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9 Ways We’re Screwing Up Our Girls and How We Can Stop

I just loved reading Anea Bogue’s 9 Ways We’re Screwing Up Our Girls And How We Can Stop. As adults, we know women live in a trick bag of cultural mixed messages, unrealistic expectations, and damaging, persistent biases about what being a girl, a woman, and a mother “should” mean. Ms. Bogue points out that this process [...]

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Brigid Schulte is Overwhelmed - and So Are You! Part One

Author Brigid Schulte has a job, a house, a husband, several children, and a whole lot of stress. She’s also just written a book, available online and at your favorite bookstore, called Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, about how we’ve taken on way more than we can handle, what [...]

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Staying Home as a Step Up

My New York Times Sunday Dialogue piece on pro-family policy changes that could improve caregivers’ economic security elicited a number of responses. One led me to a post by Valerie Adrian, a mother of 3 currently pursuing her Ph,D. in Sociology on the opposite side of the country, but engaged in issues of gender and work [...]

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Pre-School Matters for Moms

Child care used to be a family matter, taken up household by household, depending on a variety of circumstances. But times have changed and child care now moves appropriately to the public policy realm. The experts at the Center for American Progress look at three available child care options - a stay at home parent, privately [...]

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Sheryl Sandberg’s Most Important Words

“Success for me is that if my son chooses to be a stay-at-home parent, he is cheered on for that decision. And if my daughter chooses to work outside the home and is successful, she is cheered on and supported.” Sheryl Sandberg, NPR’s Morning Edition, March 11, 2013. If you stacked up everything that’s already [...]

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Competitive Mothering Takes a Hit

With an eyebrow firmly raised at all the Tiger Mother brouhaha, I was delighted to find this post from Cameron Mcdonald, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She’s written a book, “Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs and the Micropolitics of Mothering” which looks as what she calls the “private to public [...]

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Married, With Children

Contributed by MOTHERS volunteer and guest blogger Rosanne Weston.Stephanie Coontz, a history professor and expert on historical and contemporary marriage, reported in an article published last week that at least 25 recent studies have shown children to be detrimental to marital health. That’s not children in general, mind you; it’s our own kids, our very [...]

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Power to the Mommies!

Contributed by MOTHERS volunteer and guest blogger Kelly Coyle DiNorciaWhen my daughter was 7 months old, she and I accompanied my husband on a business trip to Miami Beach. We welcomed the opportunity to escape the cold northeast and spend a little time digging our toes in the sand and absorbing some Vitamin D. I [...]

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