A Million Meals

While I take issue both with Dara-Lynn Weiss's actions and her projecting her own body issues onto her young daughter, it's indisputable that her anxiety over having a chubby child is one shared by many, many parents. Read More

One of my principal traits has always been my... let's call it willingness to eat almost anything and everything (rather than, say, greed). Read More

Why are parents, however well-educated and well-intentioned, so often frustrated and confused when it comes to feeding their children these days? Let's start with the mixed messages about diet bombarding us daily. Read More

One weakness of mine is that I tend to think of myself as being ruled by common sense. So it comes as a shock when I realize that my common sense is another person's crazy—or vice versa. Read More

Yesterday, for the second time in as many months, my third-grade daughter was called a lesbian by two boys she knows. Read More

Last week, I wrote about the steady erosion of institutional trust in America, and about how that strands parents, leaving them unsure of whom to trust to help them feed their children the right way. It's equally important for children to have someone they can trust to act in their best interests, and feeding is an area where this is especially true. Read More

Motherhood is full of joyful moments–and those not-so-joyful ones we agonize over. As you become more experienced as a parent, you learn to accept as what my friends and I call Bad Mommy Moments. Read More

A few years ago, I began hearing chatter about the theory that children shouldn't be over-praised, or praised too diffusely (e.g. hearing "Good job!" as a constant refrain to every tiny move they make) lest it damage their self-esteem. Read More

No one told me that eight was the age when my stick-like child would suddenly develop curves. There's nothing obviously adolescent about these changes in her body–it's all about rounding out what has hitherto been muscle and bone–though it's clear that's where we're headed in a few years. But that's the problem: a few years from now is when I was expecting to have to explain puberty. Read More

Perhaps it's having taken a break from writing for several weeks, or perhaps it's this blog's imminent one-year anniversary (though saying I'm "blogging" still feels embarrassingly age-inappropriate)--or maybe it's the big birthday that's looming for me next month--but I find I'm becoming increasingly impatient with much of the writing out there about parenting. Read More

After a long hiatus away from my own kitchen, in a place that has, sadly, forgotten the virtues of local ingredients (Greek supermarket grapes are now imported from Chile--need I say more?), I'm ecstatic to be back in the thick of the local produce bonanza that's one of midsummer's main consolations. Read More

Like all popular books with a moment in the limelight, The Battle Hymn of Tiger Mother managed to polarize parents and spark heated discussions amongst even those who hadn't read it. Pedantic soul that I am, I avoided weighing in until I'd made my way through the book. Having done so, belatedly, I encountered many surprises, including some unlikely inspiration. Read More

What do my kids want to eat? I have to begin with a confession: I rarely start planning a meal with this question topmost on my mind. My criteria for meals are (in rough order of importance): What do I feel like eating? What might my husband feel like eating? Read More

More than ever, people are fixated on food's long-term effects. Whether you focus on the health benefits of certain foods--bran, olive oil, fatty acids--or the dangers of others--trans fats, BPAs, refined sugar--or even if you don't particularly care, you'd have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the increasingly heated obsession with the links between diet and health. Read More