Now that I have children of my own, I’m determined to do what I can to inoculate them from the toxic culture of body hatred that surrounds them. When I was 16 years old, I weighed about as much as a 10-year-old. A 10-year-old girl, that is. I was a boy with an eating disorder. […]
Roughly 63% of working mothers agree with the statement “Sometimes I feel like a married single mom.” Many women know all too well how it feels to try to accomplish the suffocating expectation of succeeding as a full-time professional while also being a full-time mom. They know the true meaning of catching conference calls on the […]
Isn’t this movement away from us and toward independence the central goal of parenting? I started my son in full-time daycare a few months ago, when he was almost 2. Before that, my partner and I traded off childcare responsibilities and got a ton of help from a nanny that came a few days a […]
We don’t want our son to grow up with 1950s-style ideas about gender roles. Recently, I got off work and did a bit of grocery shopping with the family. We came home and I proceeded to sit on the couch, eat bean dip, and watch the Heat play while my husband made dinner. My husband isn’t […]
The journey to parenthood doesn’t always follow the path you thought it would. I write narratives in my head a lot about myself. I figure out what I want and I go for it. I live by these narratives, following the paths I’ve laid out in them. I like them to be set. I think […]
While some topics are hard to discuss and might make you uncomfortable, that doesn’t mean your children need to be sheltered. I lie to my kid constantly. I tell her the store is closed in the middle of the day, when I don’t want to go. I will say, “I have no idea where that […]
Dear Dana is a bi-weekly advice column for humans who engage in romantic relationships. Please send your dilemmas, issues, conundrums, assumptions, conflicts, anxieties, worriments, obstacles, complications, predicaments, queries, questions, and any other synonyms for “problems” to deardana@rolereboot.org. Dear Dana: My wife and I have a happy, healthy 4-year-old daughter. She’s awesome. It took a couple years […]
I want her to continue to embody the bravery that seems as natural to her as breathing, but I’m not about to let her tackle the world without being prepared. My daughter, A, just turned 13. Even as a newborn, she embodied a quiet strength that seemed to float in her hazel eyes as she […]
