Because sometimes being a parent means doing what’s hard.
Posted in birthday parties, education, holidays, kids and food, school on Oct 4th, 2011
I got a letter from a reader recently that I want to share: Hi Denise, I love your blog. My only child, my son, is 5, and you certainly present an interesting take on many issues that I’ve faced as a mom. I was wondering whether you had an opinion on the candy culture [...]
After reading this article in Sunday’s New York Times the other day, by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, about “redshirting” kindergarteners (that is, keeping them back a year if their birth date falls near the cut-off date, leaving them “young” for their class), I did one of those silent victory-arm-pump things in my kitchen: I [...]
Posted in education, family life, mothers and work, school, summer, vacation on Aug 24th, 2011
Those of you who know me won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve entered my usual, hair-tearing, mid-to-late-August, why-is-summer-vacation-so-long phase of the summer. We’ve actually had a nice summer this year, even given that last year included our Disney vacation and this year we’re not doing much in the way of leaving town. The boys [...]
Posted in birthday parties, discipline, family life, humor, kids and food, school on Jun 6th, 2011
Well, the title says it, eh? I’m confessing: I’m horribly impatient. (Those of you who know me are, I realize, sitting there rolling your eyes, like, duh.) I want to be started with things, and then I want things done. When I wanted to become pregnant, I wanted it to happen pronto, and quickly [...]
Posted in education, learning, mom bloggers, school on May 23rd, 2011
A long while ago, I wrote a post about how much more involved parents of my generation are in our kids’ schooling and schools than my parents — well meaning as they were — ever were in mine. As my kids have progressed through more school since then, it’s naturally remained on my mind. Just [...]
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 [...]
Posted in family life, humor, parenting, school, summer, Uncategorized on Jul 7th, 2010
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, [...]
I’m a big fan of daycare. Not just childcare (as in, having someone other than a parent taking care of a baby or child), but daycare. My journey, as a working mother, to daycare, took me a year and a half and five nannies. Our first nanny, Maggie, was found only after I let go [...]
Posted in discipline, school on Apr 6th, 2010
Like any parent, I’m appalled and saddened and horrified in equal measure when I hear stories like the one about Phoebe Prince, the Irish girl who, after moving with her family to South Hadley, Massachusetts, was so mercilessly teased–both in the halls of her high school and online–that she committed suicide. Like any parent, I [...]
