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.
Kindergarten Bullies: Does it Start with The Parents?
So I was just reading this article in the Sunday NY Times this morning, by Pamela Paul, about the phenomenon of bullying drifting down into younger and younger ages. Like kindergarten. Of course, bullying is a huge topic right now, given the rise in attention paid to the tragic stories of bullying leading to suicide […]
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 […]
The Comforts of Community: What Weeding, Soccer, and a Loose Tooth Taught Me About the People I Need
Just yesterday, on a fine, sunny Sunday afternoon, my husband and I were doing some weeding in our front yard. For us, “some weeding” means cursing and huffing and puffing our way through a summer’s worth of work. We are not natural gardeners, let’s just say, and combining that with a summer that was so […]
Doing Disney with the Kids
So. We just got back from our first family vacation to Disney World, in Florida. OK, it was our first family vacation, full stop (at least, our first that didn’t involve visiting family members), so it was portentous in more than one aspect. But for sure, hitting Disney at this stage of the boys’ lives […]
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 […]
The Experts Aren’t Always Right, Part One: Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad, Choking Hazard? (Guest Post)
Two things this week: One, I’m starting a new occasional series, this one called “The Experts Aren’t Always Right.” And two, I’m going to treat you to a guest post as Part One of the series, by my colleague and fellow blogger, Debbie Koenig, who writes the (seriously) delicious blog, Words to Eat By. The […]
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 […]
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, […]
Mommy’s Meatballs: Why Keeping Control Over Kids and Food Pays Off. Sometimes.
So the boys started their six weeks at the local YMCA camp yesterday. I love this camp. Love it. But as with any situation where kids gather, bad food options seem to be the norm. I work around it; I try not to get my hackles up when I see the Snack Shack stocked with […]
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 […]
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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