parenting

Balancing Career and Family – Over Years

January 31, 2010

I hear a lot in the US about work-life balance. The concept is increasingly at the forefront of consciousness for both sexes, as both men and women think hard about the roles they want to play in the world and in their own families. Most large corporations at least pay lip service to the notion [...]

Read the full article →

Raising a Non-Believer

October 3, 2007

A reader has just written to me: “One was on an essay about “Religion as a Cause of Strife in the World” – you can bet she went to town on that!” this is a comment you wrote on Ross’ India Diary and i have always wanted to ask you why you believe that Ross [...]

Read the full article →

She’s Leaving Home

July 27, 2007

What with all the preparations, end of the school year, and various family medical traumas, I have barely had time to dwell on the fact that our daughter is about to leave home. It’s just as well that I haven’t had that time. Ross will be away for a full ten months (yes, I will [...]

Read the full article →

Raising a Confident Daughter

March 18, 2007

One of my newsletter readers asked for child-raising advice. Well, that’s putting it a bit strongly, but, apropos of my own daughter, she asked: “…what do you think contributed to her self-confidence and caring for others?” …and I felt an article coming on. Not that I have definitive answers, or simple ones. I have wondered [...]

Read the full article →

Dental Trauma

October 11, 2006

At five months, human babies love the world and trust everybody in it. When I took her in for a routine pediatric checkup, my daughter Rossella smiled and gurgled and laughed, assuming that everyone in the world loved her, and nothing and no one would hurt her. The checkup required that a little blood be [...]

Read the full article →

Young Lives Online

July 26, 2006

A recent New York Times article discussed how some American companies, before employing young people just out of college, are looking at how they present themselves in online communities such as MySpace and Facebook. Not surprisingly, many kids in high school and college use these “protected” online spaces to try on personas, indulging in the [...]

Read the full article →

KidSpace: Public Places Where Kids Can Be Kids

May 13, 2006

If I believe what I read in the media (and some bloggers), American parents are getting hysterical about MySpace. For those not in the know (if you’re over 25 but don’t have a teenage child, that likely includes you), MySpace is an online community with tens of millions of members, most of them adolescents and [...]

Read the full article →

Kids These Days: Italy’s Young People, and Their Manners

December 20, 2005

Lynn Truss, author of Eats Shoots and Leaves has a new rant out about how the world’s manners are going to pot, and her personal crusade to reverse this phenomenon. I totally sympathize. I ride the schoolbus in the mornings. That is to say, I take the normal bus line that goes down the hill [...]

Read the full article →

In Loco Parentis: Supervising School Trips in Italy

May 11, 2005

I wrote earlier about the traditional gita scolastica (school trip) which Italian kids take every year throughout their school careers. This year Ross’ class, along with another class, took a three-day trip to Arezzo (the town in Tuscany where Life is Beautiful was filmed), accompanied by their three favorite teachers. During the day they visited [...]

Read the full article →

Helping Kids Stay Safe Online

March 15, 2005

A guy (whose name I unfortunately didn’t catch) came to meet Rossella at the pre-vloggercon dinner. He teaches kids about computers, and had searched online for young videobloggers, finding Dylan Verdi, Ross, and some nine-year-old playing the piano. The man wanted to ask Ross and me what we thought about the safety issues of kids in online video. [...]

Read the full article →

The Family That Eats (and Drinks, and Talks) Together

August 25, 2004

News sources reported recently on a survey of American teens which shows scary correlations between the habits of the people kids spend time with, and the likelihood that they themselves will do various things (drugs, alcohol, sex). It seems that hanging out with the proverbial “wrong crowd” really can lead to trouble. The New York Times [...]

Read the full article →

Baby-Friendly

April 27, 2004

The NYT reports on the phenomenon of daytime movie screenings at which parents are welcome to bring babies – presumably the entire audience understands and tolerates baby noise. If people were a bit more tolerant in general, this kind of thing wouldn’t be necessary. Bringing a baby to a usually baby-less venue doesn’t have to [...]

Read the full article →

Life Without Buffy

November 27, 2003

We’re suffering Buffy withdrawal. Angel, the show which spun off from Buffy four years ago, is good, but it’s pretty much guy-centered. I have no complaints about watching all the good-looking men on “Angel,” but I miss the presence of powerful women, and the role model that Buffy provided for my daughter. Ross started watching [...]

Read the full article →

Bible Stories

November 7, 2003

When Rossella was still in preschool and I was travelling to the US a lot for work, I brought her with me several times on extended trips, usually while Enrico was also travelling for mathematical research. So Ross experienced daycare in several different places in America, which was good for her English, and gave her [...]

Read the full article →

Italian Brats

June 26, 2003

A survey cited by Zoomata says “a recent poll of 2,500 travel-industry professionals voted Italian kids the most obnoxious and unruly in the EU. … according to UNICEF, only 50% of parents [in Italy] reprimand their kids.” I’d have to agree that many Italian parents are over-indulgent with their kids, and many young Italian children [...]

Read the full article →

Raising a Bilingual Child

June 20, 2003

Our daughter is bilingual in English and Italian, and some people have asked “how we did it.” There really wasn’t much to it. While I was pregnant, I read the only book  I could find on the subject (The Sun is Feminine Amazon UK | US), which happened to be written (in English) by a [...]

Read the full article →

Farewell to Buffy

May 6, 2003

As mentioned in this newsletter long ago, we’re big fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and everything else by Joss Whedon, the show’s creator, that we can lay hands on). When Rossella and I attended a Buffy convention in London in 2001, we were almost the only mother-daughter pair to attend (the few other kids [...]

Read the full article →

Teenagers and Cellphones – Standard Equipment for Italian Adolescents

January 24, 2003

David Pogue, technology writer for the New York Times, mentioned in his weekly column (some time ago) some ways in which Europe is technologically ahead of the US. We’re certainly far ahead in the use of SMS (short message service), by which you can use your cellphone to send text messages to someone else’s cellphone. [...]

Read the full article →

When the Mom’s Away…

December 18, 2001

I began travelling for work when my daughter Rossella was in preschool. Sometimes I went for extended periods, and took her with me; she attended daycare in several different parts of the US, which was good for her English, and gave her exposure to American culture. For shorter trips, she stayed home in Milan with [...]

Read the full article →