The Frank Forum

  What do we miss out on when we fail to notice ? I recently re-read a brilliant piece by author Elizabeth Stice in Front Porch Republic: The Power of Place: Payphones.  Stice is a self-described "payphone flaneur." In other words, she traverses areas off the beaten path in search of old payphones. This new hobby, she explains, has significantly augmented her sense of place and spatial awareness.  Here are just a few payphones that Stice has photographed: You can find a plethora of such photographs on Stice's Instagram page, @phoningpalmbeach . She updates this account regularly, with her last post from just a day ago.  From Stice: The value in seeing payphones is the way it develops a practice of seeing. So often we are driving or walking down streets, unaware of what serves us no purpose or where we aren’t heading. Looking for things forces you to notice things. I'll admit: I shut off my peripheral vision when traveling to work, or even when going to meet a friend.

The societal salience of two-parent households used to be obvious. Today, however, this social structure has been labeled reactionary, an antiquated norm from a bygone era.  But there is no disputing the facts: children raised by both parents are far better equipped for the world than their counterparts from single-parent households.  While inconvenient for some to hear, this is an empirical reality.  Robert Putnam in his 2015 book, Our Kids: The American Dream In Crisis , takes this even further with his thesis that kids raised by a mother and father with college degrees have the best outcomes.  His rigorous research, both qualitative (interviews and anecdotes) and quantitative (graphs and regression models) makes his conclusions hard to challenge.  But, college education aside, we must concede the point: children from two-parent households are more likely to perform well in school and in their professional careers, and are less likely to become addicted to drugs and commit crime.  Wh