I’m on the board of a small, parenting-related nonprofit organization, a board comprised of smart, thoughtful women who are mostly mothers of small children (and one dad, though our father pool is growing). In addition to our full-time parenting jobs, pretty much all of us have professional jobs, or are students. We’re all juggling a […]
It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized it was okay to hate kids. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with kids. After all, we need them if we want to continue existing as a species. I just don’t particularly like them. They’re noisy, dirty, nonsensical, and really just flat out annoying. In […]
October is annual National Work & Family Month. Who knew? A 2003 U.S. Senate Resolution declared this to be the month of “encouraging workplaces to pause…and reflect on the progress already made on the journey to work-life effectiveness, to celebrate and then raise the bar moving on to even more pervasive progress.” Though it’s admirable […]
This post originally appeared as a series of three posts on 1PeachyMama. Republished with permission. In my home Superwoman died. Thank God! The ever present anxiety to keep the house immaculate, the laundry folded and put away, the children engaged and enriched, and (if that weren’t enough) to also keep myself looking fly was weighing […]
This post originally appeared on the Women’s Media Center. Republished with permission. The author, a nationally recognized authority on the choices women make as they age, analyzes a new study that tracks an unrealistic and stressful standard of perfection for men. In 1963 Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique identified The Problem That Has No Name—a soul-destroying malaise and […]
This post originally appeared on the Good Men Project. Republished with the author’s permission. My father and I never seemed to have much to say to one another. When I was growing up, he spoke and I listened. He had been raised by the clichéd-but -honored dictum that children should be seen and not heard—a […]
I’ll admit it up front: what I’m about to say is probably going to sound defensive. But to give you some background, I’m a little tapped out these days and not at my most generous. As a parent to 4-year-old twins, a senior director at a small non-profit, and the wife of a workaholic, I’m […]
Kat Zacharia writes about the trials and rewards of being a sole parent to two young children. Read her first piece about how she became a sole parent here. As we drove away from a lunch meeting at one of Burbank’s oldest institutions, my colleague and close friend Kiki turned to me and said, “Wow! […]
Several weeks ago, I read a short article in The Huffington Post by Lisa Bloom “How to Talk to Little Girls.” As an aunt to four “chiblings” (read: children of siblings), two of whom are little girls, I found that Bloom’s article struck a particularly resonant chord. My sister and her husband do a tremendous job of raising these […]
It’s now almost 30 years since the publication of Helen Gurley Brown’s “Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money Even If You’re Starting With Nothing“. In the book, the former editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine argued that it was completely possible for the modern woman to have everything she’d always wanted, from a stellar career to […]
Nearly 46 percent of American women through age 44 are childless. That’s up from 35 percent in 1976. All reasons this generation of women are not bearing children at the same rate their mothers did are valid. Some are young women and just not at a point in their lives where motherhood is a choice […]
I’m someone who has spent much of her life thinking about and observing gender differences. Growing up in a clear patriarchy, I was very aware that women seemed to have few choices and little influence. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that I spent most of my career over the last two plus decades focused on […]
