Children are absorbent learners when it comes to family expectations. They want to please, and they want to belong. Children will go against their own instincts in order to increase their bond with the important people in their lives. In sociology, that is called learning the culture. Learning the family story—how one should think, feel, and act—sh

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Who would I be today if I was raised by married parents, if our little family wasn’t weighed down by a secret? I envied Madame Lapierre and her sons, and their clean conscience. And yet, was it terrible to admit that I’d also loved the travails of our life, the inconsistency of Father’s affection, the hardness of Anouk’s hands when they pulled on m

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I had gone to the home of Marshall Duke, a psychologist at Emory University. Marshall and his colleague Robyn Fivush had been studying a phenomenon first noticed by Marshall’s wife, Sara. A teacher of students with special needs, Sara had observed that the children she worked with seemed better able to navigate their lives the more they knew about

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