Babble blogger and author Katie Allison Granju has been writing openly about her life as a mother for years. She has walked the line between keeping her kids’ lives private while divulging details of her own. For years, she held back one fact in particular — to protect her son’s privacy, to keep judgment at bay. Until now.

While sitting at her son’s bedside as he fights to recover in an intensive care unit, she decided she no longer wanted to keep this part of her life private.

Her latest Home/Work post title says it all: “The parenting secret I am no longer willing to keep.” Katie writes, quite bravely — and with some lingering internal conflict about whether she’s doing the right thing — that she is the mother of a drug addict. Her 15-year-old son is in the hospital recovery from a near fatal overdose.

It should not be surprising that there are opinions. Continue reading »

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North Carolina Middle School teacher Rex Roland has an interesting method for motivating his students. He calls them “losers.”

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If your back is aching you might want to blame your grade school teachers. A new study out of Mount Sinai Medical Center claims heavy backpacks aren’t just a problem for kids.

The strain put on a back during the development years is having ramifications on into adulthood. Continue reading »

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Ahhh yes, the news drought of the holidays is in full swing, begetting stories like this one from the unfortunately-named “The Mommy Files” blog: The Top Parenting Trends of 2009.

Okay, despite my snark, I think this is really more or less on the money. What’s writer Amy Graff’s take on what we were talking about this year?

One was recent — a New York Times magazine article from last week that talks about being married, happily, with issues. The very long article tracks a writer’s journey through various forms of marital therapy, and was actually very interesting in that many of the appraoches seemed to dredge up more problems than they actually solved. Continue reading »

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A Philadelphia area middle school teacher thought he was motivating students by putting funny clip art from Google Images onto his math worksheets.

But when he chose an image of a toothless black man in a straw hat and suspenders over top of the misspelled words, “NO WA!!!!”, one parent cried racism.

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That headline might be a little misleading.  The parents in question didn’t win the battle with their children over doing their daily homework.  No, these parents went to court to have their children declared legally exempt from being assigned homework in the first place.

Sherri and Tom Milley are lawyers in Calgary, Alberta.  After years of doing daily battle with their oldest son over his reluctance to do homework, they had had enough. When their two younger children, Spencer, 11, and Brittany, 10, began giving them similar fits over homework, the Milley’s decided to do something about it.   Continue reading »

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When my daughter informed she would be not be homeschooling after all, one of the many little sighs of relief I exhaled was that I wouldn’t have to teach her algebra, or even addition.

As a bright kid, I was always “gifted” at math, but that didn’t mean I liked it. By the time I hit high school, I’d gotten the message that being good with numbers wasn’t cool for a girl, so I shirked it. When it came time to go to college, I chose a school that did not require any math classes.

Now my stepson is 15, and I can’t even read his math homework, let alone help him solve it.

Happily, I saved my kids from a lifetime of math cluelessness by marrying a professional nerd who teaches math and physics at a university. In our house, he is the math department.

When Lisa Belkin broached this topic over on Motherlode, commenters pointed out the gender disparity between men and women around math. Lisa’s family, like mine, is headed by a math averse mom and a math friendly dad.

I’m trying to do more math for the girls’ sake. I want my girls to grow up knowing women can do just as much math as men. But let’s be real: I can pull this off now because the oldest one is 5. She is hard at work learning to count to 100. When she starts bringing home differential equations, she is going straight to Daddy.

Two recent studies show that most American parents are a lot like me when it comes to math homework: clueless and uncomfortable. One commissioned by Intel shows that parents feel more equipped to talk about sex and drugs with their kids than math and science. Another, by Sylvan Learning, found that more than 6 out of 10 parents are not confident that they can solve their kids’ math homework in middle and high school.

Those jitters about math homework translate to kids, who start to feel nervous about the subject themselves. Math is increasingly important for higher education and professional fields, but most adults rate it as the most challenging subject taught in school.

For good reason. Less than 40% of eight and fourth graders are “proficient” or better at grade-level math skills. Clearly our kids could use some help with their math homework.

Do you help your kids with their homework? Does the thought of having to go through high school algebra again give you the shivers? If we can’t help our kids learn math, who can?

Photo: tracy_the_astonishing

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