A bumper sticker that was popular on the cars of the baby boomer generation alluded to its ambivalence about parenting: “Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your kids.” The challenges in child-rearing have grown as the demands on parents have multiplied, but the ability to cope is rooted in simple traits like common sense and perseverance.

The craziness that can be part of everyday family life was revealed in a study conducted from 2002 to 2005, when researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, videotaped nearly every waking, at-home moment of families during a week.

The U.C.L.A. project focused on the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle- class American household. The investigators have worked through the 1,540 hours of videotape, coding and categorizing every hug and tender moment that those families shared, The Times reported.

It also taped the arguing, screaming, crying, nitpicking and emotional outbursts that are an unavoidable fact of family life.

“The very purest form of birth control ever devised. Ever,” one researcher, Anthony P. Graesch, a postdoctoral fellow, told The Times. Still, Dr. Graesch and his wife have just had their second child.

Many parents are unprepared for what they face and most learn to do the right thing through trial and error. Society acts to remove children from parents who are either negligent or incompetent, or those who suffer from an addiction, often drugs or alcohol. For a three-month-old in Suwon, South Korea, her parents’ obsession with the fantasy world of Internet gaming proved deadly, The Times reported.

Kim Yun-jeong and her husband, Kim Jae-beom, 41, left their apartment for an all-night Internet cafe where they role-played, often until dawn. Last fall, they returned home after a 12-hour game session to find their daughter, Sa-rang ? love in Korean ? dead, shriveled with malnutrition.

The couple, who knew so little about childbearing that they did not know the wife was pregnant until her water broke, were sentenced to two years in prison on May 29. The judge suspended Ms. Kim’s sentence because she was seven months pregnant and he said she needed some “mental stability.”

“I am sorry for being such a bad mother to my baby,” Ms. Kim said, sobbing, during the couple’s trial, The Times reported.

A good father’s efforts in a small village in Afghanistan altered the fate of his son after the boy opened a sack of grain and a pit viper bit him on the lip. The father, Kashmir, took 5-year-old Sadiq to an American Marine outpost near his house in Khan Neshin in an effort to get the boy airlifted to an American hospital where he had a chance of being saved. The helicopter mission was canceled and the boy’s chances for survival dimmed as the snake venom caused his face to swell and impaired his breathing. But Kashmir was not about to give up. He walked to another American outpost to ask again for a Black Hawk helicopter ride to get Sadiq the medical care he needed. Marines were able to track his activities through electronic message boards.

The second mission was approved and the boy’s life was saved. One parent, in a remote village in southern Afghanistan, had defied the odds, and in the process provided a lesson for parents everywhere: never stop trying.


TOM BRADY