Le Mean Maman: Are French Moms Meaner (And Are Their Kids Better Behaved as a Result)?
Mon dieu! Some news (well, okay, not news so much as opinion) from across the pond: French moms are not just thinner than their American counterparts; they’re meaner, too. (And Amy Chua thought she had cornered the market on tough.) A friend just sent me this link, to a 2007 article in an U.K. paper (the Telegraph) by an American journalist married to a Frenchman. Janine diGiovanni may (inexplicably, to my ears) describe non-French mamans as “Anglo-Saxon” mothers (who, me, Anglo-Saxon? My people are from Sicily!), but she makes excellent observations (some of them uncomfortable to modern American parents’ …Keep Reading
Why Isn’t Paid Maternity Leave a Right? Family Values, My @#$%
So, here’s a quick quiz: What does the United States have in common with Swaziland, Liberia, and Papua New Guinea? I’ll wait. And no, it’s not because those nations’ governments have just named pizza a vegetable, as the U.S. Congress just has. Got an answer? If you were thinking that the U.S.’s maternity leave policy (which is to say, lack of a cohesive, mandated one) is the answer, you win. We’re are in fine company with those three countries for offering working mothers no mandated paid maternity leave. This, despite the fact that we talk a very …Keep Reading
Plain Vanilla, Please: No “Schweddy Balls” in Our Ice Cream!
And now for something a little lighter: ice cream. Specifically, how a new flavor of ice cream is creating a bit of a firestorm among the sort of moms who would like to keep their (and, presumably, our) children’s worlds completely free of anything offensive (their definition of, I guess), immoral (ditto), scary (says who?) and … whatever. Fill in the blank. The world our children live in should be BPA-free plastic bubbles surrounded by rainbows and, I don’t know, Bible verses (the non-violent ones. Presumably). Ben & Jerry, those godless liberal Vermonters (need I say more?) unveiled a …Keep Reading
Parenting isn’t for Sissies. Or for Sisyphus.
I’m going to be honest here: I haven’t been having the greatest time lately, as a parent. As a friend of mine has said more than once (and she may have borrowed it from someone else): Parenting isn’t for sissies. My boys are going through tough stages. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but I have heard that first grade and third grade (and the odd grades in general) are harder to get through. But they seem stressed out about school even though they’re both doing well. The little one’s mood is on its usual hair-trigger: the same things …Keep Reading
Piano Lessons Plus Pizza Plus Soccer: Why Extracurricular Overload is a Bad Idea
My sons don’t do a lot. That is, they don’t do a lot of extra-curricular activities, at least not by today’s standards. Both boys play soccer (using the word “play” loosely here; James may end up being more instinctively athletic, but rest assured no one in this house is going to college on a sports scholarship), and they seem to enjoy it. Both take piano lessons, because I like it. Seriously, that’s why. I always wanted to have learned a musical instrument, and never did. So when a second-hand piano became available to us for next to nothing, I grabbed …Keep Reading
Mean Mom Meets Tiger Mom: I Read the Book
Since I wrote my post last week on The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the parenting memoir by Yale University Law professor and writer Amy Chua, it’s gotten even more press — good, bad, backpedaling, explaining. I’ve read a lot of it, not all of it — but I did read the book, as promised. One superficial observation: Wow. It’s short. Some of the chapters are only a few pages long. She claims she wrote the whole thing, save the last chapter or two, in a lightening-fast 6 or 8 weeks. Um, it shows. Not that it isn’t technically …Keep Reading
Sitcom Fail: Why Doing Everything For Your Kids Is Not a Good Idea. Or Funny.
You know what’s funny? It’s not most sitcoms (ba-da-bum!). What’s funny is that after the last time I wrote about the CBS TV sitcom “The Middle,” my friend Sally wrote to agree with me, and also to wonder how it was that I even managed to sit down for an 8pm show. Sally and I both have young children, and yes, watching a show that starts at 8, which is the boys’ basic bedtime, is tough (and no, we don’t have a DVR. Yet. It’s on my list. Thanks in advance for that suggestion). But it’s not impossible. And that …Keep Reading
“The Middle”: A Sitcom Dad Actually Gets it Right
So, I was going to write about homework this week, but that will have to wait, because an extraordinary thing happened last night, sometime between 8:00pm and 8:30pm, while I was watching the ABC-TV sitcom, “The Middle.” I say extraordinary because this involved a TV dad, who was not Bill Cosby or Bill Bixby (is anyone old enough to remember “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father”? No? Yes? God, I loved him. He reminded me of my dad). This involved a TV dad who … wait for it … did the right thing. He stood up. He not only did a …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
