People are blown away by my son Danny’s verbal acumen. He chose to talk at an early age and hasn’t stopped since. At his 18-month checkup, his pediatrician asked how many words he knew and all I could say was, “A lot!” A year later, Danny is as articulate and …
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New rules for the ride
“Do you want to be right or would you rather be happy?” So goes the saying, which I’m certain you’ve said to yourself many a time as a parent. But what about being right AND happy? I’d sometimes like to take one for the team and wind up winning both …
Read More »Taking Keys Doesn’t Cut It This Graduation Season
If you have a child who is graduating from high school soon do your best to not let the celebrations ruin their next chapter. Young people want to shout to the world that they are done with high school and are moving on to college or at least closer to …
Read More »Sailing Short Hair in A Sea of Manes
I have short hair. Buzzcut short. I used the #4 clippers. Buzzfeed’s listicle fierce women with shaved heads was my inspiration. Also, my daughter, who is nine and already well into the performance of feminino-normative. She wears her hair long. Of course. She’s a girly-girl. In an effort at frugality I …
Read More »Should You Monitor Teens’ Online Conversations?
Last year, when my son was 13, his father and I learned that he had been part of a “group chat” with other adolescents—a handful or so boys and one girl—via some Smartphone app (yes, I’m a bit of a techno luddite), in which the quote-un-quote chatting eventually devolved into …
Read More »Hold them closer
You know what’s nice about postpartum depression? Well, nothing, really. But it does have one small redeeming quality: Unlike almost any other problem you’ll encounter in your spit-up covered parenting journey—or in life, for that matter—you really can take a pill and make it better. Once the hormone brain …
Read More »Parenting is forever
More than 18 years ago a very wise news photographer told me something that I now realize is the absolute truth. His name is Ken Brown, Sr. We call him Senior. He has two grown sons. We were heading out to a news assignment in the live truck when I …
Read More »Getting my nature newbies to go outside
The weather is warm and beautiful and unseasonable. Birdsong fills the air. The daffodils are up. I want my kids to go outside and take it in. This is the beauty of their planet in the spring. What they want to do is to stay inside and watch their devices. …
Read More »Looking for tidy answers in a messy bedroom
One morning at the bus stop, my daughter Emma approached me, ashen-faced, worry creasing her forehead, tears welling in her beautiful brown eyes. “Dad, I have a choir concert today,” she said. This was problematic since I knew nothing about it. Neither did she, apparently. She was not wearing her …
Read More »Grappling with the controversy over everybody getting a trophy
The tired debate about participation trophies in youth sports flares up pretty regularly, now fanned to a damaging degree by social media. You know the argument: The everybody-gets-a-trophy ethos in youth sports has created a bunch of soft, worthless and weak kids. They’ll never grow up with the wherewithal to …
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