Guest Post: Single Mom Seeks Wealth (And Good Behavior From Her Kids!)
A big part of my Mean Mom approach is being married to a Mean Dad. My husband is old-school in the right ways (he’s tough and consistent) while eschewing some of the old-school-dad stuff like hiding his face behind a newspaper and leaving all the child-rearin’ to me. He’s out there (literally) kicking a soccer ball with our younger son and helping our older son with math homework. And while we have some minor disagreements about discipline (you might be surprised to find he’s tougher than I am in some instances!), we can discuss these differences rationally and work through …Keep Reading
The Hard Lesson of the $5 Fries: Me, My Kid, and Envy
I talk a good game about how important it is to let kids feel disappointment, to experience failure. That’s how they learn important life lessons, how they grow stronger, how they develop skills to get along in a world that, come on, is not fair or, as kids would prefer it to be, “even.” In a New York Times Room for Debate feature the other day, I contributed an essay about this very subject. Life isn’t fair, kid. On the lighter side, I refer you to a five-second scene from one of my favorite movies, The Princess Bride: Still, …Keep Reading
Other Parents’ Money: It’s Hard to Not Be Judge-y
So, I read this article on Yahoo’s homepage yesterday, about how Nadya Suleman, aka Octomom, spent more than $500 on her hair, while her kids walk around half-dressed and her plumbing doesn’t work (the very fact that I got sucked into the story is why I stopped using my Yahoo email address for anything other than shopping; I go to the page to check my mail and end up reading about how Chelsea Handler hates Angelia Jolie on behalf of her gal-pal Jennifer Aniston, and those are not minutes I get back at the end of my life). In the …Keep Reading
Got Clutter? A Guest Post From Author Leah Ingram
I hate clutter. I’m constantly weeding through boxes and bins of toys (not that we have many) and throwing out broken parts, mismatched bits, and goodie-bag swag. I keep our crap to a minimum (and I’m grateful that I have family, on both sides, who don’t overwhelm my boys with gifts). Usually when I have major purges of stuff, it’s in response to a call from a charity, and I can always muster a clutch of giant garden-waste bags filled with clothes, household goods, shoes and toys. I’ve yet to think about other options, like selling some of our stuff …Keep Reading
Men and Women, Work and Family: What Kind of Dad is a “Real Man”?
Well, here we are again. By “we” I mean my family; and by “here” I mean with one of us out of a job. Several years ago, my husband left a job that was literally sucking the life out of him (thanks to a bullying boss and a badly-run organization, he lost: 15 lbs. and his natural, glass-half-full outlook. What he did not lose, thank heaven, was his remarkable, resilient, family-forged work ethic). Anyway, though he made the correct decision to leave that job, he had no way of knowing that smack on the heels of it would come the …Keep Reading
Money Lessons for Little Folks
So, last weekend my family and I were up in the Catskill Mountains, in upstate New York, at a family-style resort we’ve been going to, on and off, my whole life (my dad used to go there as a teen, that’s how long we’ve been patrons of this particular spot). By “family” I mean a lot of us–my parents, my sister, her boyfriend, her kids, her boyfriend’s kid, my brother and his wife and new-ish baby, and me and my boys. I’ve written about this sort of vacation before, and I’ll write about the whole multi-generational family vacay again, I’m …Keep Reading
What’s it Worth To You? Teaching Kids About Money
Tell me something: When you hear your child say things like, “Gosh, that’s so expensive,” or “Mom, when we run out of the other cookies, and you have a coupon, can we get the [fill in the blank]?”, would you pat yourself on the back for getting an important money lesson across to him–or would you feel you’ve perhaps burdened him with too much knowledge of your own and the world’s financial realities? Is a seven-year-old too young to know that you can’t afford to go to Hershey Park (where we’ve never been, but which has been stuck in the …Keep Reading
Angels in the Outfield, Devils at Home: I’ll take some private mayhem if it means good behavior in public.
We had quite the day on New Year’s Eve. We woke to a snowstorm, which we drove through, slipping and sliding, for an hour to reach a lawyer’s office in a town that’s normally a 20-minute drive away. We were closing on a refinance of our home mortgage, a process that had taken many frustrating months and literally reams of paper (you’d think much of this could be done digitally, but alas, no). We’d gotten several extensions of our locked-in rate, the last of which expired on that day, so there was no option left: We had to drag the …Keep Reading
Smile, Honey! It’s Picture Day!
The other day, both boys came home with the familiar order form and info sheet in their backpacks: Gear up, mom and dad, it’s almost Picture Day! I hate picture day. To be precise, I don’t hate the day itself, since I’m not, literally or otherwise, in the picture. True to my meanness and aversion to being a Joiner, I don’t even volunteer to herd kids to the all-purpose room or comb hair and fix bows. What I hate is the form itself (murky, impenetrable); the packages offered (many choices, none of which make sense); and even the modifications you …Keep Reading
Working-Mom Guilt: Why I Don’t Have It, and Why No Mom Should
Last year, I wrote an article for American Baby magazine called “Can You Afford to Quit?” It’s a perennial subject for parenting magazines — how-to advice for making a smooth work-to-home transition. I remember when I got the assignment. On the phone, my editor and I batted around the details of what to include, and she asked me what I thought would make a good sidebar to the piece. I hesitated a bit, but then I broached this idea: What about a sidebar addressing the case against quitting? My idea was, maybe moms who are sure they want to stop …Keep Reading
