4 mins read

The Grave Importance of Saying Positive Things To Your Kids

This says something about me, and life via social media today overall, that as an alleged “parenting expert” (I can hear my three teenaged kids snickering in the background), I get some awfully fantastic parenting advice via strangers on FaceBook. Case in point: on Friday, March 4, which coincidentally marked the 19th anniversary of the…

7 mins read

70s Childhoods Vs Now – What’s Been Lost

I grew up in the 70s. This meant I was lucky to experience childhood long before helicopter parents, abstinence pledges, SAT prep courses and sexting obliterated the myriad reckless joys of American adolescence. Most parents had more than two kids, plus jobs, problems and pressures of their own. Kids’ technology risks consisted primarily of overdosing…

4 mins read

The Latest on The Mommy Wars

Why do moms need data to convince ourselves that there are myriad good (and bad) ways to raise children? After all, parenting is a quintessentially unique and personal undertaking. Every adult, even identical twin sisters, approaches motherhood differently. What I found in talking to hundreds of moms for my 2006 book Mommy Wars is that as…

6 mins read

Explaining Bruce Jenner and Transgender To Kids

Before last Friday night, only 8% of Americans knew someone who was transgender – whose gender identity does not match the sex he or she was born with. Today, an additional 16.8 million people who watched Diane Sawyer’s groundbreaking ABC interview with Olympian Bruce Jenner know someone who is transgender: Jenner himself. Jenner spent nearly two…