Because sometimes being a parent means doing what’s hard.
Posted in discipline, family life, modern families, parenting, parenting controversies on Jan 17th, 2012
Mon dieu! Some news (well, okay, not news so much as opinion) from across the pond: French moms are not just thinner than their American counterparts; they’re meaner, too. (And Amy Chua thought she had cornered the market on tough.) A friend just sent me this link, to a 2007 article in an U.K. [...]
Posted in family life, mommy guilt, parenting on Aug 9th, 2011
At the end of this post, you’ll see a link to a new TV show’s website. It’s called Lifechangers, and it’s with Dr. Drew Pinsky, and I’m writing this post because I was asked, by the show’s producers, to help them find a mom willing to come on the show and talk — honestly — [...]
Posted in family life, grandparents, Moms on moms, parenting on May 6th, 2011
Confession time: The whole mean mommy thing? I stole the idea. Stole. It. But it’s okay, because I stole it from my mother, the Original Mean Mommy: I think I may have written this in my first-ever post on this blog, but it’s an anecdote that bears repeating. When I was newly married but not [...]
Posted in family life, modern families, Moms on moms, parenting on Apr 15th, 2011
I’m going to be honest here: I haven’t been having the greatest time lately, as a parent. As a friend of mine has said more than once (and she may have borrowed it from someone else): Parenting isn’t for sissies. My boys are going through tough stages. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but [...]
Posted in discipline, family life, modern families, Moms on moms, other parents, parenting on Jan 28th, 2011
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 [...]
Posted in bullying, discipline, family life, humor, modern families, other parents, parenting, TV Moms (and Dads) on Dec 23rd, 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 [...]
Posted in Moms on moms, other parents, parenting, young kids and self-esteem on Dec 10th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in family life, parenting, spirituality on Oct 19th, 2010
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, [...]
Posted in bullying, discipline, other parents, parenting, school on Oct 14th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in bullying, family life, Mean Mom's Question Time, parenting, school on Oct 4th, 2010
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 [...]
