Going through my parents' stuff didn't make me suddenly miss them, but I became more intrigued by them every day. I wanted to know more and more about them, to solve their mysteries. At the same time, I felt a corresponding, if conflicting, urge to speak, or write, about what many people seemed to think was unspeakable: my ever-present lack of grief. So I decided to combine these seemingly divergent impulses into an Tumblr blog called My Dead Parents, which I kept anonymous both out of respect for my family and because, after years of writing fiction, I wasn't sure if I could handle revealing so much about myself in writing.
Anya Yurchyshyn
writes about rediscovering her parents through their letters, after their deaths.
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Apr 20, 2013 -
12 comments
"One parental right that is coming under attack more and more is the right to administer reasonable corporal punishment." Blogger Libby Anne of
Love, Joy, Feminism (who was homeschooled) has written a detailed three-part series (
1,
2,
3) describing how the Home School Legal Defense Association (
HSLDA)'s mission to insure the rights of homeschooling parents has come to include making it harder for CPS or other agencies to receive or act on reports of child abuse.
[more inside]
posted by emjaybee
on Apr 20, 2013 -
96 comments
"
Trusting your child with someone else is one of the hardest things that a parent has to do — and in the United States, it’s harder still, because American day care is a mess. About 8.2 million kids—about 40 percent of children under five — spend at least part of their week in the care of somebody other than a parent. Most of them are in centers, although a sizable minority attend home day cares.... In other countries, such services are subsidized and well-regulated. In the United States, despite the fact that work and family life has changed profoundly in recent decades, we lack anything resembling an actual child care system. Excellent day cares are available, of course, if you have the money to pay for them and the luck to secure a spot. But the overall quality is wildly uneven and barely monitored, and at the lower end, it’s Dickensian."
posted by zarq
on Apr 15, 2013 -
139 comments
"Premature babies born at the edge of viability force us to debate the most difficult questions in medicine and in life. After just 23 weeks of pregnancy, Kelley Benham found herself in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) with a daughter born so early neonatologist doctors would call her a "micro preemie." New technologies can sometimes keep micro preemies alive, but many end up disabled, some catastrophically so. Whether to provide care to these infants is one of the fundamental controversies in neonatology. This is the story of how Benham and her husband, Tom French, made the difficult choice:
Fight for the life of their micro preemie baby or let her go?"
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Dec 8, 2012 -
70 comments
The Mom Stays in the Picture - When Allison Tate wrote about how "Too much of a mama's life goes undocumented and unseen... I'm everywhere in their young lives, and yet I have very few pictures of me with them",
it resonated with many other women. "To read through the notes that came with the thousand-plus photos (and yes, we have read every single one) was to read the minds of today's mothers. Over and over you told us that you don't look the way you want to look, don't look the way you once did. Even when joining a movement created around the motto 'I am not perfect to look at and I am not perfect to love, but I am perfectly their mother,' you felt the need to apologize."
(via middleclasstool's other half)
posted by flex
on Oct 12, 2012 -
50 comments
Over the past few weeks, I, along with ten of my closest friends, have taken turns saying our goodbyes to our college bound kids. For some of us, this was a virgin voyage; for others, it was the beginning of an
empty nest.
[more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis
on Aug 21, 2012 -
44 comments
On Tiger Moms: "What the controversy surrounding Chua demonstrates, however inadvertently, is that parenting techniques are always grounded in basic assumptions about the way things are and what matters to us. And they are always guided by some answer to the most fundamental of ethical questions—how to live?"
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns
on May 7, 2012 -
52 comments
The novlist Julie Myerson has written a book, The Lost Child, about her son's addiction to cannabis, the violent behaviour she says this caused and her tough love policy.
Extract. Her son is
angry that she's published it, and says his parents over-reacted: "I wasn't doing anything that most other teenagers do, but such was their naive terror of drugs they were acting like six-year-olds". It comes out through
MumsNet that Julie Myerson was the anonymous author of a Guardian column, "Living with Teenagers," which described her children's behaviour candidly without their knowledge.
Extract. Myerson first
denied this. The Guardian discusses whether it was
right to publish the columns. Myerson is
interviewed about whether she was right to publish The Lost Child. Her partner, and son's father, Jonathan Myerson supports her:
This is an emergency. Her son says she's
addicted to writing.
[more inside]
posted by paduasoy
on Mar 15, 2009 -
160 comments
The great-grandfather could walk six miles to go fishing; the grandfather could walk a mile to go to the woods; the son can't go more than 300 yards from his house.
How children lost the right to roam, including a map illustrating the point.
posted by JDHarper
on Jun 15, 2007 -
95 comments
California bill to ease "move aways" by custodial parents pulled. Until a recent CA Supreme Court decision, it was easy for custodial parents to move themselves and their children far from their ex-spouse. The Court reversed the old rule and held that the move could be blocked if the non-custodial parent could show that it would interfere with his/her relationship with the kids. Legislation to reimpose the old permissive standard passed through the State Senate, but has now been pulled off the legislative calendar after an outcry by father's rights groups.
posted by MattD
on Aug 18, 2004 -
17 comments
AnarchistParenting.com As any parent knows, kids are heavily into anarchy. It seems that some parents are, too.
Personally, I like to keep my anarchy where it belongs:
fairytales (which are also the only places it works.)
posted by agentfresh
on Nov 17, 2002 -
38 comments
Abigail and Brittany Hensel are in the 6th grade and continue to defy the odds. After the initial struggle with the personal pronoun (her? their?), one is left with both curiosity and sympathy. The greater issue is how to assimilate the truly miraculous.
posted by kablam
on Nov 11, 2002 -
22 comments
White couple gets black twins, sue IVF clinic. Experts say a mistake could have occurred in one of three ways.The wrong sperm could have been used to fertilise the right egg, the right sperm could have been used to fertilise the wrong egg, or the embryo implanted in the woman may have been another couple's altogether. Although it is not clear whether another couple has laid claim to the children, legal experts say the judge will be expected to make a modern-day judgment of Solomon on who should be considered the babies' legal parents. This is unploughed legal ground. Is there a fair way to sort this out?
posted by Mack Twain
on Jul 17, 2002 -
34 comments
Nickelodeon is airing a special tonight on families that have same-sex parents. The concern of some is that this show: "proves that this network has been co-opted by homosexual activists who are targeting children. Sodomy is not a family value. Nickelodeon has now lost the trust of parents."
My issue with it is that it appears that they are not publicizing the fact that they are showing this to the parents to allow them to decide if their children should watch it or not... I couldn't find anything on their website, except the
listing in the schedule for "Nick News Special Edition" (MORE INSIDE)
posted by darian
on Jun 18, 2002 -
67 comments
Mother jailed for girls' truancy A question for our British gang, is truancy such a problem in the UK now that this is really necessary? When I went to school in England, lo those
mumblemumble years ago, I don't remember it being this bad. For the rest of the world, do you think truancy in your country would justify locking up the primary caregiver or is this punishing the wrong person? Can parents be held responsible for everything a child does? And better said, should they? When should we grant children the priviledges and penalties of their own autonomous actions?
posted by dejah420
on May 13, 2002 -
27 comments
