Maybe it’s just me, but we seem to live in a society where people are getting more and more afraid of being sick. There are billions spent on finding vaccines for even the most benign illnesses and a shortage of flu vaccine is treated as a national health emergency and shows up as the cover story in all the major news magazines.Read More

An interesting thing happened upon opening our Hanukkah presents a few days ago… our son and daughter were given cute, if somewhat wacky, slippers from a relative who knew that we do our best to avoid visible, overt characters and brands on our toys. When we looked, however, we realized that the slippers were Hello Kitty and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We were surprised, needless to say!Read More

Unless you’re one of the few who practice unschooling, there will come a time when your kids are going to have homework from school and are going to need assistance from you to complete the assignment. In the earlier grades it’s fun but as they proceed in the years, the material becomes more sophisticated and, frankly, harder.Read More

Every year we have the same challenge, trying to identify what toys and games we can purchase for our children that aren’t junky, horribly, ugly, plastic trash (obviously, that’s a value judgment. 🙂 One place I thought I’d start this year was with Amazon.com, since they have a huge range of toys and games, and with partners like Toys R Us, I figured they’d have a good organization too.Read More

It’s not news to anyone who is a parent that when wee folk are afoot your sense of privacy has to be modified, somewhat forcefully. It’s not so much that you can’t have privacy, it’s more that you need to redefine privacy to encompass the new members of your family.Read More

Our children are still a bit young to worry about this, but I was shocked to read a report from the BBC that documents research from Harvard University and the University of Queensland where they calculated that almost 5,000,000 people were killed in the year 2000 from smoking. Yes, you read that right, five million people in one year.Read More

Is there anything more difficult to handle than when all of your kids get sick at the same time? Maybe: not only are our kids all sick, but we’re both sick too. It’s “just a cold”, but I haven’t been sick in bed for two days since, well, I don’t even remember when.Read More

I won’t say that I’m startled by this data, but I am pleasantly surprised that BusinessWeek (of all publications) has a report exploring how fathers are spending more time with their families and less at work. Indeed, they cite data that suggests there are plenty of men now who are willing to eschew promotions in return for the ability to have a more flexible schedule…Read More

As a father, it’s hard to know how unique your kids are versus all the other similarly-aged children in the world. It’s kind of the problem that Garrison Keillor pokes fun at when he talks about the fictional world of Lake Woebegon, where everyone is “above average”, but applied to individual behaviors. Be that as it may, I’m convinced that my kids collect more stuff, more often, than any other kids in our neighborhood.Read More

One of the basic tenets of attachment parenting, as far as I can tell, is that childhood is a time to be protected, a time to be nurtured, and a time to grow within a safe and sheltered environment. Not to some obsessive degree, necessarily (though some people seem to go to extremes, as with anything else in life), but the idea is really that children should be allowed to have a childhood. There are…Read More

If you’re even curious about attachment parenting, you should already own a copy of Rahima Baldwin Dancy’s excellent book You Are Your Children’s First Teacher. What you might not know about Rahima, though, is that she hosts a couple of excellent AP/Waldorf conferences each year and this year, this October to be specific, she’s hosting Waldorf in the Home at Shining Mountain Waldorf School in Boulder, Colorado.Read More

I was thinking about the different books and magazine articles I’ve read recently on various parenting and fatherhood issues and realize that there’s one major topic that no-one ever talks about, and it’s a topic that’s incredibly important for any parent to realize…Read More

I’m not kidding. According to BBC News the newest trend for middle-class families is to send their kindergartners to boarding schools and some programs accept children as young as two for their programs. Seems very Brave New World to me somehow, particularly when the principal of the school explains “the boarding experience fostered abilities in the children which day attendance was not necessarily able to do.”Read More

British Researchers at the University of Manchester, England, have released a terrific new study that draws a correlation between breastfed babies and happy adults. I say “correlation” because in typical sloppy research fashion, the researchers appear to have identified two factors, correlated them, and then presented them as causal. I imagine that the research is true, but ….Read More

All children attach to their parents, whether they are birth parents or not, so when I bumped into a very interesting article about how the Web makes adoption easier but more risky, I thought it would be a good item to mention here on Attachment Parenting too.. The article appears in Wired and it’s titled Web Helps Out Adoption Process. What you might not realize until reading this is that there’s a lot of money…Read More

We’re very, very pleased to share that after some discussion with magazine editor Jody McLaughlin, we’ve been granted the right to replicate any of the excellent articles from The Compleat Mother magazine.Read More