Stop Trying to Raise Successful Kids - The Atlantic   

As anyone who has been called out for hypocrisy by a small child knows, kids are exquisitely attuned to gaps between what grown-ups say and what grown-ups do. If you survey American parents about what they want for their kids, more than 90 percent say one of their top priorities is that their children be caring. This makes sense: Kindness and concern for others are held as moral virtues in nearly every society and every major religion. But when you ask children what their parents want for them, 81 percent say their parents value achievement and happiness over caring.

Kids learn what’s important to adults not by listening to what we say, but by noticing what gets our attention. And in many developed societies, parents now pay more attention to individual achievement and happiness than anything else. However much we praise kindness and caring, we’re not actually showing our kids that we value these traits.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that kindness appears to be in decline. A rigorous analysis of annual surveys of American college students showed a substantial drop from 1979 to 2009 in empathy and in imagining the perspectives of others. Over this period, students grew less likely to feel concern for people less fortunate than themselves—and less bothered by seeing others treated unfairly.

Continued here

Israel’s top hostage negotiator on dealing with Hamas - The Economist   

Twelve years ago David Meidan, an Israeli intelligence officer, found himself standing just metres away from one of Israel’s most-wanted enemies. Across the corridor of the Egyptian intelligence headquarters in Cairo, he had caught a glimpse of Ahmed Jabari, then the military leader of Hamas. Meidan was in Cairo to try to secure the release of Gilad Shalit, a young Israeli corporal captured by Hamas in 2006. Israeli law forbade him from talking directly to Jabari – Egyptian intelligence officers shuttled messages between his room and the adjacent one where the Palestinian delegation were. Meidan remembers thinking Jabari looked tough.

Shalit had been imprisoned by Hamas for five years by the time Meidan was given the file in April 2011. Israeli intelligence agents had tried in vain to work out where he was or which unit within Hamas was holding him. An earlier attempt to start negotiations on Shalit’s release through German mediators had sputtered out. When Meidan started his mission he asked Egyptian intelligence which members of Hamas he ought to be talking to. They advised him to focus on Jabari. Hamas’s military leader, Meidan realised, was calling the shots, not the group’s “leaders in suits and ties” residing in “fancy hotels” in Qatar. It was Jabari, Meidan eventually learned, who was Shalit’s jailer. Within six months the young corporal was released, in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.

When you’re dealing with a shadowy group like Hamas, Meidan explained to me in a bustling café just outside Tel Aviv last Friday, finding the right channel of communication is everything. “You have to find the right mediators. You have to gain their trust.”

Continued here

Abortion bans in America are corroding some doctors’ souls - The Economist   

The patient was about 16 weeks pregnant. As Donna stood by her bed, steeling herself to deliver the bad news, she tried to stifle the now-familiar feeling of helplessness. It was November 2022 and they were in the triage area of the hospital in Texas where Donna (a pseudonym) worked as an ob-gyn (obstetrician-gynaecologist). The pregnant woman’s waters had broken. At this stage in the pregnancy, the fetus’s lungs are months away from fully forming and stop developing as the amniotic fluid drains away. Doctors therefore usually recommend aborting the fetus or waiting to miscarry. The latter course can take days or weeks, during which time the mother is at high risk of infection – and must endure the trauma of carrying a non-viable fetus.

But in Texas, termination was no longer an option. A year and a half earlier, its Republican-dominated legislature had passed Senate Bill 8 (SB8), which outlaws abortion from the moment a fetal heartbeat can be detected (around the sixth week of pregnancy). In June 2022 America’s Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade, a nearly half-century-old ruling that said there was a constitutional right to abortion. States were suddenly free to ban the procedure. Texas did so immediately, with exceptions only if the mother is at risk of death or a “substantial impairment of a major bodily function”. Doctors who refuse to comply are classed as criminals.

Having told the patient that her baby was going to die, Donna then had to deliver more distressing news. “Normally we would offer you an induction but right now because of the law – because your baby still has a heartbeat – we have to send you home.” She had seen many women in this position since SB8 had come into effect, and knew to speak slowly and calmly, choosing her words carefully. Though the curtain around her patient’s bed gave the appearance of privacy, the other patients on the ward could hear almost everything. “If you develop an infection or start bleeding heavily, come back to the hospital, and then we can give you medicine to deliver the baby or do a procedure.”

Continued here

The man who escaped genocide, twice - The Economist   

In a sweltering shack in a refugee camp in eastern Chad, Abdelaziz listened calmly as people told him about the horrors they had witnessed. Cold-blooded killings at roadblocks, beheadings, swollen bodies lying on the road. They had fled from Darfur, a region of western Sudan, where Arab militias were intent on slaughtering anyone who belonged to the Masalit, a black African ethnic group.

Occasionally Abdelaziz would interject, offering words of comfort to a woman who wiped her tears on her hijab, or a more precise translation for the medical staff at the camp. But unlike the other humanitarian workers, Abdelaziz, 34, hadn’t flown in from another crisis. He had fled from Darfur himself – the second time in his life he had escaped genocide.

More than 450,000 Sudanese refugees have arrived in Chad since April, when fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the regular army, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the SAF, and Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, head of the RSF, had been running the country since late 2021, when they ousted the civilian prime minister in a coup.

Continued here