Families come in all forms. We’re just trying to live our lives and the question you might have considered innocent can sting us and our children. My two youngest kids are adopted from China, which makes them…well, Chinese. My husband and I are Caucasian, so you get a little more at-a-glance insight into our family […]
How can a show survive when at its core it doesn’t understand who its characters are? What their lives are actually like? Out of all the unbelievable things that ABC’s new sitcom Single Parents asks us to believe, the most outlandish is that there are five – count ‘em, five – single parents parenting children […]
Dear Dana is a bi-weekly advice column for humans who engage in romantic relationships. Please send your dilemmas, issues, conundrums, assumptions, conflicts, anxieties, worriments, obstacles, complications, predicaments, queries, questions, and any other synonyms for “problems” to deardana@rolereboot.org. Dear Dana, I think I would like to have a kid someday soonish with my husband, but when I […]
As much as I would appreciate an afternoon off from the physical demands of playing handball with my son, I won’t force the issue. My 10-year-old son, Ryan, is in the fifth grade and has never taken an after-school or weekend enrichment class. Not because we can’t afford it, thankfully. But because he simply doesn’t […]
What is it about this particular milestone that we hold so sacred that we’re humorless about it? Is it because school is the first environment our kids enter without us, and so serves as a proving ground of parenting? If your child is crying, is it because you haven’t done enough to prepare them for […]
I think the fundamental problem here is that our culture has made us believe that two apparently opposing emotions cannot co-exist. Sometimes Sunday is family movie night. I mean, to be honest, sometimes the kids have had so many screens by Sunday night that we can’t really in good conscience let them watch on more minute, […]
We need better options for memorializing impending parenthood than embracing a view of gender that, these days, would be unforgivably sexist in a detergent commercial. I keep waiting for the wane of the “gender reveal party,” one of the most widely-disparaged-on-social-media parenting trends since white people invented adding y’s to names that don’t need them. […]
Inspiration porn does not promote inclusion; it propagates objectification. Inclusion is the brass ring of the disability community. As the mother to a 10-year-old boy with Down syndrome, I constantly search for and even engineer environments where my son is welcome, places where the social constructs expand enough to accommodate a boy who doesn’t talk […]
