So What Should We Talk About as Parenting Evolves?

I feel like the last big decision we made was how to educate our children and we made that one six years ago. Now it is all minutia or in the moment parenting. The decisions that I make about how to parent my children is less about something I've considered and researched carefully than it is about what feels right in that moment. To some extent, perhaps that is experience talking. But I think the bigger change in how I parent now versus when they were babies is that I'm parenting inside a relationship that is many years in the making. If parenting is less black or white as children get older, how do we keep the conversation about parenting going?

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Parenting, Depression and Mental Illness (Guest Post)

October is Depression Awareness Month in the United States and October 6 to 12 is Mental Illness Awareness Week in Canada. To raise awareness about the challenges of parenting while depressed, I'm pleased to welcome Kristin Craig Lai to the blog to share her story. Please read her story about "parenting through the madness".

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Can We Talk About the Parental Food Police?

I never aspired to a career in law enforcement. The whole idea of trying to police a set of sometimes logical and sometimes arbitrary laws through a combination of rule setting, surveillance, "keeping the peace", and punishment gives me the hives. But when it comes to food and children, I sometimes (often, actually) feel like the parental food police. How do I change that?

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Parenting: Someone Thinks You're Doing it Wrong

When I read Phyllis Rippeyoung's paper for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and on the immense societal pressure toward intensive motherhood, something was bugging me. At first, I thought it was just a tinge of defensiveness that was nagging at me. After all, attachment parenting was a style that worked well for us and I certainly didn't feel that it subjugated me as a woman, since we went down that path together as equal parents. But after I while, I realized it wasn't just my defensiveness that made it not sit right with me. It was the fact that I felt an entirely different kind of pressure.

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Should we parent boys and girls differently?

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