I was amused when my 7th grade biology teacher insisted that it was impossible for two blue or green eyed parents like mine to produce brown-eyed children like me and my brother.

“You should talk to your parents about this,” said the teacher, looking more than a bit concerned that he had just revealed a family secret.

The truth is that it was my idea of a practical joke. My parents had already told my brother and me that we had been adopted as babies.

When it came time to create a family tree, I researched the ancestors of the only family I knew and ignored my biological origins. I don’t remember being troubled by the assignment at all, but I can see how others in the same situation might feel uncomfortable.

In yesterday’s “Motherlode” column in The New York Times, Lisa Belkin addresses the issue of how teachers assign family trees and other biology-related projects to students who may not know their biological roots.

It’s not just adoptees who might have a problem with genetics assignments. What about all of the kids who are part of non-traditional families? Once you include gay parents, blended families, and families formed by sperm or egg donation or surrogate parents, that’s a significant group.

Belkin’s column features David Smith, an adoptive parent and science teacher, hated to see his 4th grade daughter, who was adopted, to feel left out because of a homework assignment. Smith suggests a solution to the problem:

Teachers should teach population biology (there’s a great collaborative activity at k12science.org, for example) instead of pedigree genetics. Kids still learn that offspring resemble their biological parent, but they also learn that not all dominant traits are common.

Adoptive Families magazine also provides a 1-page handout for teachers to educate them about adoption and ways they can incorporate the it into the classroom.

The family tree project is instructive, but there are other ways to convey the same information. There is no reason an assignment should exclude a segment of the student population.

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Do you live with mom or dad? Or do mom and dad live with you? A trio of articles over the past day has taken on the old-fashioned multi-generation household – which, it turns out, isn’t so old-fashioned after all.

According to Liz Weston, personal finance columnist at MSN Money, a record-breaking number of Americans are living in family units that consist of at least two adult generations of family members. While immigrants from Asian or Latin American nations have been on the leading edge of this trend for decades, the economic recession of the past two years has caused the numbers to soar, with a more than five percent increase in these family units between 2007-2008 alone. Continue reading »

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I don’t wish to blame the victim here, but we mothers — especially the new ones — can sure be hard on our friends. And not just the childless ones. Judging from two guest posts over at the Motherlode, even other mothers are no fun to be around.

Sasha Brown-Worsham, a writer in Boston, broke up with her childless friend. Granted, said friend offered to pop in a DVD to shut her blob of a baby up and also mentioned relief that she didn’t have the author’s daughter’s “wild mane of hair” to comb. What mother wouldn’t be miffed? Continue reading »

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Alfie Kohn thinks you shouldn’t punish your kids. He also thinks you shouldn’t reward them. By doing so, you’re teaching them that you love them only when they behave and demonstrate new skills. So, no timeouts and, also, no gold stars.

But kids, right? They can’t be trusted to raise themselves. So why is this Kohn guy trying to get parents to be so permissive, to let them run around wild and turn into narcississtic, rule-ignoring embarrassments who won’t show up to work on time … if at all?

Kohn, responding to the criticism of his New York Times piece in which he said kids interpret timeouts as conditional love, explains in the Times blog Motherlode what parents can do to teach their kids the ways of the world without using timeouts or praise. Continue reading »

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Jody Becker, a writer and mother of two children, is one of the lucky ones. Because they can afford to live where they do, in a wealthy area of Orange County, Calif., her kids get to attend a top-notch public school, basically for free. Sure, even the so-called “blue ribbon” schools have been hit with cutbacks and, yes, even these schools rely on an outside revenue stream to educate the kids.

Because she doesn’t want her kid to be a free-rider, she’ll write the check. But that’s it. She says she won’t be volunteering as class mom.

However! Continue reading »

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Finding out the sex of your baby — as Jeanne recently pointed out in this post — can be a dicey proposition, for many reasons. But one key one? The sense of attachment we sometimes develop to our kids, even when they’re still in utero.

A reader to the New York Times Motherlode blog, Amanda Goehring, wrote a thoughtful letter to blogger Lisa Belkin about the bond she formed with her unborn daughter. Or rather, the daughter she thought she was having. Times blogger Belkin shared Goehring’s response in its entirety, in which she talks about her despair once she realized — courtesy of an ultrasound a few weeks before her due date — that the little girl named Lucille she believed to be growing inside her was actually a boy.

Continue reading »

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Move over, women, there’s a new mom in town. He may go by the name “Dad,” but really? He’s Mommy.

Men parents have been encroaching on mom’s turf for some time now, but this year it seems to have reached a critical mass.

Let’s start with the research. Dad gains weight and experiences mood swings during pregnancy just like his pregnant wife — the original mom. Studies also show that Dad doesn’t value  himself as a parent, which is such a self-deprecating and motherly thing to do. Continue reading »

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