Now that my three kids reliably use a toilet and can brush their own teeth, it’s been a while since I’ve been so flustered and frustrated that I felt like pulling out my eyelashes. more

Last month, an obesity specialist at Children’s Hospital Boston and a lawyer at Harvard’s School of Public Health set off a firestorm parenting debate: they recommended that seriously overweight children be taken away from their parents, aligning childhood obesity with other forms of childhood abuse. more

Most American First Ladies bow to unrelenting political and social pressure to be seen -preferably smiling and wearing an attractive-yet-affordable outfit by an American designer - but never heard. more

Freedom was on tap to everyone in the world on July 4th weekend. Except apparently the fiancée of Prince Albert of Monaco. The 33-year-old former Olympic swimmer Charlene Wittstock was allegedly stopped by airport officials last week as she tried to leave Monaco on the eve of Friday’s civil ceremony and Saturday’s lavish, multimillion dollar wedding. more

When I was ten, my best friend’s mom was the smartest woman I knew. She was a 4’9” spitfire from New York City who wore a great deal of black along with a sophisticated perfume never before sniffed in my staid DC hometown. As a young woman, she’d been one of the early Peace Corps volunteers in Africa, and then written a best-selling memoir about the experience. more

Yikes. Being a girl today is hard work.

Those of us who were once teenage girls know firsthand there is no creature on earth as critical and perfectionistic as a teenage girl. However, our squeaky clean friends at The Dove Self-Esteem Fund have collected astounding data quantifying precisely how challenging it is to be a girl in American today. more

People who frequent the blogosphere love to argue about women’s equality and lack thereof, at home and at work, and to dissect hot-button subjects like equal pay and gender discrimination, who changes the diapers and who takes out the trash, in our relationships and in society at large. more

Two Sundays ago, I picked up my nine-year-old daughter from a girly girl sleepover birthday party at her friend Jo-Jo’s, five minutes from our house. In addition to her rumpled pink sleeping bag, my daughter left the host’s front door carrying a purple balloon and a goodie bag filled with unicorn stickers. more

At a recent school fair – you know, the type with a moon bounce, funnel cakes, and kids running around tipsy with glee to be off-leash for a few hours -- my nine-year-old daughter strutted around with a puzzling pink cell phone sticking out of her front pocket. The phone looked familiar, I realized, because it was my old cell, dead for at least three years. She’d snitched it from my messy office desk drawer. more

Bear with me for a brief but essential women’s history lesson. In 1972, at the peak of the women’s rights movement, US Congress passed legislation known as Title IX. Title Nine outlawed sex discrimination in federally financed education programs - in simple terms, it became illegal for schools that received government funding to spend more on programs for boys than girls. more