Peggy Orenstein has parents everywhere seeing pink. Her new book “Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Girly Girl Culture” is a nuanced look at whether or not the transformation of little girls into sparkly princess worshipers is just a normal stage, or the result of a deliberate assault by marketers.

She concludes it is a little of the first mixed with a heaping serving of the second.

You can read a review of her book in the New York Times Book review here, and the original New York Times Magazine article that led her to write the book here. (You can also take a listen, here to Orenstein being interviewed by Diane Rehm.

And then you can come back and discuss what parents can do about this. In part, Orenstein writes, until about age seven, both boys and girls believe that sex is externally determined — by things like how you dress and wear your hair. “It makes sense,” she writes: Read more…

According to the National Weather Service, 100 million people live in the path of the monster snow storm that has turned my driveway into a sheet of ice. (I am thinking of teaching the poor, confused dog to do an axel.)

That means up to 100 million of us are trying to figure out how to stay sane while trapped in the house. For a couple of days. For what may be the third or fourth time so far this year.

Dawn Meehan, author of “You’ll Lose the Baby Weight (and Other Lies About Pregnancy and Childbirth)” is doing just that in Chicago, where the drifts in her yard are taller than four of her six children. On her blog, Because I Said So, http://mom2my6pack.blogspot.com/ she posted a list of tips on how to weather a snow day. As a public service, she has given me permission to reprint them as a guest post on Motherlode.

Hers is the voice of a mother who is home all day with her kids. So use the comments to add your own tips — for how to survive this weather when you are at home during a snow day, and also when you have to somehow make it in to work.

SURVIVING A SNOW DAY WITH CHILDREN
By Dawn Meehan

1. Throw them outside. Fresh air and exercise are good for kids. They can build a snow gargoyle at the end of your drive to scare away the plows that would otherwise pile the snow in your driveway. And while they’re out there, have them shovel the sidewalks. It’s not child labor if you pay them in hot chocolate. Read more…

Eugene Richards/Reportage, for The New York Times Audrey Edmunds, a mother of three, was in prison 11 years before her conviction for shaking and killing a 7-month-old baby was overturned. She now lives apart from her children in the lower level of a friend’s home.

In a piece in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, Emily Bazelon explores shaken baby syndrome — and the possibility that doctors are not as certain about it as they were once thought to be.

Researchers are beginning to question what was once taken as absolute fact: that a triad of symptoms — brain swelling, subdural hemorrhaging (bleeding in a space between the skull and the brain) and retinal hemorrhaging (bleeding at the back of the eyes) — meant an infant had been shaken violently.

But recently, Bazelon writes:
Read more…

Illustration by Barry Falls Toddlers

I moved to the suburbs so that I would not have to put myself through preschool admissions. Yes, you read that right; I did it for me more than my children. I knew I didn’t have the stamina or ego strength to get through a process that weeds out three-year-olds based on their academic potential.

Allison Weeks, a reader in Staten Island who works as a fundraiser, thought she had made a similar choice. She chose an open enrollment program for her son and thought she had avoided the ratchet-up-the-competition-and-the-complications trap.

But as so many of us learn, traps spring in unexpected places. She asked if she might share her story with Motherlode readers, hoping you would use the comments to share your own tales, and maybe parents a bit behind her in the process might not be taken by surprise.

How, she wonders, did we get to the point where competition for preschool is the norm? And what can we do about it?

She writes: Read more…

Illustration by Barry Falls Life/Work Balance

For months after my son was born I kept a running time tally in my head of time I no longer had to myself. Television I wasn’t watching. Books I wasn’t reading. Conversations I wasn’t having. Sleep I wasn’t getting.

Now a survey in Britain has done the calculating for me. The Co-operative supermarket chain polled 3000 customers and found that after everything else was subtracted, working parents have 90 minutes a day “to themselves.”

The poll breaks down the average day as follows: Read more…

The news out of Ohio State University last week seems to contradict everything “forward thinking parents” believe. In a study published in the journal Developmental Psychology, researchers reported that couples who share caregiving are more likely to experience “conflict” than couples where the wife does more.

My first thought upon reading the results was of Amy and Marc Vachon, who literally wrote the book on Equally Shared Parenting, and who have made it their mission to teach other couples how to live as they do. What did they think was the takaway from this research?

In a guest post today they explain that they were not surprised by the findings, and see them as an argument for equal parenting rather than evidence against. Read more…

Do we assume men are predators? We have discussed that question here on Motherlode periodically, and earlier this month Lenore Skenazy asked it in an essay in The Wall Street Journal.

That led Jeremy Adam Smith, author of The Daddy Shift, who blogs over at Daddy Dialectic, to post on Twitter: “I was once asked to leave a playground by a grandmother. I wonder how many guys have had that experience?”

To which the Web site DadLabs responded: “Most? Or faced playdate discrimination of one kind or another?” They hashtagged their exchange “#dadsnotpervs.” Read more…

The New England Journal of Medicine has taken on one of the pillar arguments in the abortion debate, asking whether having the procedure increases a woman’s risk of mental-health problems and concluding that it doesn’t. In fact, researchers found, having a baby brings a far higher risk.

The study, by Danish scientists (and financed in part by the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which supports research on abortion rights), is the most extensive of its kind to date. It studied 365,550 Danish women who had an abortion or gave birth for the first time between 1995 and 2007. Of those, 84,620 terminated their pregnancies and 280,930 gave birth.

In the year after an abortion, 15.2 out of 1,000 sought psychiatric help (defined as admission to a hospital or clinic), which was essentially the same as the rate of that group (14.6 per 1,000) in the nine months before the abortion. In contrast, among women who went on to give birth, the rate at which they sought treatment increased to 6.7 per 1,000 after delivery from 3.9 per 1,000 before. Read more…

Kelley Williams-Bolar got out of jail yesterday, having served 9 days of her 10-day sentence. Now she faces two years of probation and 80 hours of community service.

Her crime? Sending her children to a better school.

Back in August of 2006 Williams-Bolar registered her two daughters in the Copley-Fairlawn schools in Ohio’s Copley Township. Where the forms asked for an address, she gave her father’s, saying she and the girls were living there with him.

But in November of 2009 Williams-Bolar was arrested and charged with two felony counts of tampering with official records, because a school-district investigation found she was actually living in a housing project in Akron. During a four-day trial earlier this month, she maintained that she had taken her daughters from that crime-ridden building after a home invasion several years ago, and gave their grandfather power of attorney and guardianship. The school district argued that was merely a ruse to game the system. Read more…

In his State of the Union address last night, President Obama spoke of the responsibility of parents in educating their children. “That responsibility begins not in our classrooms, but in our homes and communities,” he said. “It’s family that first instills the love of learning in a child.”

Yes. And it works the other way around, too. Teaching our children educates us anew. Becoming a parent often feels like taking an out-of-town friend on a tour, allowing you to see familiar sights through a visitor’s eyes, and asking you to remember what it is you love (or don’t) about where you live.

Lee Skallerup Bessette feels this duality keenly when reading to her two young children. Yes, she reads aloud because of all those studies that show that children do better at everything in life if their parents read aloud. And she reads aloud because it’s cozy and fun. But there are other reasons, too. As she writes in a guest post today, her children are not the only one learning from the stories. Read more…

When Anthony Raftopol and his husband, Shawn Hargon Raftopol, had twins in April of 2008, the State of Connecticut would not allow both men’s names to appear on the birth certificates.

The children were conceived with Anthony’s sperm and a donor’s egg and carried by a gestational surrogate. The laws governing such situations vary among the 50 states, and Connecticut was one of the many that only recognized three kinds of parents: the couple whose baby is genetically related to both the mother and the father; the parent or parents who adopt; and the parents whose child is conceived through artificial insemination. In cases like the Raftopols, where one spouse sought parental status though they have no genetic link to the child, state law required them to go through the adoption process. Read more…

Illustration by Barry Falls

Sarah Vander Schaaff has been sleeping. And reading. And worrying a bit about her husband, who has been taking the night shifts for a week and now “looks like a bedraggled lumberjack — unshaven and tired,” she reports in an e-mail, adding, “I’ll give him a break soon.”

After asking for advice from Motherlode readers last week about how to cope with profound sleep deprivation, Sarah is back to synthesize what hundreds of you told her — and how it has worked so far. Here is what she posted on her blog, LunchBoxMom, yesterday afternoon: Read more…

Breast-feeding — and the contradictory recommendations and practices surrounding it — is in the news again.

Last week the surgeon general of the United States, Regina M. Benjamin, issued a “Call to Action to Support Breast-Feeding,” which lists ways to lower what she calls “barriers” for “mothers who want to breast-feed.”

Her report cites the finding by the Centers for Disease Control that while 75 percent of babies start life breast-feeding, only 13 percent are “exclusively” fed that way by the age of 6 months. It is society’s job to make it easier for more mothers to continue, Dr. Benjamin said, suggesting, among other things, an increase in community- and hospital-based education programs, better training for medical care givers, more encouragement and support from family members and, most specific, the commitment of employers to provide time and space for nursing mothers to pump milk.

That last part is in keeping with a provision of the new health care law, which requires, not merely suggests, workplace accommodations for breast-feeding.

But while the surgeon general is giving support, another government agency might be seen as taking it away. Read more…

Eric Mccandless/ABC Members of the cast of “Modern Family.”

Television cameras are often mirrors, reflecting back the message of the times. In an article in the Styles section this weekend, my colleague Bruce Feiler looks at the hit show “Modern Family” through that lens, asking “what does ‘Modern Family’ say about modern families?”

The version of ourselves we see in this particular mirror is an eclectic one, he writes, built as it is “around a new fangled family tree. Patriarch Jay 
Pritchett, his Colombian trophy wife, Gloria, and her son, Manny. Jay’s grown son Mitchell, his partner, Cam, and their adopted Vietnamese daughter. And Jay’s high-strung daughter, Claire, her goofball husband, Phil, and their three suburban kids.” Read more…

“There are no words.”

Countless parents have said something like that to describe the transformation that comes with a first baby.

Melissa Sher means it literally.

The founder of the Web site Mammalingo.com, (you may remember reading about her here a few months ago), where she invites readers to coin words that are missing from the parenting vocabulary, she has proposed one that captures the numb, clueless, intense early days.

In a guest post today, crafted as a letter to the keepers of modern language, she explains. Read more…