Another Side of Modern Fatherhood
Much of what you've heard lately about men has probably been negative. Young guys, we're told, are being radicalized and sucked into the manosphere; adult men are toxic, or victims of a loneliness epidemic. We may have become so used to crisis narratives about men, masculinity, and fatherhood that we're failing to see the ways in which men are progressing. One omnipresent parenting influencer, Becky Kennedy, thinks that, when it comes to fatherhood in particular, a lot of dads are doing just fine, and that should be celebrated.
'I asked a group of dads the other day, 'What is something you do that your own dad never did?'' Kennedy, who goes by 'Dr. Becky,' told me earlier this week. 'It brought tears to a lot of their eyes to be able to say, 'Maybe not even 50 percent of the nights, but maybe 30, I put my kids to sleep even if they're screaming for their mom every time. My dad never put me to sleep.' I could cry, John.'
Kennedy has found a large, eager market for her views. Four years ago, Time magazine dubbed her 'the Millennial Parenting Whisperer,' and her reach continues to grow. She's the author of a No. 1 New York Times best-selling book, a podcast host, and the proprietor of a parenting-education program—all branded under the banner 'Good Inside,' her 'app-based membership' platform. On Instagram, she has more than 3 million followers. She makes part of her living on the speaking circuit; at times, the charge for a virtual Dr. Becky appearance has run to as much as $200,000. Her detractors say she's more a shrewd businesswoman than a benevolent force, but thousands of parents have come to see her as some sort of healer. Kennedy, who holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, leans more on anecdotal evidence than on hard research, presenting herself less as an expert and more as a confidante.
At the recent 'Future of Fatherhood Summit' in Midtown Manhattan, Kennedy was among the speakers discussing topics such as caregiving, paid leave, and 'inclusive masculinity.' Most of the voices were male—Jonathan Haidt, Chasten Buttigieg, and Representative Jimmy Gomez of the Congressional Dads Caucus among them. Kennedy's upbeat presentation stood out amid no small amount of pontificating. Kennedy offers a centrist perspective: She rejects the expectation that men are breadwinners and nothing more; she also rejects the idea that dads 'need to be made into moms' or that successful parenting requires 50–50 sharing of household tasks.
Listening to her there, and during a follow-up interview, I thought about one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons. In the frame, a slump-shouldered middle-aged man is holding a vacuum cleaner and daydreaming about a wild celebration—confetti, people cheering, and a banner that reads NED HELPED OUT. Kennedy's glass-half-full mentality is undoubtedly a form of positive reinforcement for guys who feel like they can't do anything right.
Kennedy is often associated with the 'gentle parenting' movement, but her overall philosophy boils down to what she calls 'sturdy parenting,' an even-keeled approach that is, in some ways, a welcome alternative to 'helicopter parenting.' She likes to talk about what she calls 'deeply feeling kids,' or 'DFKs' for short, and her defense of the modern dad is almost a continuation of her child-care approach— You're doing great, sweetie. Like many figures in the wellness and self-improvement space, Kennedy occasionally falls back on platitudes—fathers are looking for a 'dad journey,' not just 'dad duty,' she maintains. And the resetting of expectations that she proposes also runs the risk of stalling progress. At what point does affirmation for dads become nothing more than handing out participation trophies?
Kennedy feels confident that fathers are hungry to better their domestic lives. 'We've had this drumbeat of 'parenting is a skill,' which I think means anyone can learn it,' Kennedy told me. But she's found that today's dads actually have 'less shame' than moms around confronting the hard truth that they may not know everything from the moment their child is born. She believes that this is partly because society doesn't home in on the phrase paternal instinct, whereas an innate 'maternal instinct' is widely expected. In lieu of male pride or obstinacy, she's found modern dads to be genuinely curious. 'They know they don't have the skills,' she said. 'They're like, 'Someone just teach me.''
In the end, Kennedy believes that today's dads, to varying degrees, want 'repair' with their kids, and to be 'cycle-breakers'—making up for all those nights they went to bed without their own dad tucking them in. Rather than raising boys who will end up in the manosphere, they want to teach their kids how to deal with their feelings. In a time of wall-to-wall negativity, Kennedy's optimism is refreshing. Whether or not the proper prescription for modern parenting partnerships lies in patting dads on the back for performing seemingly basic tasks, Kennedy's pragmatism about making men feel capable of the job of raising children seems a worthwhile place to start.
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Atlantic
5 hours ago
- Atlantic
RFK Jr. Is Globalizing the Anti-Vaccine Agenda
This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used his address to a global vaccine summit to disparage global vaccination. The conference was organized by Gavi, the world's leading immunization program, and in a recorded speech, Kennedy accused the organization of collaborating with social-media companies to stifle dissenting views on immunization during the coronavirus pandemic and said it had 'ignored the science' in its work. He criticized Gavi for recommending COVID-19 shots to pregnant women, and went deep on a discredited study that purported to find safety issues with a tetanus vaccine commonly used in the developing world. 'In its zeal to promote universal vaccination,' Kennedy claimed, Gavi 'has neglected the key issue of vaccine safety.' Kennedy's remarks confirmed what The New York Times first reported in March: that the United States, Gavi's third-largest donor, would stop pledging money to the organization. (Congress, which has always had final say over Gavi funding, has not yet weighed in.) They are also the first indication that the U.S.'s rejection of global vaccine campaigns stems from the Trump administration's opposition not only to foreign aid, but to vaccination itself. For the first time, Kennedy has managed to use the anti-vaccine agenda to guide American foreign policy. Gavi, at its most basic level, is Costco for immunizations, wielding its massive purchasing power to buy vaccines in bulk for cheap. National governments and private philanthropies pledge funding to it every five years. The United Kingdom and the Gates Foundation are its largest donors; the United Nations distributes the shots. The poorest countries pay 20 cents per vaccine, and prices rise along with national income. Since the partnership was launched, in January 2000, 19 countries —including Ukraine, Congo, and Guyana—have gone from relying on Gavi to paying for vaccinations entirely on their own. Indonesia, which accepted donations from Gavi as recently as 2017, pledged $30 million to the organization this funding cycle. Gavi, by its own estimate, has saved about 19 million lives and vaccinated 1 billion children. At the conference this week, the director of the World Health Organization noted that since 2000, the number of children who die each year before they reach the age of 5 has fallen by more than half, largely due to the power of vaccines. By Gavi's estimates, the U.S. canceling its Biden-era pledge to provide $1.2 billion this donation cycle could lead to the deaths of more than 1 million children who otherwise would have lived. (The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.) In his recorded remarks, Kennedy said America would not send the money until Gavi can 're-earn the public trust' by 'taking vaccine safety seriously.' Cutting off millions of children's only access to routine vaccines is 'the most emphatic globalization of the anti-vaxxer agenda,' Lawrence Gostin, the faculty director of Georgetown's O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, told me. Tom Frieden, the former director of the CDC, told me that after he heard Kennedy's remarks, 'I was literally sick to my stomach,' because 'unscientific, irresponsible statements like this will result in the deaths of children.' (The U.S. has run an international anti-vaccine campaign before: According to an investigation by Reuters, in 2020, the Pentagon unleashed bot accounts on multiple social-media platforms that impersonated Filipinos and discouraged uptake of China's Sinovac vaccine—the first COVID vaccine available in the Philippines—using a hashtag that read, in Tagalog, 'China is the virus.' The goal was not to combat vaccines, but to undermine China's influence.) Kennedy's prerecorded address held back his harshest critiques of Gavi. In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy paints 'Bill Gates's surrogate group Gavi' (the Gates Foundation co-founded Gavi) as nothing more than a profiteering 'cabal' and a facilitator of 'African Genocide.' To hear Kennedy tell it, 'virtually all of Gates's blockbuster African and Asian vaccines—polio, DTP, hepatitis B, malaria, meningitis, HPV, and Hib—cause far more injuries and deaths than they avert.' Decades' worth of safety and efficacy studies have proved him wrong. In his remarks to Gavi this week, Kennedy focused on the DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) shot, describing at length a 'landmark' 2017 study that found the vaccine increased all-cause mortality among girls in Guinea-Bissau. But as Frieden pointed out, this was in fact a relatively small observational study. In 2022, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of more than 50,000 newborns found that the DTP vaccine significantly decreased infant mortality. Frieden compared the evidence: 'Hundreds of kids versus 50,000 kids. Poorly done; well done.' Kennedy made efforts to take his anti-vaccine advocacy global before he became America's health secretary. In 2021, he delivered a webinar on the importance of expanding an 'international movement' for Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization he founded. In 2019, when Samoa was experiencing a major dip in measles immunization after an improperly prepared vaccine killed two children, Kennedy visited the prime minister and, on behalf of Children's Health Defense, reportedly offered to build an information system the country could use to track the health effects of vaccines and other medical interventions. When a deadly measles outbreak took hold later that year, Kennedy sent a letter to the prime minister suggesting that widespread vaccination might make unvaccinated Samoan children more likely to die of measles. (In an interview for a 2023 documentary, Kennedy said that 'I had nothing to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa' and that his conversations about vaccines with the prime minister had been 'limited.') Now, it seems, Kennedy has gained the power to realize his ambitions both domestically and abroad. Earlier this month, Kennedy dismissed all 17 members of the CDC's vaccine advisory committee, then replaced them with a group that includes several allies who have spread misinformation about the harms of vaccines. This week, as other countries pledged their support for Gavi, Kennedy's brand-new, handpicked panel convened for a discussion of the dangers of thimerosal, a vaccine ingredient that is a frequent target of anti-vaxxers despite having been found safe. The committee has formed a working group to review the 'cumulative effect' of childhood vaccination in the United States. As Kennedy said in his address to Gavi, 'Business as usual is over.'
The Hill
5 hours ago
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RFK Jr. is fighting a two-front war against chronic disease and anti-MAHA partisans
At a certain point, the gruesome reality of war fades into a white noise of fatalism. Hundreds of thousands killed in Iraq; tens of thousands killed in Afghanistan; over 1 million killed or wounded in Ukraine; Israel and Iran at each other's throats, with the fear of the U.S. being dragged into a wider war. Since the end of World War Two, it can be argued that there has been no 'just' war — just needless killing. While most on the left won't want to hear it or acknowledge it, there has been no president more firmly opposed to these 'forever wars' and the slaughter of young soldiers than President Trump. That said, there was one war Trump was anxious to wage — a war that counterintuitively saves lives, while taking none. To command the campaign, Trump selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 'Make America Healthy Again.' It's a nice slogan and looks good on the front of a hat, but what is it really about? The reality is that this program has the potential to save more lives than all those lost in the wars since WWII — and then some. As Trump's secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has chosen to dedicate the rest of his working life to this quest. Why? To save lives that should not be lost in the battle against the unchecked and steadily advancing chronic disease epidemic raging in our nation. Tragically, millions of Americans are lost each year to such preventable disease. Depending upon the study, experts say that approximately 1 million Americans die each year from heart disease; over 1,300 per day, or approximately 500,000 per year, from obesity; 1.5 million Americans are newly diagnosed with diabetes each year, with over 100,000 passing away each year from the disease. Many of these deaths overlap; many are preventable; and many are caused by the foods, beverages and food additives we consume each day. But now Kennedy and his team at HHS have illuminated a bright light at the end of this dark and seemingly endless tunnel. On June 19, Kennedy posted, 'Big food brands are listening. From cereals to spices to fast food, artificial dyes and additives are being removed from America's food supply …' Along with that announcement, he attached a video reporting that General Mills was removing artificial food dyes from U.S. cereals and K-12 school foods by summer 2026 and removing all artificial dyes completely by the end of 2027; Kraft-Heinz just announced that they are removing all artificial dyes by the end of 2027; In-N-Out Burger announced that they removed artificial dyes from strawberry shakes and pink lemonade, using beet juice and turmeric instead. Steak 'N Shake will now be using beef tallow instead of vegetable oil to cook French fries, onion rings and chicken tenders; and McCormick spice company announced it is working to remove artificial food dyes and sodium. All of this comes on top of the banning of Red Dye No. 3, which potentially causes cancer. This is huge and truly transformative news for the health of the American people. None of it was really going anywhere until RFK Jr. came on the scene. While great news, little of this progress will hold unless the broken U.S. healthcare bureaucracy is torn down and rebuilt into an aerodynamic, perpetual-motion machine protecting the health of the American people. To this point, as Kennedy pointed out after his testimony before the House Commerce Committee earlier this week, 'We've thrown trillions of dollars at our health agencies — and the American people have only gotten sicker … we're transforming HHS from a bloated sick-care bureaucracy into a streamlined health care agency focused on outcomes—not waste.' He added, 'The path forward is clear: We will restore public trust by restoring public truth.' Unfortunately, while Kennedy was testifying before this committee regarding the president's 2026 Health and Human Services budget, we also got a troubling look at the other war he is forced to wage to 'Make America Healthy Again.' It is a war that Kennedy would like to avoid. Sadly, but quite predictably, a number of the Democratic members used the hearing for partisan purposes to fire loaded trick questions at Kennedy while demanding 'yes' or 'no' answers based on false premises. Most of them pompously went out of their way to prevent Kennedy from getting a word in edgewise in response. Why? Because they didn't care about any of his answers. That was not the point of the exercise. It was all partisan performance art. It was all about fundraising letters and voters back home. Kennedy is a well-known personality, they wanted to badger and harass him into getting the soundbite needed for their next reelection effort. The ironic part is that Kennedy would very much like to work with all the members taking partisan shots at him for self-promotion. He knows many of them and has worked with some in the past. Rather than be at 'war' with them, Kennedy desperately wants to enlist them as allies in the greater war which, as Kennedy has repeatedly stated, has made America 'the sickest nation in the world.' The American people are sick of being sick — and sick of the partisan nonsense that has put them at greater risk. Tens of millions now believe Kennedy is a prayer answered when it comes to combating those issues. They want and need their congressional representatives to join with Kennedy to make them and their children healthier. A 'war' that takes no lives but could potentially save millions. Kennedy is waging it but needs help from every power center to win it. Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official.
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10 hours ago
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Carrie Johnson admitted to hospital over 'severe dehydration'
Carrie Johnson - the wife of former prime minister Boris Johnson - has revealed she was admitted to hospital with severe dehydration, as she offered advice to other breastfeeding mothers in the hot weather. Mrs Johnson, 37, posted a picture of herself and her newborn daughter Poppy Eliza Josephine on Friday in a hospital bed. "Being hospitalised for two nights for severe dehydration was not on my postpartum bingo card," she captioned the Instagram post. Mrs Johnson urged other "breastfeeding mums" to make sure they eat and drink enough "in this heat", especially those who are "clusterfeeding". Poppy was born on 21 May, becoming the couple's fourth child after their son Frank, born in July 2023, daughter Romy, born in December 2021, and son Wilfred, born in April 2020. In a separate Instagram story, Mrs Johnson described an "honestly brutal week". "Mastitis (me), reflux (her), dehydration (me). What a pair we are!," she said. "But thank you for all the kind messages, especially all the brilliant advice on reflux. Really appreciate it and made me feel way less alone going thru (sic) it all. And as ever, thanks to our amazing NHS." Read more from Sky News: The NHS recommends drinking plenty of fluids while breastfeeding - and avoiding caffeine and alcohol to stop their effects being passed on to the baby. Having a drink nearby when mothers stop to feed is advised, as is water, lower-fat milk, and low-sugar drinks. The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has issued an amber heat health alert for the next four days. Although not a public weather warning, it advises health and social care organisations of possible dangers to their patients and facilities. Temperatures could reach 34C on Monday - with a 20% chance of beating the hottest June day on record of 35.6C from 1976. The likelihood of record-breaking temperatures could increase over the weekend as the day approaches.
