to-be who can’t seem to do what many have done before me. That is, make the baby a quilt.

The baby’s 89-year-old great-grandmother made one. By hand. She apparently sat in front of the TV for weeks and stitched together dozens of one-inch squares, which she presented at the couple’s baby ...Read more

SAN DIEGO — Meet Freeway. He's a teenage mischief maker, a land-loving sea lion fishing for freedom.

And now the pinniped, who earned notoriety in January when he shut down a busy San Diego freeway a couple miles from the ocean, is back.

Last month, someone spotted him wandering up a storm drain in Logan Heights, about a half-mile from where...Read more

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- About 1,500 pickleball players, all 50 years old and older, are competing this week in a national championship in Fort Lauderdale. An additional 1,000 people have attended to watch and cheer on their friends, family and favorite teams. The oldest player this year is 92 years old.

“I think everyone that picks up the ...Read more

Q: My best friend’s 6-year-old daughter is an only child and a spoiled brat. She screams at her parents when she doesn’t get her way, always wants to be first at everything and is extremely bossy with other children. For whatever strange reason, my children want to play with her. How can I discourage the friendship? Should I talk to my ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — Most swiping for love on a dating app know the drill.

Strategically pen an inviting self-description. Select filters — age, geographic proximity — for potential partners. Perhaps declare intentions: Looking for something serious? Something casual?

The dating app Mirchi presents another possibility: "Auntie made me sign up....Read more

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A bout with flesh-eating bacteria can start out with a day at the beach, a hardly worrisome cut and then, in less than 24 hours, a raging infection fought with heavy antibiotics and gruesome scalpel work.

It would be reassuring to know where and when Florida’s coastal waters are ripe with “one of the fastest growing ...Read more

When I think of the legendary concerts in music history — the Beatles at Shea Stadium in New York City; Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and other rock giants at Woodstock; me as the guest triangle player for the Stamford Symphony Orchestra — the one I remember as the greatest was my granddaughter Chloe’s third-grade recorder concert, which was ...Read more

Some cooler heads have prevailed in Florida, where Seminole County School Board members unanimously voted down a proposal to cover an entire high school yearbook page in stickers to hide photos of students carrying “love is love” signs.

The photos were taken at a March walkout, which students organized to protest Florida’s Parental Rights...Read more

CHICAGO — The 35th annual University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt — which is nominally a scavenger hunt but closer to a campus tradition wrapped inside a multigenerational class reunion bundled into an elaborate prank requiring the cooperation of hundreds of students, dozens of faculty, family, friends and government officials — concluded ...Read more

Prince Tut and the dwarf exquisite Queen Tut papyrus grasses have put the proverbial ta-da in ‘The Garden Guy’s containers this year. The story, however, really goes back to October. I have two containers I call smokestacked in their shape. They are about 20 inches tall, ceramic-glazed and about the diameter of a Frisbee. The containers get ...Read more

OK, I promise this is the last one. No. Really. This time, it is. I just can’t stop telling these wedding disaster stories, because you all keep springing them on me. And they’re just too funny.

I mean funny later — not funny when they happened. Well, maybe sometimes when they happened. But it was like when my daughter Curly Girl was ...Read more

Cameron Wright, 16, has always seen himself as a “dude.” As a young child, Cameron didn’t have the words to explain the disconnect between how he saw himself and how the world saw him. But he knew that despite being born in a girl’s body, he was meant to be a boy.

After taking reversible puberty blockers that pause a teenager’s body ...Read more

CHICAGO -- Peggy Stenger casually admits to having a freezer of dead birds.

The Cleveland native, who lives in Chicago's South Loop and works in the Loop, collects the creatures when she sees them on the ground, often dead or injured from midflight collisions with buildings in her neighborhood.

Stenger puts the dead birds in Ziploc bags and ...Read more

A 64-year-old bartender loves pi — and it led him to score a jackpot win in North Carolina.

“I’ve always been an extremely big math person,” Jonathan Ruby told the N.C. Education Lottery. “I picked my numbers based on pi.”

It isn’t the first time Ruby said he was drawn to the ratio — which starts with the decimal places 3.1415...Read more

Online dating seems like the most obvious way to meet a potential partner — after all, how many singles (who are ready to mingle, of course) do you know who don’t have at least one dating app on their phone?

But online dating has become more than just a place to find dates. When someone moves to a new city, it’s a place to chat with ...Read more

CHICAGO -- Chicago Public Schools on Tuesday announced the launch of a mental health and suicide prevention campaign that encourages students in seventh through 12th grade to take a pledge to stay alive and seek help if they need it.

CPS said staff members, including school counselors, will discuss the “Please Stay” campaign, self-care ...Read more