If calling me Mrs. Badzin makes me seem more uptight than other people’s parents, I almost welcome that boundary.
By Nina Badzin
children and childhood
One of the hardest parts of parenting is deciding when to let your children come to their own conclusions and when to steer them down a certain path, in the name of transmitting values.
By Lauren Apfel
What grooming habits is my daughter going to learn from me, and what will I say to her about why she might be expected to shave her legs but her brothers won’t be?
By Lauren Apfel
The chance to remember myself at that age, in a way that I often don’t when I wrangle with my own teens, was illuminating.
By Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser
What can be seen as the messy complications of a blended family are, when viewed differently, just more branches on a beautifully tangled family tree.
By Elizabeth Maria Naranjo
Cousins are more complicated than I’d realized. They give more than I thought possible, but they also demand more than I’d ever known.
By Antonia Malchik
What makes this an exceptional book is that it always steers its eye away from self-pity and toward a greater understanding of love and acceptance.
Abigail Rasminsky and Mira Ptacin
Children are resilient little creatures and they don’t need our eyes on them, our attendance at every single school function, to know how profoundly they matter.
By Lauren Apfel
The idea of my son scanning the stands for my face and not finding it is a horrifying thought, a cross I cannot seem to bear. By Randi Olin
Without practicing curious, respectful engagement ourselves, we can’t expect to pass it on to our children.
By Sharon Holbrook
I don’t think we are a family who loves each other in some especially profound way. We have just made the words that stand for our love a part of the verbal dance we do.
By Lauren Apfel
I am a mother and I am a lawyer. I don’t know how to reconcile these parts of myself, and I feel very alone in this struggle.
By Carinn Jade
I can’t help feeling sad for all the things I imagined his childhood to be, but now know it won’t.
By Zsofia McMullin