babble » blogs » Strollerderby
Strollerderby
Remember that college friend who you swore you’d stay close to forever?
The guy you knew you could always call on at 2 a.m. if you were stranded somewhere and he’d take care of you? And then one day you found yourself stranded at the Tampa airport at 2 a.m. with your baby. You did call him and not only did he pick you up but he offered you a joint and wanted to stay up till dawn catching up on old time. You were like “Dude, those days are over. I have to get my toddler settled and then pass out so I can be human when she wakes up at 6.”
OK, maybe that exact thing only happened to me. But we’ve all had awkward moments with friends as we grow and change and some of our friends just … don’t. Or they grow in different directions. Your friend who was taking the bar exam while you were doing childbirth classes might not have as much in common with you now as she did when you were both English majors at Swarthmore.
It’s not just the stoners and high-powered lawyers you’re growing apart from. Turns out, there are a few key points in life when many of us ditch our friends. Becoming a parent is one of them. Continue reading »
Good news for parents: the HPV vaccine is now recommended for boys as well as girls.
The new vaccine schedule released on Thursday goes beyond the tepid language of past schedules and makes the HPV vaccine a “recommended” vaccine for boys ages 11 to 12, and a catch-up vaccine for boys ages 13 to 21.
This is good news if you have a son, since the vaccine protects against genital warts and the cancer-causing virus repsonsible for many oral and anal cancers. It’s good news if you have a daughter, because protecting both boys and girls against the virus means your daughter’s eventual boyfriend is less likely to have HPV and therefore less likely to pass it to her.
Don’t let the Susan G. Komen foundation convince you for a moment that the funding cuts to Planned Parenthood weren’t politically motivated.
As my colleague Katherine wrote this morning, the organization’s founder is a Republican who recently hired a conservative politician as senior vice president of policy. Not everyone at Komen was on board with the newly conservative agenda.
The Atlantic reports that the organization lost one of their top people when they made the decision to cut Planned Parenthood’s funding. Mollie Williams, Komen’s former head of public health, resigned in protest over the decision.
Does your marriage have a nagging problem? You know, the kind where one of you keeps pestering the other to do some simple tasks that never seem to get done. The more you nag, the more your partner dawdles and blows off your requests. Which leads to more nagging.
A recent Wall Street Journal article called this problem potentially as toxic as adultery. It’s a pattern that has certainly caused some chaos in my own marriage, and I’ve watched it corrode intimacy between friends. Nagging can be a vicious cycle, with both partners feeling like they’re being pitted against each other over things they should be on the same side about. You both want the dishes to be done and the bills to be paid. Why are you fighting about these things?
Amanda Marcotte has a great solution over on XX. Continue reading »
Parents with children who’ve been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD have a difficult choice to face: should we medicate?
Therapy in combination with medication is widely believed to produce the best results in terms of behavior and academic achievement. Side effects can be an issue, though, and many parents dislike the idea of putting their child on a psychiatric medication.
Now a larger question looms: do the medications currently used to treat ADHD even work?
The New York Times this weekend ran a major article critiquing the use of medication for ADHD in kids. It’s an opinion piece, but one written from the vantage point of considerable authority by a therapist who has been researching children with ADHD for 40 years.
His assessment of the current state of ADHD treatments is frightening. Especially if, like me, you take Ritalin every day to manage your own attention problems.
Buckling under pressure from anti-choice organizations, the Susan G. Komen Foundation is halting their financial support to Planned Parenthood. This change will cost Planned Parenthood hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, mainly for breast exams, according to the AP.
Last year, Planned Parenthood received nearly $700,000 for breast exams and related breast health services. They are now scrambling to replace that money so that the women they serve won’t o without potentially life-saving medical care.
The abrupt halt in funding stems from a congressional investigation of Planned Parenthood for possible funding abuses. The investigation is widely seen as a spurious political ploy.
We worry. We worry about the bills we have to pay. About whether our kids are talking soon enough. About who will be elected president and whether or not we should order dessert.
For some of us, the day-to-day worries that crowd our minds take on the character of monsters, seizing control and paralyzing us against other action. Nearly 20 percent of Americans suffers from an anxiety disorder. Xanax is the leading psychiatric medication in the country, with over 46 million prescriptions written each year.
Are we an anxious generation? Or simply a better medicated one? The New York Times explored this question recently in an interesting essay about the history of anxiety.
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Wendy Michaels 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
The Walt Disney Company supports Babble as a platform dedicated to honest, engaged, informed, intelligent and open conversation about parenting. However, the opinions expressed on this site are those of individual parents/writers and do not reflect the views of Disney. In addition, content provided on this site is for entertainment or informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or safety advice.
3