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Strollerderby
To binky or not to binky? That is just one of many questions that can drive Mommies apart.
Anyone who’s ever read a Mommy blog or looked at parenting network threads knows how viciously women can judge one another. But as USA Today points out, mothers often criticize each other’s parenting skills face-to-face as well.
Stephanie Bello, 31, a stay-at-home mom from Alexandria, Va., hits the nail on the head when she says “modern moms are commonly denounced for being overprotective, but you’re looked at as a bad parent if you are in the ER with your kid.” Exactly. If you hover over your kids at the park, you’re smothering. If they fall off the swing, you’re incompetent. There’s no way to win.
Parenting rifts can be caused by generational differences, too. “By the time a mother’s kids are in middle school, much of what she knows about baby care may be considered out of date — or even dangerous,” says March of Dimes blogger Andrea Moleski. Ten years ago, “parents considered themselves progressive if they gave their kids apple juice instead of soda or Kool-Aid.” But pediatricians now recommend cutting juice with water or avoiding it altogether. Continue reading »
Just as the book Queen Bees and Wannabees inspired the film Mean Girls, Rosalind Wiseman’s sequel, Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads, is behind the idea for a Mean Girls follow-up titled Mean Moms. Now I’m gonna go to bed tonight chanting, “Please cast Lindsay Lohan as the mother. Please cast Lindsay Lohan as the mother.” Not the nice mother, but the mean mommy who projects her anger onto other people because she doesn’t love her husband or herself, so she has a tiny coke habit she indulges while the kids are at soccer. (I guess that’s not PG-13.) Continue reading »
This maybe should be filed under “duh”: A husband-and-wife team of economists have reviewed data from 42 years of studies and drawn the conclusion that college-educated mothers spend a lot more time ferrying kids around to activities than they used to, and that they do this in order to secure them a spot in a good college and eventually a high-paying job.
Garey and Valerie Ramey, who both are economists at the University of California — San Diego, noticed a trend they found troubling when they moved to a neighborhood in San Diego with their family. Children’s schedules were packed with activities, and soon both of them — but especially Valerie — found themselves caught up in what they dubbed “the rugrat race.”
The decided to look at what might be driving this phenomenon, so they reviewed data from 12 U.S. surveys taken between 1965 and 2007, describing how people spend their time. Continue reading »
We’ve all read the advice to constantly stimulate your baby with talk — keeping up a ceaseless stream of updates and information, packing in every possible teachable moment. And quite frankly, sometimes I’ve even annoyed myself with the constant chatter: “Yes! Now we’re going to go get milk! Yes! The milk jug has BLUE on it! Milk comes from COWS!”
Apparently, I’m not the only one rolling my eyes and thinking “will you LISTEN to yourself, woman?” (Much as, I should note, I do love talking to them and think it’s helped them both develop good verbal skills). Susan Goldberg, writing for the New York Times “Complaint Box” blog, describes this phenomenon thusly: Continue reading »
Pregnancy is a fairly vulnerable time in a woman’s life. You’re jacked to the gills on a potent cocktail of hormones, your body doesn’t look or behave the way it once did, and you’re probably spending a lot of time thinking about how to do your best for this little helpless being you’re gestating.
And I am sorry, but those people need to sit down, put their feet up and take a niccceeee deep breath, because they are seriously overwrought. Continue reading »
As a mom who’s feeling just a bit sniffly today after I dropped off my daughter at kindergarten this morning, I’m liking one of the latest entries on the Nurtureshock blog. Namely, that “redshirting” kids or keeping them out of kindergarten an extra year so they’ll do better actually doesn’t help much at all.
Two new studies found that at most, there’s a 4-percentage-point difference in how well the oldest kids do versus the youngest, and much of that can be explained away by who has babies when. Kasey Buckley and Daniel M. Hungerman of the National Bureau of Economic research recently looked at detailed birth certificate data from every child born in the United States from 1989 to 2001. Surprisingly, poor women and wealthy women Continue reading »
We’re counting down the days to the first day of kindergarten over here, so I reacted very strongly to this story on MSNBC. And by “reacted strongly,” I mean, “shook my head and said ‘are people frickin’ nuts?’ ”
It’s about parents hiring tutors for their kids to prepare them for kindergarten. Yes, that’s right, kindergarten. The first mom profiled hired her daughter’s preschool teacher to work on her daughter’s reading skills with her during the summer, although every teacher interviewed said kids are not expected to enter kindergarten able to read.
Experts are really concerned about this shift away from play and Continue reading »
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