New research on the finicky eating habits of children with autism finds that while autistic children tend to eat a less varied diet than other kids do, their dietary preferences have little negative effect on their height, weight and growth. Researchers at the University of Bristol began with a database of children born from 1991 to 1992 who were enrolled in a long-term study in Avon, England. The children's caregivers completed detailed food questionnaires describing the kids' eating ...

When five children of Orange Picker Allan Platt first appeared at the white public school in Mount Dora, Fla., Principal D. D. Roseborough suspected that there might be trouble. Skins of some of the children were so brown that pupils and their parents wondered whether the children might be Negroes. Principal Roseborough quickly reassured them: he had checked in Holly Hill, S.C., where the Platts lived last year, found that though they had Indian blood, they were officially listed as ...

Two days after leading Ugandan gay-rights activist David Kato was bludgeoned to death at his home in Kampala, his friends and family gathered for his funeral on Friday. As hundreds of Kato's supporters mourned, they rejected the police line that he had been the victim of a violent robbery. Many of those who knew Kato fear that his murder was the result of the harsh anti-gay rhetoric coming from the nation's politicians and its media. "He knew ...

This is the typical day of a relatively typical soul in today's diversified world. I wake up to the sound of my Japanese clock radio, put on a T shirt sent me by an uncle in Nigeria and walk out into the street, past German cars, to my office. Around me are English-language students from Korea, Switzerland and Argentina -- all on this Spanish-named road in this Mediterranean-style town. On TV, I find, the news is in Mandarin; today's baseball ...

Here's an old bit from a stand-up comic's act: "Some say the glass is half empty. Some say it is half full. I say it's twice as big as it needs to be." This is a story of glasses, not nearly empty, not quite full. Except that the glasses are the children of divorce--a million new ones each year in the U.S.--and what's being measured is their misery. For decades, since a pioneering study by Judith S. Wallerstein in ...

A clinical psychologist practicing in Newcastle, Australia, Michael Currie has worked with adolescent boys and their families for 20 years. Much of his attention has centered on the anger that can consume boys during their high school years. Manifesting in the home as sullenness, disobedience and fierce assertions of independence, teen rage confuses and distresses parents, who often make matters worse with their clumsy, if well-meaning, attempts to address it. In his new book, Doing Anger Differently, ...

It's the recurring nightmare of high-minded modern parents of daughters. You ask your relatives to lay off the pink pinafores at the baby shower. You give your daughter Legos and soccer balls, not Barbies. You encourage her to play fire fighter and immerse her in Dora the Explorer videos. Then one Halloween rolls around, and your empowered, self-confident budding Marie Curie tells you that she wants to be...a princess. Call it nature or nurture, harmless fantasy or insidious indoctrination, ...

For any species hoping to survive in the wild, the lifetime to-do list is agreeably brief: eat, mate, defend your turf and above all, protect your young. It's that last one that seems the most primally encoded, and for good reason: it's hardly possible to pass on your genes if your babies die before they're old enough to have offspring of their own. And yet not only do animals sometimes fail to protect the young of their ...

Should morbidly obese children be taken from their parents? That's the question an increasing number of countries are grappling with amid the Western world's obesity epidemic. The latest case to make headlines concerns a Scottish couple who lost custody of two of their six children on the basis of what was, their lawyer claims, a failure to reduce the kids' weight following warnings from Scottish social services. The couple lost their Oct. 14 appeal in a case ...

Barely a month ago, big , bluff William Bennett looked upon his early works as Secretary of Education and declared them good. "I have more affinity with the views of the American people than do most of my academic colleagues," he announced. "I think I am in the mainstream of American thinking." If so, then it is a turbulent mainstream, and at times Bennett has seemed in need of a pilot. Since taking office Feb. 6, he has been a ...