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Study Up For 'Think': A Flight To The Range

Christy McDonald
/
flickr

It's in the detailed custom blanket sets sold on Etsy by the ad exec mom who quit to freelance and stay home with her kids. And it's on a street outside city limits, where a handsome twenty-something tends a garden on Sunday morning instead of sleeping in after a night out. We'll look at this how this interest in slower-paced lifestyles is affecting society at large with Emily Matchar at noon.

One of the first places this paradigm shift showed up is in the family structure. For many Americans, it's becoming less surprising to see a dad pushing a grocery cart with a plastic car holding toddlers attached. Stay-at-home dad Jonathan Heisey-Grove of Alexandria, Va. and his wife, Dawn, say they've gotten emotional feedback from neighbors who watch Jonathan in action with their two young boys - "I wish my dad played with me like that when I was a kid," one college-aged passerby told him. Dawn is a public health analyst, and Jonathan decided to stay home with the kids after he lost his job as a graphic designer.

Check out the piece about this couple and others by NPR's Jennifer Ludden. How could the evolving family model reflect our society's inheritance? (One father who started a play group for stay-at-home dads in Washington, D.C. told Ludden, ""I didn't want to be the dad who was never around.") For more insight, spend some time with NPR's "Changing Lives of Women" series.

And proof that living slower isn't just a family thing is in the books: An interest in rural settings has overridden city-slick romance in the so called "chick-lit" genre, according to The Atlantic.

Listen to Think from noon to 2 p.m., Monday through Thursday, on KERA 90.1 or stream the show at kera.org.

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Lyndsay Knecht is assistant producer for Think.