Parenting

Apart from my book The Feminist’s Guide to Raising a Little Princess, I also write articles about parenting. In 2014, I chronicled my family’s overseas move in the New York Times ‘Coming to America’ column. I wrote about PTA Culture and the Working Mother for the Washington Post. For U.S. News and World Report, I wrote Let Fathers Be With Their Babies, a piece about the importance of paternity and family leave.

I’ve written about the experience of teaching Hebrew to my son, asked about the wisdom of forcing children to perform on stage, worried about sending my 8-year-old on a five-day school trip, shared the drama over naming our daughter and wondered about how to celebrate Hanukah in a country with a very small Jewish population.

And of course, I also write parenting humor. My first parenting humor piece was inspired by guilt. After I started writing about my kids, I felt bad about it. Was I violating my children’s right to privacy? Was I writing something that would one day embarrass them? As they got older, I became more circumspect about what I shared about them, but that initial guilt led me to write Mommy Blogger’s Lament. This was also my first piece for McSweeney’s. Real life Mommy Bloggers reached out to tell me the piece made them laugh. I’m still in touch with a few of them today – they’re some of the best people I’ve met virtually.