If actively fearing for your children’s safety is a natural instinct, my maternal hardwiring must be faulty. By Lauren Apfel
Author: Motherwell
Motherwell publishes provocative, evocative essays on all aspects of the parenting experience. Here are our most-read pieces from 2016.
I can’t help but think ideas about simplicity mask ideas about masculinity, and what it is, and isn’t, okay to feel.
By Ashley Lefrak Grider
Our carefully curated selection of must-read parenting books from the last few years.
By Lauren Apfel
I’m postpartum. Without a newborn. At 20 weeks of pregnancy, my baby didn’t make it.
By Jenn Press Arata
What shocked me most about online dating was the absolute scorn for women who wanted, or already had, children.
By Dena Landon
If bad things really do happen in threes, then my son being hit by a car had completed our 2016 trifecta.
By Samantha Shanley
Photographs suggested a future, a future in which we would look back at this moment, but a future where our baby might be gone.
By Yvonne Spence
After this election, if we want our children to be a part of the solution, we need to start modeling activism for them.
By Jody Allard
Motherwhelmed is a graphic memoir about the tumultuous first years of a new mother’s life.
By Jessica Carew Kraft
One mother’s experience getting through the day, now that she knows Trump is the President of the United States.
By Sara Ackerman
When my daughter smiles, she is not a “beauty queen.” She smiles because she is happy.
By Marina Koestler Ruben
If you calm down about the illicit nature of the words, we’re just talking about talking.
By Brianne DeRosa
Our no cursing rule is one way I maintain the boundary between child and adult.
By Lisa Sadikman
One day my son was a typically developing, albeit shy, three-year-old. The next he wasn’t able to say a word in public.
By Tanya Mozias Slavin
I am shocked still by the parenting moments that break my heart.
By Catherine Newman
I had to step back and let her stand on her own two feet—even when she was shivering feverishly under the covers.
By Candy Schulman
Why do so many kids have tutors? Are the placement requirements that lax or is everybody just trying to get a leg up?
By Francie Arenson Dickman
How do we decide when a family is “complete”?
By Lauren Apfel
The #IHadAMiscarriage campaign was launched to de-stigmatize pregnancy loss.
By Jessica Zucker
While American parents are talking to their daughters about the risks of sex, the Dutch are talking about the joys of intimacy.
By Peggy Orenstein
Hillary Clinton might not have won the presidency, but we need women to keep fighting for these roles.
By Lauren Apfel
Peggy Orenstein’s Girls & Sex is a deftly executed, non-judgemental cultural commentary on the complexities of female adolescent sexuality.
By Lauren Apfel
Caregiving, which is typically undervalued and underpaid, needs to be given the respect it deserves.
By Vicki Larson
Nowhere in my plans was talking to a stranger about teaching basic social skills. Nowhere in my plans was autism.
By Katie Read