Where Have All the Little Kids Gone?
One day, I looked up and realized I no longer had little kids. Neither did my friends. We lived solidly in the realm of tweendom.
Parenting outside the box: Celebrating family in all forms.
Practicing Nonjudgmental Parenting in the Post-Covid World
Confession time: Despite writing a blog dedicated to nonjudgmental parenting, I’ve been judging other parents for the past two years. I’m hesitant to even think about the world “post COVID”. This disease doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, but with any luck, the daily impact on our lives will lighten.
A Year Without Rain
When I stuck my hands in the pocket of my rain jacket this morning, I found three receipts dated March 13, 2020. I sucked in a breath when I realized I hadn’t been out in the rain in over a year.
The Return to School Creates a New Parenting Battleground
Like many parents, my partner and I agonized over the decision of whether or not our daughters should return to school in person this fall. New Jersey has the advantage of beginning the school year after Labor Day, so we’ve watched as state after state, family after family, has made the difficult choice before us. Many districts opted for all virtual instruction, but for others, like ours, parents have the option to choose between virtual or in-person learning.
Why I Wear A Mask to the Beach
Was it uncomfortable wearing a mask in the heat at the beach? Yes. But I will continue to wear it each and every time I come in contact with people “outside my circle.”
Maintaining an Emotional Bank Account for Special Needs Kids
The emotional bank account concept holds that we run unconscious tallies of “deposits” and “withdrawals” with every human-to-human interaction. Keeping your bank accounts balanced – financial and emotional – is a part of being an adult. But what about when that socially awkward person is your special needs child? Who balances the emotional bank account then?
The Moment I Became a NICU Mom
It wasn’t at that first moment of separation that I realized what it would be like to have a child in the NICU. It was later, after my nurse settled me into my bed, made sure I was comfortable, and left me alone to sleep. It was when I heard another baby-a presumably healthy, chubby thighed, full term newborn-crying in the room next door to me. I imagined his mother, sleeping an arm’s length away from his bassinette, waking, immediately ready and able to meet her child’s needs. Maybe she was pulling him close to nurse, or carefully mixing a bottle of formula, or maybe she was simply holding him, sitting in the darkness of her room, touching his plump cheeks and wispy thin hair and marveling at the fact that he was here, with her, in her arms.
My child was a floor away from me, behind locked doors, alone, on the first night of his life. If he was crying in hunger, I wouldn’t know it
I Can’t Decide When to Send My Child to Kindergarten
Like any neurotic person trying to make a life-altering choice, I’ve researched this topic for over a year, asked everyone I know, and posted my dilemma to the internet.
Big mistake.
Everyone—and I mean everyone—has an opinion on this topic. Her pre-K teacher says to wait. One of my best friends, who has a Ph.D. in early childhood development, is dead against waiting. Her pediatrician parroted the same advice I’ve heard countless times: “No one ever regrets waiting, but they regret not waiting.” I’ve had friends look at me as though I’d grown three heads for even suggesting I might hold her back. I’ve spoken with parents who held and those who hadn’t. I’ve heard words of regret, words of encouragement, and a whole steaming heap of judgment
To the NICU Mom Who Blames Herself
I know your child’s birth and the days that followed weren’t like you imagined when you became pregnant. I know that on the day your baby was born, after you blew a kiss goodnight to him in the NICU, you headed back to your room, and, as you tried to sleep, you heard the cry of a healthy, normal baby in the room next door, being calmed and snuggled and fed by his mother, while your baby was on oxygen on a different floor, weeks away from being able to eat on his own.
The Book Report That Landed My Kid on the School’s Suicide Watch
Imagine that phone call, in which you as parent have to tell your child’s brand-new counselor they’re three years behind the curve.
Now imagine guiding that same kiddo through Of Mice and Men, wherein the intellectually disabled character, prone to violent outbursts, is put out of his misery with a bullet in the back of his head, fired by his guardian. Or To Kill a Mockingbird, featuring the “not right” Boo Radley spending his adult years under family-imposed house arrest. Next up, Romeo and Juliet, the story of obsessive teenage lovers kept apart, wherein one character decides faking suicide and running away from home are her best options, and the other character kills himself in despair.
Is this canon really the best we can do? If the literary characters with mental health issues students read about are always marked for confinement or death, then we’re not moving the ball on diversity, acceptance, or even opening pathways to conversation.