Lisa Endlich's Blog, page 457

I Know How She Does It: A Review and Q&A with Laura Vanderkam

Not long after my second child was born I went back to work. I was grateful to have a new job, thrilled for the opportunity to be back on a trading floor and determined that having young sons would not hold me back. One day shortly after I returned to work my nanny called — and I know you saw this coming — to say that she had been sick all morning and could not longer watch my boys.

There is no way I could tell my boss that I was leaving work, so I did the only thing I could and called my hus...

Having a Baby at 40: A View from Down the Road

Pregnancy is a physical and emotional adventure like none other. As your belly grows, the list of questions you ponder grows, too – boy or girl, blond or brunette, your nose or your husband’s, and will you ever decide on a name??? Perhaps a little worry creeps in, and you long to count ten fingers and ten toes. When you can’t sleep at night, you think about the sleep deprivation in your future, and the inevitable stress a new baby places on a marriage, on a career, most likely both.

If you ar...

Mom Friends: Is It All About The Kids?

Mom friends. These are the wonderful women you met on park benches as you watched your toddler play or at the bake sale table for the third grade or even later on the sideline of a 9th grade soccer game. These are women you grew to love like sisters, the women who helped you raise your kids, the women you could not have managed motherhood without.

We confided our deepest fears about our children in our mom friends. We quietly told them that our child wasn’t fitting it, was struggling academi...

Mental Health in College: What Parents Need to Know

Dear Readers, I am just like you—a proud, tired, and often worried parent of two kids teetering on the brink of adulthood.

My daughter just graduated from a highly selective liberal arts college. She once told me, “I am majoring in my own sanity.” And over her undergraduate years, she studied through bouts of severe anxiety, producing a thesis that earned her high honors in disability studies and her first professional job.

My son, still giddy from his senior prom, is newly enrolled at a larg...

College is the Best Four Years of Your Life and Other Lies Parents Tell Teens

In the endless stream of advice we offer our teens, it is far too easy to fall back on clichés, well-worn turns of phrase or unquestioned ideas that contain only a shred of truth. Sometimes when I am heaping these meaningless, or worse, harmful, words on my kids I stop and think, is this really true or have I just heard it so many times I have come to accept it as truth? Here are a few of the aphorisms I have at one time or another offered up and why, instead, I owed my kids the truth.

Eight...

10 Commandments of Dorm Shopping

Outfitting a dorm room might be just one more shopping trip if it weren’t so imbued with expense, confusion and nostalgia. It is so easy to get so much wrong and wind up having wasted both time and money. We gathered our cadre of experienced moms and offer up these 10 Commandments, okay “guidelines,” to help parents just embarking on the college journey. We would love to hear any dorm shopping tips that have worked for your family.

1. Do Not Pay Full Price

Under no circumstances, at any time...

Parenting Pendulum: Have Parenting Styles Swung Too Far?

When my kids were small overparenting was all the rage. Parents competed with stories of out doing themselves to help their children. While our own parents might have made us a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, we went one better. We made the (organic) sandwich, cut off the crusts, sliced it into perfect triangles, put it on the special plate with the matching sippy cup and served it in front of favored cartoons. If our kids balked we even ate the sandwich for them.

But at some point the pen...

The “Mommy Track:” Interview on C-SPAN Washington Journal

The Mommy Track was a term that first appeared in The Harvard Business Review in 1989 and was largely criticized as a way women were shortchanged in the workforce. But in the twenty-five years since the debate began, women continue to leave their careers in droves as the pressures of parenting often give them little choice but to seek less-demanding work arrangements.

Lisa Heffernan, author & blogger @GrownandFlown, joins us from NYC to talk working mothers & “The Mommy Track” pic.twitter.co...

When Parents Ask Kids for Tech Help

Most of my generation related to the Super Bowl advertisement that showed an amazed Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel mystified by “The Internet.” I still remember the day email was introduced in my office and I thought I was pretty hip with my first huge cell phone. Today I email and text, have a rarely active Facebook page, use iPhoto, download movies, ebooks and audio books, listen to Spotify, and use my computer and the internet in various ways for my teaching. Still, I am self-declared “tec...

“In Defense of the Mommy Track”

Lisa Heffernan writes in Vox about the Mommy Track and the success that companies find when they manage it well.

Vodafone, the telecommunications giant, announced in March that it was changing its global policies for new mothers. Beginning this year, all women will be offered 16 weeks of paid maternity leave and the ability to work a 30-hour week at full pay for six months after they return. Vodafone made this policy change after it found that 65 percent of the women who left the company foll...