Quick hit: the best interests of the child

Two articles in The Guardian today which bear some thinking about. 1. A study has been conducted which seems to suggest that if a child is abused, that child will do better in the long term if sie is removed from hir family and not returned. That may well be what the study found. And [...]

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Amy Alkon was a perfect child, apparently

Shorter Amy Alkon: I didn’t get to scream in public when I was a child, so neither should anyone else. SRSLY. Of course, Ms Alkon is basing this on her recollection. I’m sure that, like most people, she doesn’t remember very much before the ages of 4 or 5, probably not daily events even after [...]

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Out of the mouths of …

I’m not sure if I have enough of a readership to get a decent number of comments on this thread, but I’m going to try, as I think that this post is one that will benefit far more from comments than from whatever I might post. My mother – who is pretty good about not [...]

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Calling all academic mothers!

Are you, or have you ever been, a mother academic? There’s a call for papers out for a collection of both narratives & articles about academic motherhood. (That takes you to a pdf, so if you don’t like those, try the general page here – the “Being a Mother Academic” link takes you to the [...]

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“I’ll get your mother”

I’ve been thinking about parenting in various ways lately, kicked off by various posts. I’ve even written a couple of posts. These have mostly been to do with the roles of mothers and fathers, the societal pressures to stick to reasonably traditional roles (ie mother as primary childcarer and homemaker, father as breadwinner). I want [...]

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Where are the men?

What gets me, what really gets me, is that all the discussion about child-raising and stay-at-home parenting and “downsizing to one salary” assumes that it is always the mother’s responsibility, the mother’s decision, to choose to stay home with kids or not to stay home. In articles like this, that is particularly clear. And it’s [...]

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And that was when my head exploded

Women don’t WHAT?!?!?! Not only is this another misplaced article, in the Relationships sub-section of the Life&Style part of the Sydney Morning Herald, even though it’s clearly about work, (but hey, it includes comments about a report by the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency, so it’s about women, so it’s clearly not [...]

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There are reasons for this!

Do children really “grow up more quickly” than they used to? I don’t know. To some extent, I don’t care: I didn’t have an unhappy childhood, but I was desperate to become a grown-up, and I would be surprised if many people felt all that differently. And while I feel a bit sickened about the [...]

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