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.
Monday Funny: Just Another Day With James
James and I are drawn to this kind of photo. I don’t know why, honestly. If I do a mom-and-son selfie with Daniel, it’s always serious. With James, tongues go out and eyes pop. I gotta give it to him, he’s a funny kid. (He makes up jokes all the time; some of them […]
Our Kids Could Use a Little “Lord of the Flies”
“It was like… what was that book with the kids on the island?” “Lord of the Flies? “Yes! Lord of the Flies! That’s what it was like out here.” The above conversation (more or less) took place last Memorial Day, at my in-laws’ house in Astoria, Queens. My brother-in-law, Johnny, my husband’s older brother, was […]
Dear Pew Research: Stop Asking How We “Feel” About Working Mothers
Well, lookie-hoo: The Pew Reseach Center recently published the results of survey that reveals the following: A full four in ten households with kids under age 18 have mothers who are the sole or primary breadwinners. (That’s 40%, folks!). Drill a bit deeper and you discover that 37% of that number are married mothers who […]
Mom’s Not Always There. And That’s Okay.
Small housekeeping note: Y’all might be accustomed to my post-writing pace of, what, a couple times a month? But brace yourself for the month of June. Better yet, tell all your mom friends to subscribe before June 1 (the subscribe button is right up at the top right, next to the blog header!), because I’ve […]
The Problem (I Have) With Mother’s Day
This Mother’s Day, we are having both sides of our family over to our house for brunch. We’ve done it a few times before, and it works pretty well as a way for both my husband and me to see our mothers, as well as our sisters (who are also mothers) and their families. Everyone […]
Sweet Success: Being Honest About Sugary Yogurt
My kids love yogurt. They always have. But I now realize, looking back at the trajectory from their early, plain-yogurt-slurping days to now, when they pilfer my private stash of Greek yogurt in between sucking down squeeze yogurts, that I let too much sugar into the system. And once you go sweet, can you go […]
We All Need a Little Help
I’ve been watching Call the Midwife, a British series about a group of young nurse/midwives in London’s East End in the 1950s, and I’m hooked. I tell my husband (who leaves the room when it’s on) that it’s not like those silly childbirth “stories” I used to watch on TLC when I was pregnant. What […]
Who Has Daddy Issues: How My Parents Spared the Praise and Didn’t Spoil the Child
As I do every few days, I checked Mean Moms Rule’s Amazon rankings and sales stats this morning (this is down from last year, when the book came out and I was checking multiple times per day!). I noticed that I had a new review, and I read it. This reader gave the book three […]
Should We Ban Bossy?
My sister and me in 1968. She, the firstborn, was not bossy. I was. Think I was pushing that snack on that poor calf? A year (two? three?) ago, I wrote an article for womansday.com called How Birth Order Affects Your Relationships. That piece was picked up by MSN recently, and suddenly received a flutter […]
Do Childless Folks Have a Valid Opinion About Parenting?
Okay, taking fun photos with the webcam aside, how would you answer the question of whether childless folks — your sister, your friend, the checkout lady at the market, a New York Times writer — have opinions about childrearing you should take to heart? It’s a tough question. Have you looked back — with honesty […]
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).
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