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.
What’s the Best Way to Teach Kids About Money? A Q&A with Finance Columnist Ron Lieber
Earlier this summer, I got an email from a New York Times personal-finance reporter named Ron Lieber. He’s working on an upcoming book called The Opposite of Spoiled, and he had question for me regarding this piece I’d written for Daily Worth. The post he referred to was about my allowance-ambivalence; in it, I describe […]
Thoughts on Getting Older
Yesterday, I read an essay by a 38-year-old mom, called “This is 38.” This is midlife, she said. Alarm bells went off. I thought about it on and off all day, and by the time I was getting ready for bed, I had half this post written in my head. Because something irks me when […]
“You’re Not in Control of My Life!”
The above is what my younger son, James, said to me yesterday. It wasn’t in response to anything earth-shaking (I wasn’t telling him what instrument to take up in fourth grade, where he must go to college, or whom he should marry). In fact, I forget why he tossed that off, but trust me, it […]
The Lesson of the $5 Fries: Money, Kids and Envy
Getting toward the end of the WordCount Blogathon here! I was thinking about my boys starting daycamp again in a week and a half, and I’m already anticipating the Battle of the Concession Stand, wherein I dissaude them from spending their own money on crap food, but also tell them that, no, sorry, I can’t […]
Are You “Living Through” Your Children?
I think I’ve mentioned that my boys both take piano lessons. My big boy started in second grade. A year later, when his brother was in first grade, he started too. It was perhaps a little bit early for him (he got kind of goofy and often his half-hour was cut to 20 minutes, the […]
Photo Friday: My Mom, a New Mom
Recently, I’ve been working on a bit of a photo project, and got hold of a disc filled with scans of my family’s old slides. Anyone remember slides? The disc I have contains photos from 1957 (when my dad went into the Army) to 1977 (when we all wore the most head-scratching outfits; I should […]
Why Childcare is One of the Best Business Investments I’ve Made
This story I wrote for the financial website Daily Worth more than a year ago popped up on Twitter yesterday, so I went back and read it, and the comments it received, again. Two things came to mind: One, I stand by my assertion that the $80K or so I spent on childcare (this doesn’t […]
What Foreign Parents Get Right: A Q&A With the Author of “Parenting Without Borders”
I am so thrilled to share this Q&A with you. Author and mother of four Christine Gross-Loh is a longtime writer friend/colleague of mine, and I’ve been watching from the sidelines as she worked on this amazing book, a sensible, smart, deeply researched book about how other cultures around the world do parenting differently. Did […]
Lies, Damn Lies, and Summer
When I begin, somewhere around this time of year, to clear my throat in preparation for my annual end-of-school-year, start-to-summer rant, my kids roll their eyes at best (“here she goes again!”) and, at worst, have brief moments of panic that I might cancel summer camp and enroll them in summer school instead. Because for […]
Photo Friday: Solitaire
Last summer, I did a very important parenting thing: I taught my boys how to play Solitaire. I learned most of what I know about cards from my grandfather, a big player of Solitaire. Watching my sons figure out how the patterns in a deck work was amazing. They more or less abandoned the game […]
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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