Adolescence is a rough time. Teens are acutely aware of relationships and social status, but they don’t yet have the psychological and emotional fortitude to let social struggles roll off their backs. They also don’t have the life experience to know that setbacks or failures are temporary and can overcome.

Have you ever heard of emotional labor? The concept has been around since the sociologist Arlie Hochschild defined the term in 1983. It’s essentially the work that we do, either professionally or personally, to regulate and present our emotions in a socially acceptable way—and to care for the emotional well-being of…

It’s understandable that pregnant women focus their planning on the impending delivery: whether it’s going to be a C-section or vaginal birth, at home or in a hospital, smooth jazz or total screaming shitshow. You might even have made up a detailed “birth plan,” complete with instructions for pain meds, lighting…

Hey there preppers! Remember when we talked about Doomsday Prepping for Non-Paranoid People? About how, in these uncertain times, we should all have a well-stocked emergency kit, or in my case, an emergency cabinet? If you acquired the basics of water, food, and gear six months ago, now is the the time to open your…

The census is in klaxon-level trouble. The decennial census, that once-every-ten-years count of the American population, is drastically underfunded. And what happens if it’s underfunded? A lot of people don’t get counted, so they don’t get what they need in terms of hospitals, schools, roads, emergency services,…

Last week, I saw another furniture recall: Ameriwood Home recalled 1.6 million dressers after a four-year-old child was injured in an accident involving a tippy dresser. Last year, Ikea recalled 29 million dressers after at least six children were killed by dressers that fell over. If you own one of the Ameriwood…

I suppose there are some couples who feel they divide household chores and childcare exactly 50-50 and are perfectly happy all the time and give each other foot massages every night. But for most people I know, every day is a particularly exhausting combination of whack-a-mole, an obstacle course, and a flogging. And…

Bats are woefully understudied. Perhaps it is because they are not cute, or because they’re nocturnal and we don’t see them very often, or, as “citizen scientist” Danielle Gustafson says in a Bloomberg report on a new bat app, because they just don’t have good P.R. in pop culture.

Right up front I’m going to say: It’s easier for a white nurse than a black motorist to say no to a cop. In a video released last weekend, Alex Wubbels, a nurse at University Hospital in Salt Lake City refused a cop’s orders to draw blood from an unconscious patient. Wubbels had hospital policy on her side as well as…

Childbirth injuries are no fun. For one, these are our tenderest bits we’re talking about here, places we generally want to be treated with kindness and respect. But what do hefty little babies know about kindness and respect? Not much. They’re coming out, by hook or by crook, and it can feel like they actually used a…

Maybe failed dieters need therapy for overeating, not food restriction, argues Claire Zulkey in the Atlantic. She describes the cycle that many dieters fall into: a controlled eating plan—this many ounces of cheese, a deck-of cards portion of meat, probably no Cheez-Its—and then the frenzy of overeating that ensues…

If you’ve been alive in the last, say, 10 years, you’ve been subject to the spate of articles claiming that smartphones are destroying a generation. Today’s young people, the argument goes, are more isolated, have shorter attention spans, and

In my family, we had a no-restaurants rule for our kids for about two years. This is because they ate either at lightning speed—which meant one of us parents had to gobble too, and then take them outside to whack sticks on trees—or at a snail’s pace, which meant the closing waitstaff was turning up the air…

In the early months of parenting, the ordeals are mainly physical: incisions, episiotomies, back pain, fatigue, breastfeeding. But once you’re through that particular hellish gauntlet, other challenges crop up, and by “challenges” I mean the totally absurd cost of—and lack of—high-quality child care in this country.…

A jogging stroller is an aspirational purchase. You think, I’m watching the kid, I need some exercise, I’ll just buy this smooth-rolling baby carriage and presto, an easy, close-to-home workout.

When I envisioned having children, my happy fantasies included curling up and reading my childhood favorites to my kids. I pictured evenings of Little House on the Prairie, Pippi Longstocking, and Little Women. When my two boys came along, I worried that their affection for board books about farm equipment meant that…

If you look at social media a lot, as I do, you might be startled by how many of your fellow Americans were...unbothered by Nazis and white supremacists marching in Charlottesville two weeks ago. In the days after the clashes in Virginia that led to the killing of Heather Heyer and the beating of DeAndre Harris, a…

“You know those ABC after-school specials where the parents get divorced, and they tell the kids it’s not your fault,” asks Catherine, a mom of three in Florida. “They lied. If we get divorced, it is totally their fault.”

I have one kid who’s a darter. He’s four now, so he’s a little better than he was when he was two or three, but still, visits to crowded museums and outdoor concerts cause me a certain amount of anxiety. My most recent terrifying episode was at a crowded park, where I saw him go into the monkey bars area, then I…