Mean Moms Rule: The Blog
Observations on parenting in the tween and teen years.
This blog was born in 2009 as Confessions of a Mean Mommy, and gave rise to the book you see over on the right. Since I began blogging, my sons morphed from 5- and 7-year olds who looked to me for just about everything, to 11- and 13-year olds who have perfected their eye rolls and have one foot out the door. This parenting thing just got real.
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 […]
Hymn of the Tiger Mother: Why I Love Amy Chua
Last week, an article in the Wall Street Journal caused a major stir in the parenting world. Amy Chua, a law professor, author, and mother just published a book called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and the blogosphere is having spasms over her and her stories of forcing her daughters to practice piano for […]
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 […]
A Look Back: My Favorite Posts of 2010
I’ve now been writing Confessions since May of 2009, when I tapped out my first post, The Birth of a Mean Mom. In reading over random past posts this morning, I felt the urge to re-read a couple of favorites, just to see if I still agree with myself (for those of you who are […]
What Is “Pretty”? The Mom Who Straightened her 6-Year-Old’s Hair
Back in elementary school, we got a new girl in our class one year who had Very Curly Hair. I mean, very curly. It wasn’t long and corkscrew-y, or wavy and bouncy, or quirky and Shirley Temple-like. This girl — her name was Tina Battaglia, in case she Googles herself these days — had a […]
Turning Tikes into Tiger Woods: What’s Wrong With Sports For Babies?
I never have to wait around for very long, or dig very deep, to find something to be either baffled or outraged about when it comes to modern parenting. Yesterday’s crazy-making dose came in the form of a New York Times article about sports for babies. Yes, I meant to write “babies.” The article opens […]
Mean Mom’s Thank-You Time: What I’m Grateful for This Thanksgiving
For some reason I’m feeling more squishy-sentimental than usual (I have this crazy dual-personality thing, which I claim to have inherited from my mom — hard-shell mean-mom exterior surrounding a gooey, nougat-y, cries-at-sappy-ads center.) So I figured it was time, it being just days shy of Thanksgiving, to make a little list. Thanksgiving is one […]
“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 […]
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 […]
Hail Mommy: A Requiem for a Lost Mother
Last spring, I wrote a post entitled The Spiritual Education of Mommy, Part II, and reflected on a sobering, emotional religion class I’d just attended. To recap: As a group, the Monday night religion classes (kids and adults) were told about an upcoming annual four-mile walk/run, organized by a father in the parish whose son, […]
My name is Denise, and I’m a Mean Mom.
That’s the very first line of my book, Mean Moms Rule. Let me explain the “mean” for you, in case you were under the impression that I never hug my boys (I possibly do this too much, as evidenced by the fact that they routinely try to wiggle away from my embraces and especially my sloppy kisses, the urchins), or that I advocate for children to work in coal mines (it’s illegal! Plus, no coal mines in my area!). I say “mean” because my approach often bucks the prevailing parenting trend, which you could call helicopter-y or indulgent (I prefer my own technical term, “squishy”). It’s mean because it’s not easy. Because it’s focused on the end game, not the here-and-now (and anyone who has kids’ll tell you, they are all about the here and now).
Grab a copy from your favorite bookseller:
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