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A view from the backseat
There was a plaid wool blanket in my parents’ car, just big enough to cover me when I would stretch out across the backseat. During snowy Massachusetts weather, I would wrap it around me, cocoon-like,...
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Why do we have bad science about only children?
I’m preparing to talk to a group of high school psychology teachers about “bad” science. (How is “Bad Science” not an eighties movie? Was “Weird Science” enough?) I’m reeling, as I have many times...
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Low fertility is about liberation, not economics
This month, the Center for Disease Control reported that birth rates had dropped again, for the fourth year in a row, bottoming out under 4 million babies born for the first time since 1998....
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The new vogue of hating motherhood
For the first time in five years, I rang in the New Year without a child to put to bed before midnight, or to wake me before dawn. In fact, I spent the last several days of 2012 giddily cramming in...
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Emailing (in angst) about other people’s second pregnancies
Otis reading my Time article on only children. From the when things start getting real files: I wanted to share an email exchange I had with my dear friend Julia this morning. Julia is a psychologist...
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The trouble with idealizing what we don’t have
You may have seen the Motherlode post written by an unhappy only child this week in the New York Times. It’s fairly typical of its ilk: my mother wanted more children, and I wanted siblings, and...
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Taking stock, fifty years after Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique”
Oy, it’s still this bad? Both fathers and mothers pay dearly for the miracle of parenthood, but in most cases, it’s women who pony up for the bulk of those costs, even fifty years after Betty Friedan...
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Having it All by Raising Only One?
Here’s what we don’t talk about when we talk about having it all: mothering less. Not willful child negligence, but simply having one kid, and no more. I’ve watched most of my friends tread into the...
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