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Showing posts from February, 2015

My Jenn-eration up on The Washington Post

I hope you’ll take a minute to hop on over to The Washington Post’s On Parenting page. This week I’m sharing my reflections and questions there on what makes a productive parent, and how do we distinguish between busy versus productive.   Come join the conversation by clicking here !

The Logic of Dinner

If parenting as a whole could be summed up through a single snapshot in time, that time would be dinner. It is nightly reinforcement of a central parenting principle that at no time should the amount of effort you put into anything correlate with the amount of joy, interest, education, and/or nutritional value that your children get out of the same moment. There is simply no connection between how much I try and work, and how many eat it at all, or how many spontaneously induce vomiting to evade the whole situation (in fairness, this only happened once but was nonetheless impressive in its own way). Here’s the thing. Now that Phil and I are doing this the third time around, we are ever so slightly more comfortable in our parenting roles. That is to say we don’t overreach. We know our limits. As parents, we know what we can pull off. Low expectations don’t mean we think less of ourselves as parents. It means we are realists who understand the math. Extraordinary effort does not neces

Missed Connection and a Valentine's Day Challenge

The season of love is upon us. It's almost Valentine's Day and this year, I want to talk about real love and connection: the messy kind - the human kind. The other day I took Hope to her favorite little gym class. It’s funny how things shift from your first to your third kid. It has been a good six years since I did this class with my first born. Toward the end, they dump a big basket of toys in the middle and ask the parents to step to the side so that the babies can learn to socialize independent of their parents. This, at least historically, was always the time when the moms (and sometimes a few dads) would chat casually about their little ones. If they were sleeping, or not, new teeth, first steps, first foods. You see separation time for the babies is actually super important for moms and dads. It gives them precious seconds of adult conversation together. For many parents, they may not see another adult for the rest of the day. I remember that feeling as a first tim