Friday Tidings offers a whole new grading system in the annual Back-To-School edition.

In a new book, "slow parent" Susan Sachs Lipman pushes back against the highly scheduled, jam-packed lives of parents and kids.

I’m a father now. Not like a priest with a collar or anything, just a dad, with khaki shorts and t-shirts from Target. It sounds a little funny, to say it out loud like that. It’s just that I feel a little too young to be a dad. I feel like dads shouldn’t have blogs, or eat Skittles, or watch Seinfeld every day. Dads should read newspapers and wear suits, eat Werther’s originals and tell other people to turn the TV off...

Parents lead by example and a child’s moral legacy will be influenced more by what the parent does and speaks than any other influence. Human services counselors call this “parent modeling.” As a social worker, I tried to help parents understand this concept.

Dear Stay-at-Home Mom: You are a gift of God to your husband and your kids. But you don’t always feel that way, do you? There’s a low-level feeling of guilt that creeps into your heart from time to time. Sometimes it bubbles over into tears, usually on lonely, difficult days.

Sociologically and anthropologically, no society anywhere has found an alternative to the gold-standard of parentage--a married mother and father--for providing the health, safety, educational and life-opportunities that thriving children require. Mountains of careful and diverse research consistently show that not a single one of these new "alternative family" forms emerging over the last 40 years have done so. But here we are, continuing to invent them all the same, all under the illusion of progress.

Some have opposed Chik-fil-A's support of the traditional family. "Well, guilty as charged," said Cathy when asked about the company's position. "We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.

Tighter government restrictions have reduced the number of children adopted from overseas to a 15-year low. In response, evangelicals—more willing than ever to adopt—are broadening the type of children they are willing to take in. More families, for example, are taking special-needs children, older kids, and those in foster care.

What should we think about these matters as Christians? Is there really no difference between physical discipline and assault or child abuse? And what does the Bible actually say on the matter? Well there is a famous verse in Proverbs used to justify physical discipline, and perhaps it would be useful to look closely at it first.

The children of the more affluent and less affluent are raised in starkly different ways and have different opportunities. Decades ago, college-graduate parents and high-school-graduate parents invested similarly in their children. Recently, more affluent parents have invested much more in their children’s futures while less affluent parents have not.