On Wednesday, New York City schools chancellor Carmen Fariña announced that every single one of the city’s 1.1 million public school students will now be offered free lunch, beginning on Thursday, the first day of the school year. As far as back-to-school news goes—hell, as far as any news goes these days—this is…

When I was in my early twenties I dated a guy who was just a nightmare. He played games with my mind, going back and forth between making me feel like I was the best thing ever and then making me think I made him sick to his stomach. Emotionally, I was a wreck. But things never got physical. Except once. We fought,…

Welcome to The Small Stuff, a sporadic series about liberating ourselves from the (often dumb) parenting habits we hate.

On Wednesday, Bill Cosby spokesperson Andrew Wyatt announced to Birmingham, Alabama Fox News affiliate WBRC that Cosby will spend his suddenly free summer touring around the country, speaking to young people in town halls about how not to be charged with sexual assault, and, yes, it’s exactly as bad as you’re thinking.

Of all the physical indignities of having a baby—the delivery, the breastfeeding, the mesh undies that made me feel like an enormous wounded sea creature snagged in a tiny net—the postpartum stomach pooch is among the worst. For many of us, our distended abdomens deflate eventually, given time and maybe a little…

On March 8, women from all around the world will tell people who don’t respect them, how important they are to the world. This day is very important to women because women are super important to the world, and today wouldn’t be today without women. The world wouldn’t exist because women are the ones who produce human…

How can modern parents raise the next generation to be free from corrosive gender and racial stereotypes? By the time children start elementary school, gender and race shape their lives in many ways that parents might want to prevent. As early as first grade, girls are less likely than boys to think members of their…

While much of the country continued to debate the ethics of protesting and punching Nazis, an extremely punk middle schooler threw a piece of wood at Donald Trump’s motorcade on Saturday afternoon. Trump was leaving the site of a rally in Florida where he’d implied that Sweden had just suffered a terrorist attack (it…

It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and my husband, our four year-old son, and I are coasting through the hills of rural Kentucky. Two days before, we’d driven from Brooklyn to Indiana to visit my family. Now we are en route to the Ark Encounter: a life-size recreation of Noah’s Ark, which happens to be nearby.

Bullying has already been on the rise, but since Tuesday, there’s been a surge in blatant racist bullying in schools. However you feel about the election, this is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. If your child is experiencing racist bullying and you don’t know what to do, here’s where you can turn for…

It’s been a heavy news night, hasn’t it, poppets? And on Halloween, to boot! So I think it’s only fair that we wrap up the evening with something pleasant: President Barack Obama flexing with a tiny Superman.

Still haven’t got your Halloween costume squared away? Well, perhaps some time in the archives will offer a solution. For instance, you could be a cranky cat, like this girl watching a Halloween parade in Anaheim, California, in 1962.

Last week, Donald Trump was widely criticized for kissing a young black girl who was brought on stage at a rally in Green Bay Wisconsin. As the mother of two daughters, 19 and nine, I watched in complete horror. And while Trump was dead wrong for forcing a kiss on that girl, there was something else on my mind.

Mike Lanza, a dad and tech entrepreneur from Menlo Park, California, thinks we’re experiencing a crisis in child-rearing: Boys aren’t allowed to play rough or run free, and moms hover nervously at the margins of children’s social worlds, chirping reminders about sharing and playing nice. The result, he explains in a…

Children have naturally different levels of daring, but little girls are told to be careful far more frequently than little boys. Watching a five-year-old girl encouraged by her dad to climb on top of a shed, then jump from that shed to another shed, is wonderfully refreshing.

Some Florida State football players visited Montford Middle School in Tallahassee yesterday, but Leah Paske didn’t realize it until later, when a friend sent her this photo of WR Travis Rudolph eating lunch with her son Bo, who has autism.

If you hear that your kid (or one of their friends) has head lice, your first reaction might be a mixture of disgust, panic, and an urge to disinfect everything in your house. That would be overkill. Head lice aren’t a health hazard, and even medication-resistant “super lice” can be eradicated with proper treatment.

Veganism has met a formidable match in the form of a bill proposed by the Italian government to jail parents who force their children to eat vegan.