As reported all over the US this past weekend, the article below is from the Daily Mail online. I looked and listened for a trace of dismay (other than the fake shock accompanied with a smile on Fox News) in the voices of television reporters, or the mention of child abuse. I didn’t find either. This is [...]
November 16, 2012
On Teenager Island, rituals of bed and bath and books are no longer. All that remains of Unicorn-Lollipop-Toddler- Island, are ghosts of your children in the curls of a four-year old girl, or in the hand of a boy, hidden inside his father’s palm. When parenting on Teenager Island there are a few essential items: [...]
November 9, 2012
Setting: Car, early am, before school drop-off. Radio goes on and on about election results. I’m feeling hopeful and buoyed by the elections. I forget I’m living with an angst-filled revolutionary, a kid who didn’t like either of his choices. The kid starts to talk, buzz-kill ensues. Gabe: Both sides are totally corrupt. Obama is more [...]
September 17, 2012
Our house is open to our friends. That of course, includes my children’s friends. Up until about today, my daughter’s life has been devoid of much of the girl drama we’ve discussed here at Femamom. I’ve liked to imagine that is because we have been welcoming to our children’s friends. Of course, that’s a ridiculous corollary and [...]
September 13, 2012
Guest Post by Avital Norman Nathman This: …is not reality. It’s an edited for entertainment version of what teen parenting might look like. But the magazine covers? The sensationalizing and “shockers” they’re trying to sell as the teen parenting narrative? That’s not reality. Between the sensationalism that accompanies most “reality” TV and the stigmatization of many [...]
August 2, 2012
There’s a new phrase in our house and though I am rarely surprised anymore, after douche made it’s debut, I was initially taken aback. I was listening to my daughter share a sticky social situation. She felt the girl in the story was being too timid and needed to: pussy-up. take a stand, share their [...]
July 31, 2012
My son, the same kid who a year ago preferred action movies to political discourse has become a one person fountain of political facts. The problem? There isn’t really a problem it’s just that he’s really enthusiastic and doesn’t talk about much else. He’s filled with righteous rage at the “billionaires with money tucked in [...]
June 9, 2012
Guest Post by Gail Pomeroy Doktor I should say that not all children have the privilege of reaching commencement, or the opportunities just beyond it. I have known amazing high school seniors who cheerfully filled out college applications, one while she turned dark green due to liver failure in the wake of relapse with cancer (people [...]
May 9, 2012
The afternoon before the prom there was a flutter of activity. I sensed the excitement from my office, knowing the prom was the source, I dug harder into my work. I would not be corrupted. Right about then, my daughter burst in, she’d accompanied an older girlfriend to a tanning salon! A tanning salon?!? [...]
May 8, 2012
Just as Vogue announced a ban of under-aged and thinspo-leaning models from its pages–a “triumph” according to Slate’s Libby Copeland–Seventeen magazine shut down 14-year-old Julia Bluhm, a ballet dancer who attempted to convince Seventeen magazine to hire “real” models instead of using photoshopped girls. Bluhm, who supplied Seventeen editor Ann Shoket with 25,000 signatures, was [...]
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November 29, 2012
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