When I was a kid, my mom had this thing about x-rays at the dentist. Every time my brother and I went for our annual teeth cleaning and check-up, the dentist wanted to take x-rays of our mouths, and every time my mother would refuse to let him. more

A few months ago I wrote about how my six year-old son suffers from anxiety, and I figured that it’s about time for an update. more

I saw the movie Race to Nowhere last week, and boy, did it scare the crap out of me. If you haven’t seen it yet, the brief synopsis is that our kids are stressed out to the point where it’s become dangerous. more

It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been a year since my father died. In some ways, it flew by, just like every other year seems to these days. more

I saw Waiting for Superman over the weekend, which, if you don’t know, is a documentary about the deplorable state of public schools in America. more

A few years ago, when my daughter was five, she asked me how babies get made. It was not the first time she asked, and my old ‘an egg and a sperm meet in the mommy’s tummy’ trick wasn’t working anymore. But how do they meet, she wanted to know. more

A few weeks ago I ran into a woman I haven’t seen since my son was in preschool two years ago. We were at the grocery store and started chatting in line, and she mentioned her daughter, who is twelve, so I mentioned that I just wrote a book for girls that age, and told her that she should look it up on Amazon. more

I was standing in line at the market this morning when the cover of Newsweek caught my eye. Man Up! was the headline, with an image of a well-built, shirtless man facing away from the camera, holding a little boy in his arms. The subtitle was The Traditional Male Is an Endangered Species. It’s Time to Rethink Masculinity. more

When I was in seventh grade, I had a drawer full of tee-shirts that advertised to the world all of the various horrors that I somehow managed to survive over the course of my brief, suburban, upper-middle class existence. For example, I Survived Sandy Run Middle School. more

My children are finally back in school this week, hallelujah, and a friend of mine sent me an email that had me ROFL (that’s Rolling On the Floor Laughing to those of you who are not fluent in text-ese; can you tell I write teen novels?). more