THIS POST ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON JEWISHBOSTON.COM. CLICK HERE TO READ IT THERE! At my son Carston’s bris I proudly announced that he had already completed his first mitzvah—or at least I hoped he had. Shortly after he came into this world, Carston gave up some blood—cord blood. He didn’t really have to do anything, but [...]
Is there anything worse than a Harvard stage mother? No, there is not. When I was an undergraduate and saw all the babies going to do experiments in William James Hall, I vowed that someday my kids would do the same. But in the haze of postpartum life I forgot my promise to myself. Until [...]
Prodigies are always a hot topic, and with the publication of Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, they have been back in the news. While prodigies tend to come from fields where it is not necessary to go through physical maturation first (like music, math, chess, etc.), that is beginning to change as some parents [...]
The past month or so has been pretty crazy in the Levey Friedman household– death, life, illness(es), first teeth, a hurricane and a nor’easter, Halloween, an election, the list goes on. Through it all I’ve attempted to keep writing, but the priority has been parenting the Little Man… especially after we lost our childcare in [...]
We’re in the midst of multiple football seasons– Pop Warner, high school, college, and pros– and, like anything, we have some good and some bad stories. The bad stories focus on injuries and over-involved adults. Massachusetts and New England are no strangers to crazy youth sports parents and physical altercations (as I wrote about in [...]
Almost 9-months ago, right before my son was born, I blogged about how my work and my husband’s work would impact our parenting. Obviously so much in our lives has changed since then– yet much has remained the same. Various “family business” over the past week captures all of our various interests… and hint at [...]
A few weeks ago I was thrilled to receive an email from Hanna Rosin that Slate’s Double X was interested in a piece I was working on about a variety of former Miss America contestants running for political office. Today it’s a feature at the online magazine, focusing on the history of the Pageant and [...]
Perhaps it’s time to start Carston’s art career. In fact, I may be too late if I want him to compete with five-year-old “prodigy” Aelita Andre. Aelita started painting at 22 months. Her “Abstract Expressoinist” work sells for upwards of $10,000. But if you watch this video of her working (and it is clear based [...]
While most of us spent yesterday celebrating fathers we seem to spend the rest of the year placing parents under a microscope. So far in 2012 we’ve heard about why French parents are superior and why you aren’t good enough if you aren’t a breast-feeding mom. And those are just the major headlines. Yesterday The Boston [...]
I’ve been studying parenting for about a decade now as a sociologist. I always strive to contextualize families and their parenting decisions by thinking about both the micro and macro structures that impact people’s everyday lives. Now that I’m a mom that hasn’t changed. I know that not everyone will make the same decisions that [...]
