Living with Less: How Much Stuff Does a Family Need?
Last spring, at the height of weekend garage sale season, my older boy asked me, “Mom, do people all over the world have garage sales?” How I answered will be revealed at the end of this post. But I thought about our conversation after reading this opinion piece in the Sunday New York Times, about why we all have so much stuff and what we can do about it. It’s by a serial Internet entrepreneur named Graham Hill who realized, when a series of life changes first compelled him to buy and fill up a 3,600-square-foot Seattle house and, then, …Keep Reading
Are Smartphones Making Our Kids Lonely?
Last weekend, we took the boys to a local frozen-yogurt place — a treat because, after we pushed Daniel hard to study for his science quiz on the parts of a cell (which, as an aside, seem to have more parts than they did when I first learned about nuclei and mitochondria), he got a 100%! While we sat there, me with my salted-caramel yogurt (there is a God, by the way, because of caramel), a handful of young girls walked in. And then another handful. And another. Turns out they were all together. Our first thought, when we ascertained …Keep Reading
Food From a Pouch: Space-age, or Scary?
Kids have been drinking out of pouches for a generation at least. It bears remembering that when many of us were in our juice-drinking days, juice boxes and pouches, as well as sippy cups, didn’t exist. Now, it’s more common in some circles for kids to drink out of so-called spillproof devices or disposable containers than to use cups. I get (and have availed myself of) the convenience factor, but there’s a point at which convenience far outweighs commonsense. And I think we may have arrived there. It occurs to me that drink pouches (and now food pouches, about which more in …Keep Reading
Do You Know Who’s Breaking Up With Your Kids? (Please Tell Me You Don’t. Please.)
I keep reading this stuff, and I keep wondering if (a) it’s all a parody, a great, online reach for irony that either falls short or I just don’t get (but usually I’m pretty good at irony); or (b) if people are making up this stuff so that I have something to write about here. What I am talking about is the compounding evidence of the persistence — the deeply creepy persistence — of out-of-control helicopter parenting. The latest is a story by writer Jennifer Coburn, on Salon, about how she was floored and upset by a romantic …Keep Reading
Uncomfortable? That’s Life, Kiddo. (Or, Why I’m Not Raising Professional Victims)
I don’t mind if my kids are uncomfortable. No, seriously. Of course, when they were babies and had dirty diapers and empty bellies, I dispatched those discomforts (those are the easy ones). But these days? If my sons find themselves in situations where they have to suck it up, wait, make do, play second fiddle, or just plain-old not get what they want when they want it (or at all), I sit back and watch rather than scramble to fix it. And that even goes for times the situation is pretty obviously unfair. (Because who promised fair? Not me, that’s …Keep Reading
Bringing Up Bebe Part II: French Moms Don’t Play in the Guilt Olympics. (Me, Either)
If the Olympic Games had been founded by modern American moms (rather than ancient Greeks with chariots and time to kill), the prize for Most Abject Guilt would be a coveted gold. I refuse to compete. I like to say I was born without the guilt gene, but after reading Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bebe, I’m thinking I was born in the wrong country. Frenchwomen, Druckerman reports, don’t express guilt over their choices to work or not, nurse or not or – this resonated most with me – over wanting to remain fully themselves after becoming mothers. It’s not that …Keep Reading
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
