Because sometimes being a parent means doing what’s hard.
Posted in discipline, kids and food on Feb 11th, 2010
My boys are completely normal American children, which is to say, if you sit them down in front of a bag of potato chips, they’ll plow through them. If you give them a bucket of Halloween candy, they’ll dig right in. If you make a cake and offer them mixer beaters coated with chocolate frosting, [...]
Posted in discipline on Jan 28th, 2010
Spoiling. Wow, what a hotbutton topic. Right now, as I type, I’m listening to the Brian Lehrer show, on my local NPR radio station (WNYC; I listen to it streaming live on WNYC.org). He’s talking to Rufus Griscom, the founder of the parenting website Babble.com. Babble has a column called “Bad Parent,” and he’s been [...]
Posted in discipline, family finances, humor on Jan 5th, 2010
We had quite the day on New Year’s Eve. We woke to a snowstorm, which we drove through, slipping and sliding, for an hour to reach a lawyer’s office in a town that’s normally a 20-minute drive away. We were closing on a refinance of our home mortgage, a process that had taken many frustrating [...]
Posted in discipline, family life on Nov 24th, 2009
Did anyone see this article in the New York Times’ Style section the other day? It’s by Alex Williams, it’s titled Becoming the Alpha Dog in Your Own Home, and woo, boy did I get a good laugh over it. In a good way, I assure you! The story is about how some parents today [...]
Posted in babies, discipline, family life, kids and food on Aug 26th, 2009
Years and years ago, well before I had kids, I was hanging around in my sister’s newly refinished basement, playing some board games with two of her kids and my dad. My niece and nephew, Tara and Nick, were drinking juice out of those foil pouches, like Capri Sun (which now, by the way, are [...]
Posted in discipline on Jul 22nd, 2009
Couple things happened recently that got linked up in my head in one of those classic lightbulb moments.
The first thing was a conversation overheard in James’ preschool classroom on the last day of school. A mom of a girl in Jamie’s class was chatting with the teacher about how she was taking her daughter to [...]
Posted in discipline, family life on May 26th, 2009
My boys and I had quite a day this past Friday. I’d known for months that May 22 would be a big day: my niece, my beautiful Tara, would be graduating from Marymount Manhattan College. I had to be there, no question about it. Tara was born when I was a senior in college, and [...]
Posted in discipline, family life on May 19th, 2009
I read a fascinating article in The New Yorker yesterday. (Which, having read the magazine weekly for years now, is a sentence that pops out of my mouth pretty frequently.) It’s called “Don’t! The Secret of Self Control,” by Jonah Lehrer. The piece opens with a description of an experiment conducted in the late 1960s, [...]
Posted in discipline, family life on May 15th, 2009
The other day, in the midst of the Worst Head Cold Ever (turned out to be a sinus infection, during which I’ve still shuttled and cleaned and fed my kids — there are no sick days in parenting, but I digress), I interviewed a child psychologist at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City for [...]
Posted in discipline, kids and sleep on May 11th, 2009
Not long ago, someone I know slightly was having a problem with her young son. Seems the darling boy was developing a very unlovely habit of waking, shrieking, at 5 a.m., and the only thing that would calm him was a visit to his crib from Mom or Dad — and all the better if [...]