Is Sharing the House After Divorce Good for Kids?

Also in this issue: The insidious undermining of girls by boys who make derogatory comments about their female classmates’ bodies on Instagram group chats.

But first, Miquelle West isn’t just a stylist to the stars, living her childhood dream. She’s a daughter and advocate who used her skills and connections in fashion to set her mother, Michelle, free from prison after nearly 32 years. “My mom has told me so many more stories (about other women seeking freedom),” Miquelle told Outlier Media. “So I don’t think I want to step back. I think I want to continue to mesh freedom and fashion and help other people. Maybe that’s my purpose.”

Sharing a house after divorce — for the kids

If a good divorce yields better emotional outcomes for children than living with parents in a miserable marriage, what sense could it make for the exes to share a home after the breakup? “For our kids it really made a huge difference,” Kathleen Brigham told the Washington Post. “It allowed them to just be.” She spent six years “birdnesting” with her ex-husband in an arrangement that worked so well, she co-authored a book about the experience to help others. 

Birdnesting revamps convention after divorce. Rather than have children move back and forth between their parents’ new homes, the children stay put. Parents take turns returning to live with them. The goal is to limit any emotional or physical distress experienced by the children amid the split. “It’s not for everybody,” Brigham said. “A lot of people read about it and think, ‘I can do that.’ But when you’re in it, you have to settle in this complete discomfort. I don’t think I ever got to the point where I thought it was really easy.”

In fact, while nesting may reduce disruption for kids, it might increase it for parents. Thirty one years ago, before the practice had a name, family therapist Ann Gold Buscho nested with her ex and their kids for 15 months. She felt uncomfortable and unsettled throughout, she said, being in her 40s and renting a room in a house with five others during her days away. But she doesn’t regret it. “He and I agreed on one thing, which was that we wanted to protect our kids.” They preferred the adults to shoulder the bulk of irritations and hardship as they all adjusted to a new life.

Beware though, said Lynn Waldman, a collaborative divorce counselor. Divorce can be contentious and further erode trust between parties. Nesting can also stall the process of accepting divorce and the changes it brings. “It’s harder for the parents to emotionally separate. Especially if it’s the family home, then they’re coming back every few days,” Waldman explained. “They’re not able to really move on with their own separate life. Each parent should be able to have the opportunity to develop their own routine, their own roots in their own home, develop memories and traditions with the kids on their own time.”

That said, nesting works best when rules and boundaries are communicated and strictly followed. Every detail and contingency must be written out, said Buscho, including how long nesting will occur and “the little things:” What food will be stocked? Who should change the bedsheets? Can either parent use the main bedroom on their days in the house? Families should be open to configuring the arrangement to their needs.

It’s pretty great for those it fits, though. Lori Badach and her ex-husband began nesting two years ago — and they’re still doing it. She even decided to pause on buying a condo, considering how well nesting works for the kids. Though not together, Badach and her ex still trust each other, she said. They’ve made adjustments to their written agreement over time, and get along so well that they still travel together for family vacations and games for their kids’ sports teams. Some friends are puzzled by the ease of their relationship after divorce, Badach said, but it’s no bother. What’s working well for her children isn’t something she feels the need to justify. “My motto is it will work until it doesn’t,” she said.

Dozens of teens who spent time at abusive Florida reform school ended up on Death Row.  Did the horrific abuse from the school make them more violent?

Republished from The Marshall Project

Eight years before a jury sentenced him to death for two murders and he confessed to three more, Michael Bell spent time at a Florida reform school so violent that the state later apologized for the abuse and paid millions to the victims.

The 54-year-old Bell, who was executed by Florida officials on Tuesday, spent four chaotic months at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna during 1986 and 1987 when he was 15.

Guards forced him to fight much larger boys at least six times, he said, taking cash bets from other Dozier employees on whether he would win. They threw him face down on a cot in a squat building everyone called “the white house” and told him to grasp the headrail, while beating him with a leather strap until he bled. They shackled his arms and legs and left him in that position for hours.

Bell is among at least 34 boys who stayed at Dozier and another 16 sent to Okeechobee — a separate boys’ school with a troubled history — who ended up on Florida’s death row, according to a review by The Marshall Project. At least 19 others, and possibly many more, went to prison for murder but were not sentenced to death. Twenty-five of them were killed when they were 15, 16, 17 or 18 – soon after departing the reform schools. Combined, men who attended Dozier and Okeechobee have killed at least 114 people.

Most people who are tormented in childhood do not become murderers, and it can be difficult to know why someone commits violence, experts say. Some boys who went to Dozier likely would have committed murders regardless of the trauma they suffered at the reform school. But research shows that childhood and adolescent abuse does affect brain development and can make people more violent.

Bell and other men sent to Dozier around the same time described to The Marshall Project a culture of fear, a foreboding that escalated at night when older boys stole in through the windows and beat up or sexually abused younger ones.Dr. George Woods is a neuropsychiatry specialist in California who offered expert testimony in the 2010 case of another death row inmate sent to Dozier as a child. Woods said the institution literally beat the humanity out of some boys, whittling away their value for human life. “Dozier helped make these boys killers,” he said.

Read the whole story here.

In other news…

Generative AI is changing the university landscape and straining students’ relationships, in different ways than you might assume, according to The Conversation. There are definitely students using tools like ChatGPT to cheat on assignments, and other studies show evidence that overuse of generative AI can dull critical thinking and problem-solving skills. In addition, a 2025 series of focus groups with 95 students at the University of Pittsburgh found that resources like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are significantly eroding the trust students feel in the classroom, while also ramping up their anxiety. Professors are generally “very anti-ChatGPT,” one participant said. But the times when it is acceptable to use aren’t clear, said another. Moreover, students have to contend with classmates who use it anyway, leaving them resentful and uncomfortable during group projects. “It ends up being more work for me,” a political science major said, “because it’s not only me doing my work by myself, it’s me double checking yours.”

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In an extraordinary personal essay for Chalkbeat New York, Anika Merkin, a high school junior from Brooklyn, describes the mental and emotional toll of persistent, long-term sexual harassment. Things shifted the day she joined Instagram, she said. The very same day, she was unknowingly added to group chats where boys began to make derogatory comments about her body. It struck her because they thought nothing of it. “They called me names that made me feel ashamed,” Merkin wrote, but she hesitated to tell her mother how she felt. “Even though I was only 11, this kind of attention and the discomfort that came with it had already started to feel routine,” she explained. “The comments, the screenshots, the way girls are sexualized without consent — it has become so familiar that many teens and tweens don’t immediately recognize it as wrong.”