From the NYMetroParents July Source Book issue, a selection of thought-provoking, laugh-inducing, and just plain interesting facts and quotes from the web and the world of parenting.
| Tale of a Tantrum
“Immediately all eyes turn to me to see what I was going to do with this child who is throwing a full-on tantrum in the middle of a teeny tiny grocery store. Rather than getting mad and yelling at her, I quietly picked her up off of the ground and tried to get her back in the stroller as quietly as I could—and I did it without yelling or screaming at her. Little did she know that I was going crazy inside. I was embarrassed beyond belief as a crowd was forming to see how I was going to discipline my child. I was angry that she was blatantly defying me and would not listen to a single thing that I had to say. And I was exhausted that it took me 15 minutes to handle a situation that I wasn’t prepared to handle.” —Lauren Jimeson (@amommyinthecity), a NYC transplant from Florida and mother of two little girls, in a post entitled “Testing my Patience” at amommyinthecity.com |
| “A helicopter hovers above, at a safe distance, with lots of insulating air between. Cyberparents, on the other hand, are squished right up next to their offspring.”
—Pamela Paul (@PamelaPaulNYT), editor of The New York Times Book Review and author of Parenting, Inc., in an article entitled “Cyberparenting and the Risk of T.M.I.” (nymetroparents.com/tmi) in NYT; Paul lives with her family in New York City. |
 “This is what I’ve struggled with so often as a stay at home parent: to what extent am I still entitled to time off? Do I earn it by baking muffins or cooking dinner or doing laundry or taking the kids to ballet/karate/the playground? Do I have to justify myself in the moments that I’m not caring for them or gazing at them beatifically or photographing them or even thinking about them?
—Jacquie (@After_Words), formerly known as BrooklynGirl, mom of a 7-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl who lives with her family in Fairfield County, CT, on her blog afterwordsblog.com, where she kvetches about parenting and suburban life |
| “How do you balance work and life? The truth is, you can’t. There is no magical 50-50 split between your life on and off the job. There is no ‘right’ answer.”
—Cali Williams Yost (@caliyost), CEO and founder, Flex+Strategy Group/Work+Life Fit, Inc., author of Tweak It: Make What Matters to You Happen Every Day, and mother of two daughters, on her site worklifefit.com |
 “With a little imagination (and maybe one too many late-night glasses of wine), I began to see parallels between a sixteenth-century Florentine prince and twenty-first-century motherhood and quickly became convinced that the same strategies that Machiavelli prescribed could also be applied to my kids.”
—and so began an experiment that mom of four and writer Suzanne Evans turned into her book, Machiavelli for Moms: Maxims on the Effective Governance of Children (Touchstone Books); and yes, she does claim to have eliminated yelling and nagging from her parenting repertoire, so maybe hardheaded rule can go as far in running a household as a kingdom! |
