3 February 2012
parenthood & culture — #
Barack Obama talks about his father’s impact on him in this touching and very real video from the Dinner with Barack series.
24 January 2012
parenthood & culture — #
Jeff Atwood: On Parenthood
That one percent makes all the difference.
22 December 2011
design & parenthood — #
Ben Chestnut, CEO of MailChimp, explains his creative leanings and the genesis for his great company
7 April 2011
parenthood & web — #
StorkBrokers.com is a place you can buy and sell used baby clothing and gear.
18 March 2011
design & parenthood — #
Teaching Kids Design Thinking, So They Can Solve The World’s Biggest Problems
23 February 2011
education & parenthood — #
Inside the multimillion-dollar standardized test essay-scoring business
18 February 2011
parenthood & health — #
Delivering my son: ‘Breathe, baby, breathe!’
As I knelt on the bedroom floor, on the phone with 911, I didn’t understand what was happening at first. I thought something had gone wrong — or at least that the paramedics would have plenty of time to arrive.
When your wife is pregnant, no one tells you, “By the way, she might skip labor, suddenly fall to the floor, and give birth. Oh, and the umbilical cord might be tangled around the baby’s neck five times.”
12 January 2011
parenthood & culture — #
Tiger Mothers: Raising Children The Chinese Way is a deeper look at the controversial parental pedagogy espoused by Amy Chua in her latest book.
30 November 2010
parenthood & culture — #
Modern parenting is a fantastically well-written examination of so-called ‘Helicopter Parenting’ and its obvious blind spots.
Last year, a friend of mine sent a shipment of green rubber flooring, at great impractical expense, to a villa in the south of France because she was worried that over the summer holiday her toddler would fall on the stone floor. Generations of French children may have made their way safely to adulthood, walking and falling and playing and dreaming on these very same stone floors, but that did not deter her in her determination to be safe. This was, I think, an extreme articulation of our generation’s common fantasy: that we can control and perfect our children’s environment. And lurking somewhere behind this strange and hopeless desire to create a perfect environment lies the even stranger and more hopeless idea of creating the perfect child.
Of course, for most of us, this perfect, safe, perpetually educational environment is unobtainable; an ineffable dream we can browse through in Dwell, or some other beautiful magazine, with the starkly perfect Oeuf toddler bed, the spotless nursery. Most of us do not raise our children amidst a sea of lovely and instructive wooden toys and soft cushiony rubber floors and healthy organic snacks, but the ideal exists and exerts its dubious influence.
This fantasy of control begins long before the child is born, though every now and then a sane bulletin lands amidst our fashionable perfectionism, a real-world corrective to our over-arching anxieties. I remember reading with some astonishment, while I was pregnant, a quiet, unsensational article about how one study showed that crack babies turned out to be doing as well as non-crack babies. Here we are feeling guilty about goat’s cheese on a salad, or three sips of wine, and all the while these ladies, lighting crack pipes, are producing intelligent and healthy offspring. While it’s true that no one seemed to be wholeheartedly recommending that pregnant women everywhere take up crack for relaxation, the fundamental irony does appear to illustrate a basic point: which is that children, even in utero, are infinitely more adaptable and hardy and mysterious than we imagine.
[…]
One of the more troubling aspects of our new ethos of control is that it contains a vision of right-minded child rearing that is in its own enlightened way as exclusive and conformist as anything in the 1950s. Anyone who does not control their children’s environment according to current fashions and science, who, say, bribes their child with M&Ms or feeds their baby non-organic milk or has a party that lasts until two in the morning, is behaving in a wild and reckless manner that somehow challenges the status quo. The less trivial problem is this: the rigorous ideal of the perfect environment doesn’t allow for true difference, for the child raised by a grandparent, or a single mother, or divorced parents; its vision is definitely of two parents taking turns carrying the designer baby sling. Mandatory 24-hour improvement and enrichment, have, in other words, their oppressive side.