These 12 household rules were once considered normal parenting — but they're now illegal parenting practices.
A 6-week-old baby girl died just one day after becoming inconsolably ill. Here's what happened and how you can stay in the know.
Picking a name for someone you haven’t met yet is one of pregnancy’s great contradictions. You’re being asked to make a permanent, lifelong decision about a person whose personality, look, and energy you have precisely zero data on. You can’t even confirm if the name suits them until they’re out in the world, responding to...
Most people would agree that parenting comes with a certain amount of private accounting. The mental register of moments that didn’t go well, the tone that came out sharper than intended, the day that just ran out before the child’s needs did. That list accumulates alongside the love, and most parents review it at 2...
The calls get shorter before you notice they’ve gotten shorter. That’s the thing nobody warns you about – not a dramatic falling-out, not a fight about anything, just a gradual change in the rhythm of contact that you register somewhere in the back of your mind before you register it consciously. Your adult child is...
Every daughter has a moment, usually sometime in her thirties, when she catches herself doing something so thoroughly, unmistakably maternal that she has to stop and sit with it for a second. Not a vague similarity. A specific, undeniable one. The exact phrase her mother used. The face her mother made. The particular way a...
December has a particular way of making everything harder. The bills that were already close to the edge sit a little closer. The school calendars clear out right when the gig work is busiest and the childcare options are fewest. And somewhere in all of that, a woman puts a child in the back seat,...
Bone density doesn’t announce its departure. It doesn’t send a warning email or wake you up at 3 a.m. the way anxiety does. It just goes, quietly and incrementally, while you’re busy running the actual life you have: the early meetings, the kids’ schedules, the parents who need more from you than they used to,...
Young women in the United States are choosing not to have children in numbers that demographers have not recorded in generations – and the data documenting this change are growing sharper and more specific by the year. The question of whether to have children has always carried personal weight, but something has changed in the...
The village was never supposed to be a metaphor. Somewhere along the way it became one – the kind of warm phrase that gets said at baby showers and in parenting books and means almost nothing by the time the actual work of raising a child falls on one person, one income, and one set...
Nobody sets out to raise a bully. You read the books, you attend the school meetings, you have the “be kind” conversation in the car on the way to drop-off. You are, by most available measures, paying attention. And yet there’s a particular kind of vertigo that comes with getting a call from a teacher,...
Texas is a state that tends to believe in itself. And fair enough: it has the economy, the land, the pride, and enough bumper stickers to fill a warehouse. It also has some of the fastest-growing cities in the country, a booming job market, and a cost of living that, for a while at least,...
