What Stupid Kind of Parent Are You?

Just yesterday, you were at the playground, chasing little Ayden as he bolted around the jungle gym, keeping a hand outstretched in case he might stumble and fall. Or maybe you were at a middle-school PTA meeting, cowing the other moms and dads into submitting to your field-trip theories. Or perhaps you were at the …

What Almost Made Me Cry Today: A Milestone

It’s funny how extremely subtle changes in your kid grab your attention. For instance: Little kids cry all the time. Sometimes for good reason, sometimes for no discernible reason at all. But what’s in a cry? Anyway, when I got Sasha up this morning, she was weepy, crying as I changed her diaper, saying “I …

Betty Draper’s Parenting: A New View

It’s become accepted Mad Men fan wisdom that Betty Draper is a horrible mother, an ice queen, one of those wire-frame monkeys from the Harlow experiment. Up till this week, I only half-bought it. Betty, I always thought, was just supposed to be a chilly WASP archetype, not much worse than the other moms on …