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The Kids Are All Right

David Lancy Questions Our Assumptions About Parenting

Parenting trends are less about what’s good for the child and more about parents’ need for affirmation. The message of my work is that parents have far less impact than they think they do.

Sunbeams

Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn’t music.

William Stafford

The Inevitable

Lacey, my tall, blond, newly Christian thirteen-year-old, believes that anything that happens to me will end up on the Internet and will embarrass her in front of the entire planet. “It’s inevitable,” she says every time she uncovers a maternal infraction on the Web.

Sunbeams

We’d traveled, we’d been to lots of parties, lots of movies and concerts, we’d slept in. We’d done all those things that people with children seem to miss so passionately. We didn’t want those things anymore. We wanted a baby.

Liane Moriarty, What Alice Forgot

Great Expectations

Jennifer Senior On Modern Parenthood And Its Discontents

I was amazed to read about the New York City newsboys’ strike in 1899, which ultimately improved conditions and raised wages. You had these armies of seven-, eight-, and nine-year-olds bringing the entire newspaper business to its knees. They organized and won. Today we don’t even let our nine-year-olds go on the subway by themselves.

Phys Ed

Recently my twelve-year-old son, Darius, matter-of-factly informed me that he was playing football in the fall.

“No, you aren’t,” I said.

A Boy

Seven years ago, when Tytia Habing first became pregnant, she secretly hoped for a girl. She got a boy instead, and ever since, she says, her life has been “filled with dirt, broken toys, shoes full of sand, sticks, scraped knees, cut-up cardboard boxes, mud, toy guns, dinky cars, and a never-ending sense of amazement at this foreign little creature I brought into the world.”

Breasts

Breast-feeding, skinny-dipping, and Christmas shopping