Florida State University has informed its employees that as of Aug. 7 they will no longer be allowed to care for their children while working from home during the coronavirus pandemic, according to reports.

Covid-19 is increasingly a disease of the young, with the message to stay home for the sake of older loved ones wearing off as the pandemic wears on.

The dropping age of the infected is becoming one of the most pressing problems for local officials, who continued Wednesday to set curfews and close places where the young gather. U.S. health experts say that they are more likely to be active and asymptomatic, providing a vast redoubt for the coronavirus that has killed almost 130,000 Americans.

In Arizona, half of all positive cases are people from the ages of 20 to 44, according to state data. The median age in Florida is 37, down from 65 in March. In Texas’s Hays County, people in their 20s make up 50% of the victims.

DEAR ABBY: My fiance, “Jay,” has a 14-year-old daughter who has been home-schooling during the quarantine, and she refuses to put pants on. When we ask her to, she gets upset.

She isn’t built like the average teenager. Abby, she’s 5’10” and weighs 200 pounds, so it’s like seeing a grown woman in her underwear.

I think it’s inappropriate for a young woman her age to be unwilling to dress herself fully, and I don’t like seeing her like that every time I go to their house.

Jay doesn’t notice. He says it doesn’t bother him, and he doesn’t mind when I ask her to put shorts on.

I don’t feel it’s my place at this point to dictate what she wears, but I’m uncomfortable. I don’t know if I’m crossing a line or if it’s normal to feel this way. Help!

DIDN’T THINK I WAS A PRUDE

My mother texts me multiple times a day either in a private message or in a group message with my brother and his girlfriend. Most of the texts are “just checking in” or “thinking of you.” I already feel like the world’s worst daughter for complaining about this, but it feels like it’s too much. I am 28 years old, married, and have a 1-year-old. I work full time in an ER, which obviously has its own stressors. For this reason, I haven’t seen my mom since the pandemic started. I know it’s getting to her not being able to see me and my daughter, and I empathize with that. I video chat with her at least once a week, and I respond to her texts most of the time, but honestly she’s driving me crazy. We don’t have the relationship that she wishes we had. I’ve always found it hard to talk to her, and we are fundamentally polar opposites. I feel guilty for thinking this, let alone writing it out, because I know I would feel devastated if my daughter felt this way. Do I suck it up and go on with the multiple texts and group texts and realize it’s not that bad in the grand scheme of it all, or do I upset her and set boundaries?

—Needy Mom

The growing number of New York children diagnosed with a serious inflammatory syndrome possibly connected to COVID-19 may impact whether schools reopen in the fall, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday.

Health officials are investigating more than 120 cases of pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome in New York, according to the governor.

“This is a syndrome that we are only just discovering,” Cuomo said. “I think the numbers are going to be much, much higher.”

The illness, which causes the inflammation of blood vessels, has been identified in children across 16 states and at least five countries, according to Cuomo. At least three children have died in New York, health officials have said.

Symptoms of PMIS include a persistent fever, rash, abdominal pain and vomiting. Parents should call their pediatrician immediately if their children exhibit symptoms.

When the temperature gets above freezing, it's a good day. Not just because it feels better, but it's also good for the electric bill and because Grenier can no longer justify paying $50 to $70 to get her driveway plowed.

The dental practice where she has worked for two decades shut down in mid-March, just before her son, Ryeder, also lost his job at an auto body shop.

She had hoped to use accumulated sick leave and paid time off to cover some of her expenses, but the dental office couldn't afford to pay that out. Unemployment benefits took time to process, she says, because there have been so many layoffs.

It’s been nearly two months since schools in the United States closed their doors and sent students home to carry on their lessons through a screen.

Due to the coronavirus, American pupils from kindergarten to senior year were forced to swap blackboards for Zoom — much to the dismay of the parents now forced to step in as surrogate teachers.

A viral tweet from archeologist and University of Alabama at Birmingham professor Sarah Parcak summed up many frustrated parents’ emotions after she said homeschooling after completing other household chores was a “fucking joke” that made her “want to barf.”

“We just wrote a hard email. I told our son’s (lovely, kind, caring) teacher that, no, we will not be participating in her 'virtual classroom,' and that he was done with the 1st grade,” she wrote on April 8. “We cannot cope with this insanity. Survival and protecting his well being come first.”

Dear Care and Feeding,

Our neighbors moved in next door a couple of years ago. We were thrilled when we discovered they had kids. Their son is one year older than our son, and, while we initially thought he would be a convenient playmate for our son, we couldn’t have been more wrong. On the day his family arrived, we invited their son to play in our backyard so that his parents could focus on moving in. The new neighbor boy immediately reached out from the top deck of our play set and started dismantling the swings from the beam, to the great amusement of our son. He also proved to be a rough and aggressive kid with no regard for others’ belongings. To his credit, when we intervene, he changes his behavior, but only momentarily.

Besides being excessively aggressive, he’s manipulative as well. He instructs our son to do things that he knows will get my son in trouble (even from his side of the fence during this time of quarantine). Even though we have discussions with our son about how, “The neighbor boy knew you would get in trouble for holding up your middle finger. Do you think he’s your friend?,” our son can’t help but think of him as a friend or even as an older boy to look up to.

We simply don’t have the time to be constantly supervising them. We’ve gone from being thankful for having a neighbor boy for our son to play with to being fearful of letting our son play outside at all. I have spoken with his parents about his behavior a few times, but honestly, I could tell them unpleasant things about their son every day. We feel stuck. What can we do?

—Blustered by This Bully

In an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity on Wednesday, Dr. Mehmet Oz discussed reopening schools amid the coronavirus pandemic and said that doing so "may only cost us 2 to 3% in terms of total mortality." The television personality suggested that the potential deaths "might be a tradeoff some folks would consider" and has since come under fire for his comments, with some on social media calling him "heartless."

"We need our mojo back," Oz said in reference to the American economy. "Let's start with things that are really critical to the nation, where we think we might be able to open without getting into a lot of trouble. I tell ya, schools are a very appetizing opportunity."

Millions of people in America are under shelter-in-place orders requiring them to stay home whenever possible, but a growing number don’t have that luxury. Their landlords are kicking them out for not paying the rent, despite moratoriums on evictions in more than 30 states and dozens of cities.

Some landlords change the locks when tenants are out. Others cut off power or utilities, or let themselves into tenants’ apartments and throw their stuff onto the street. Landlords also take the doors off the hinges if tenants won’t leave, says George Donnelly, an attorney at The Public Interest Law Center in Philadelphia. In most cases, experts say, the evictions are illegal, since landlords are required to go through the courts to evict tenants, and most courts are not currently processing eviction orders. In addition, sheriffs or marshals, not landlords, are supposed to enforce eviction orders, including supervising removal companies to carry away a tenant’s belongings if the renter refuses to leave.

It?s not such a stretch then to suggest that a popular TV program, such as The Brady Bunch, might have had a significant impact on how people have raised their children since. Millions of people have grown up watching The Brady Bunch, and many have seen it either as the perfect version of normal, or as the way they wished that they were raised in their own childhood. Would it influence the way they might one day raise their own children?

I think so.

Yet if we look at kids today, we see evidence of a pronounced lack of discipline. I submit that a generation of people who were raised on The Brady Bunch might come to see some legitimacy in the weak response from the TV parents, as though it?s somehow the enlightened course of action.

I also submit that it?s that kind lack of discipline that has contributed to an explosion in the number of incarcerations. Some 65 million people in the US have criminal records; is it too far-fetched to connect the dots between a lack of discipline in the home, and the need for the criminal justice system to do in adult life what the parents wouldn?t do in childhood?

Real life isn?t The Brady Bunch, and it?s beyond silly to think that that kind of non-discipline has any use at all. Sadly, it seems to have become the new normal in American households today.

Melissa Pintor Carnagey’s puberty workshops still feature the same genital anatomy models and quizzes around body care, but these days she looks out on a virtual classroom of adolescents sitting at home alongside a parent. A few weeks ago, she took her in-person classes to Zoom, where familiar exercises have gotten a technological update: a software program allows students to text her their associations with puberty. A colorful on-screen collage of words like “pimples,” “breasts,” “hair,” “acne,” and “sex” show up on the screen, each growing in size relative to the number of students who submit it.

Since Carnagey’s puberty workshops went online, they continually sell out within 48 hours of open registration. “We’ve definitely seen an influx in families seeking out resources for sex ed,” said Carnagey, founder of the organization Sex Positive Families. “Parents are very hungry for access to these conversations, the information, and the resources.”

Hello, lost generation.

The Millennials entered the workforce during the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Saddled with debt, unable to accumulate wealth, and stuck in low-benefit, dead-end jobs, they never gained the financial security that their parents, grandparents, or even older siblings enjoyed. They are now entering their peak earning years in the midst of an economic cataclysm more severe than the Great Recession, near guaranteeing that they will be the first generation in modern American history to end up poorer than their parents.

Recessions are not good for anyone, from infants to the elderly. Nor are pandemics. Americans born during this calamity will be more likely to have low birth weights and to be in poor health generally, with lifelong effects. Children will not just endure this trauma—manifested in lost months of schooling, skipped meals, housing volatility, and increased abuse—but will carry it with them. Zoomers graduating into the recession will die sooner because of it, suffering increased incidence of heart disease, lung cancer, liver disease, and drug overdoses in the coming decades; they will also earn less over the course of their lives. The elderly are likely to be the most economically insulated group but are facing the most terrifying health consequences.

Among adults the news isn’t good, either. And particularly not for those youngish-but-no-longer-young adults who came into this crisis already vulnerable, already fragile, already over-indebted and underpaid. The Millennials were left with scars during the Great Recession that never quite healed, and inherited an economy structured to manufacture precarity for the young and the poor and black and brown, and to perpetuate wealth for the old and the rich and white.

Shocking allegations in a new federal lawsuit accuse the Transportation Safety Authority (TSA) of refusing to allow a transgender 16-year-old girl to board her flight unless she showed an officer her genitals.

Jamii Erway and her mother Kimberly were prevented from boarding their flight out of Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina in May 2019. The mother and daughter sued earlier this week.

The lawsuit says that when Erway went through the scanner, it set off a false positive. When the teen explained that she is transgender and if they changed the gender marker on the machine everything would be fine, they refused. Instead, the agent called a supervisor.

“Notwithstanding, and for reasons still unknown to plaintiffs, [the supervisor] advised Jamii that she would need to accompany her to a private room, expose herself, and allow [the supervisor] to ‘feel up in there,’ i.e., touch her genitals,” the complaint alleges.

When I was in high school, there was no bigger rite of passage than being able to drive. But today, there's a trend of teens not getting their license when they come of age. With ride sharing apps as a convenient way to get around, coupled with rising costs of owning a car and an eye on the environment, many teens don't feel the push to get their licenses.

In fact, only about a quarter of 16-year-olds had a driver's license in 2014, a sharp decline from nearly half in 1983, according to a study by Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.

As a parent of teen on the cusp of getting his license in these uncertain times, I often wonder if driving is a life skill that should be encouraged even if teens don't see the need for a license. Here's what the experts have to say.