babble » blogs » Strollerderby
Strollerderby
Today was a gorgeous afternoon, and my kids spent 90 minutes of it sitting inside glued to a screen watching some terrible animated fairy tale. I don’t even know which one, but it was not better than playing outdoors in the sunshine.
Sorry, past me. I’m letting you down. I’m not the mom you thought I’d be when you so cheerfully got knocked up. These kids eat junk food. They get less exercise and more TV than you ever planned. They have, in their time on this planet, been yelled at and overindulged. Sometimes both in the same afternoon.
This isn’t because I’m a terrible mom. Just a real one.
And I’m not alone. The Huffington Post has a hilarious essay by Kara Gebhart Uhl, apologizing to the parents she judged four years ago.
Most babies born in the U.S. draw their first breath inside a hospital room. Only a tiny minority are born at home.
The few women who do choose home birth do so because they believe childbirth is a relatively safe, natural process best experienced without a lot of medical intervention, in the safety and privacy of one’s own home. Until the past few generations, home birth was the norm everywhere in the world. In much of the developed world, home birth remains vastly more common than it is in the U.S.
Given how few babies are born at home, one wonders if “the case for hospital births” really needs to be made. But The Atlantic makes it in an essay published last week arguing that home birth is unsafe every time, basically in response to a single data point: the writer’s experience with a last-minute emergency transport from home to hospital. Continue reading »
As if you didn’t have enough reasons to eat healthy, guys, here’s one more: think of the children! Your unborn ones, that is.
A new study out of Harvard Medical School links high-fat diets with lower sperm counts in men. The more saturated fat men ate, the worse their sperm quality and concentration was. At the other end of the spectrum, eating a lot of omega-3 fatty acids seemed to improve sperm quality.
We all know we’re supposed to eat a healthy diet. This is just one more on the long list of reasons why choosing health food over junk food is good for your body. But if you’re trying to conceive, it might be the one you care most about.
Firing a woman for using birth control sounds like something out of a dystopian fantasy. It could soon become a grim reality for women in Arizona, though, if a proposed law passes.
Arizona lawmaker Debbie Lesko has proposed a bill that would allow employers to require women seeking birth control prescriptions to prove they aren’t using the pills for contraception. Lesko claims this legislation will somehow protect First Amendment rights, by allowing employers with moral objections to birth control to opt out of paying for it.
The problem is…well, there are so many. The only brilliantly pointed out by our friends at Jezebel is that Arizona is an at-will employment state. So all those “mom and pop” employers who will be opting out of paying for birth control prescriptions would also be within their rights to just opt out of employing women who do use birth control. Classy.
Think your 4-year-old is ready for kindergarten?
There are a lot of considerations that go into deciding whether to send a younger child to kindergarten or hold off a year. Add concern about a possible ADHD misdiagnosis to your list. The youngest kids in a classroom are the most likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, two new studies found. The study suggests that for these kids, normal immaturity may be misdiagnosed as ADHD because their behavior is out of sync with their peers. Continue reading »
What if ADHD wasn’t a neurological disorder at all, but simply the result of poor parenting? If just being a good enough Mommy could make all your kids’ troubles go away? If every outburst in class or missed homework assignment was your fault, and under your control to fix?
This is the premise endorsed by Dr. Sroufe in a recent New York Times op-ed about “Ritalin Gone Wrong”, which I wrote about a few weeks ago.
Judith Warner has a lovely rebuttal in Time, rounding up the expert opinions of those who work closely with ADHD patients and know what Sroufe doesn’t seem willing to acknowledge: that this disorder requires more than good parenting.
Teenage girls are totally the harbingers of new linguistic trends, you know? As Jezebel puts it, everyone is totes talking like them.
Which is pretty cool. While teenage girls are often ridiculed for their speech patterns, those vocal tics and new slang seep out into the culture until we’re all dropping extra question marks and extraneous “likes” into our speech like it’s going out of style.
Which it is. Teen girls have moved on to something new, a trailing-off growly sound called the “vocal fry”. Think K$sha.
The New York times reports on a study of emerging vocal trends among teenage girls. They point out that the linguistic trends set by teenagers are often disparaged, but eventually find their way even into the mouths of presidents. George W. Bush was occasionally known to use the same verbal tics Valley Girls made famous.
Lori Garcia 
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
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.
6