Mean Mom Question Time: When Do You Tell Your Kids What Gay Means?
The story about the young man at Rutgers University who, after he found that a video of him having sex with a male partner had been live-streamed on the Internet, committed suicide, has me heartsick. I’m sick for him, for his family, for all the other teens unsure of how they fit in a world that still, still can’t deal with the fact that we’re all born different. I’m also sick for my own children, who are coming up in a world where being a homosexual puts you in a second-class category, shunts you aside, tells you you’re at best …Keep Reading
Does Being a Parent Make You Happy?
Okay, here we go again, with another flurry of conversation swirling around the topic of parents, children, and happiness. Specifically: Does becoming a parent increase or decrease happiness? Do kids make you happy? Are parents happier than non-parents? And my personal favorite: Why do we all work so hard at this parenting stuff without it making us happy? AREN’T WE SUPPOSED TO BE HAPPY, FER CHRISSAKES? This has been circulating in old- and new-media circles this muggy month in part thanks to an article in New York magazine, by Jennifer Senior, that has, as they say, gone viral. It’s been …Keep Reading
He is Me: Parenting The Kid Who’s the Most Like Me
My second son, James, is bewildering and bedeviling in shifting measures, like all offspring, but I have been feeling for a while lately that, while he’s as capable as his big brother of winning or crushing my heart, I understand him better. To put it in actorly terms, I have flashes of brilliance and insight, dealing with him, where I can totally see his motivation. Why? Because I am he, and he is me. Replace his penis and dormant male hormones with girl parts, let his hair grow (not a a lot, but a little; at his age my mom …Keep Reading
Why Good Parenting is Less Work Than You Think
Here’s a case where being a Mean Mom works in your favor: When you have a big family. It’s obvious, right? You can’t coddle and hover over 14 kids; no one’s arms are that big. Even with four or five kids helicoptering and over-parenting is a stretch. (And four or five is, by today’s standards big, though it’s not by the standards of past generations, especially past generations of Catholic families I grew up around. Take the Canedos, who were on my Catholic-school bus. Every year for the whole six years I was on that bus, Mrs. Canedo shooed another …Keep Reading
You Can’t Always Get (The Kid) That You Want
Yesterday afternoon, as I was quietly melting away in the 90-degree heat on the edge of the soccer field, watching (well, sorta watching) my son Daniel’s practice, I started chatting with another mother, whose son was in D’s preschool class. We were just having one of those idle, “aren’t they getting so big” back-and-forth things, before we both turned back to our bottles of water/magazines/making sure our other son wasn’t putting rocks in his pockets for me to find in the bottom of the washer (me). Now, Daniel and this other boy, I’ll call him O. because his first name …Keep Reading
Giving Helicoptering the Heave-Ho
Just read this today: researchers in Japan, at Gunma University, took a look at twentysomethings, scanning their brains and having them answer questions about how they were parented. Turns out, those newly minted adults who grew up under the helicoptering arms of overprotective parents (they responded “yes” to statements such as: “did not want me to grow up”, “tried to control everything I did,” and “tended to baby me”) appear to have less gray matter in key brain areas than others. They posit that these kids’ experience with overprotective parents caused an excessive release of cortisol, a stress hormone. Is …Keep Reading
