Avant Parenting Archives
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Avant! Welcome to my parenting blog archives
As you can see by the dates below, this blog is no longer being updated. However, there’s lots of good stuff here, much of it as true now as when it was written. Please feel free to browse, or follow these links: One last piece of parenting advice: Enjoy today even if it’s a rough…
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Helicoptering, hovering, and hyperextending, but holistically
Someone forwarded me the cover story from Time Magazine this week and asked for my opinion. In summary, it’s about what some are seeing as a trend in parenting, the trend already dubbed “helicopter parenting” and made famous by Lenore Skenazy, the author of “Free Range Kids.” Parents who parent too much, who hover and…
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Things we teach kids, and they teach back at us
So we were having our semi-monthly veracity talk with one of our offspring. You know the one: It’s not the wrong thing that you did that’s the real problem — it’s the fact that you lied about the wrong thing you did. The wrong thing you did would have wasted 30 seconds of you confessing…
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Thanksgiving off the shelf
My husband’s cousin sent a link to a very useful site: http://www.goodguide.com/ [See my article about it on Examiner.com] I enjoyed perusing it, and thought I might find it useful in many circumstances. However, it was a head-shaking, shocking realization to look at their reviews of their “Thanksgiving Food Collection” that they are probably spot-on…
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Making a school fundraiser pay
The first big fundraiser I was involved in was when my son was in preschool. The first year he’d been there, it was the usual stuff: a raffle, Scholastic book orders. Then the parents found out the financial state of the school — it turned out there was a five-figure hole in the budget and…
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Public health, groupthink, and my son's jacket
Statistical analysis, anyone? Yet another example of how people don’t understand how public health decisions are made… “I guess I am the 0.7 woman whose life would be considered expendable under the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s new recommendations on mammography screening,” writes a reader to the SF Chronicle. She points out that her potentially…