Hitting is sure enough not good, and no parent should resort to it, probably. But "not hitting" in itself isn't enough to make you a good parent. It takes a lot more than that. Indeed, you can "not hit" until you're blue in the face and still do horrendous damage to your kids because you're a self-involved control…

There are women who get enormous satisfaction, plus cash bonuses, from the whole little Kabuki of affirmation that happens on the right whenever a woman denounces other women or spouts conservative Party Line in order to humiliate or marginalize women who have managed (whether deliberately or through the accident of…

The irrational but powerful fear that autism might be caused by something over which a mother has control (like eating the wrong food while pregnant), that it's somehow her "fault" if her child must struggle through life broken from the outset, is in fact probably the biggest single reason why the whole…

You're exactly right. I'm sure a lot of people had no idea about this, and it's actually a pretty important slice of our history. Anyhow, given what's going on in this country nowadays (including the growing phenomenon of conservative boards of education banning curricula that might 'stir up' racial issues) it's…

Ah yes—the fabulous parent who has raised terrible children, and simply can't imagine why, because she was such an absolutely great mother that it just doesn't make any sense at all. People like this always remind me of that anecdote about Joan Crawford, who was once asked by some fan magazine to list her worst…

"Aunt Ayn." It just can't be said.

Sabrina Erdley is taking a lot more heat for her journalistic failings than, say, Judith Miller or the other journalists (lots of them, some quite prominent) who lined up to send American kids off to die in Iraq and Afghanistan ever did. In fact, even the ghastly Miller ended up as part of the Fox pantheon with a…

Body cams and dash cams are good.

Two hundred and eighty three dollars? Gee whiz. Rush Limbaugh says you can get all the "birth control" you want for five bucks at any gas station in America, right up there alongside your Marlboro Reds and your Big Gulps and your stale Slim Jims.

The only time in my adult life when I've been vulnerable to the same kind of icky invasive touching behavior that children must endure as a matter of routine has been when I've been obviously pregnant, in the later months, and random people—some of them virtual strangers—have reached in with both hands to touch my…

This is a perennial issue. Mary McCarthy's The Group, published in 1963 and set in the 1930s, has an intense and brilliant chapter about a young woman, Priss Crockett, bullied into breastfeeding by, among others, her ambitious pediatrician husband, who wants to score points for his practice by establishing that even…

Yes, I'm actually getting kind of weary of blaming fascist politicians, Machiavellian strategists, and even the vile oligarchs who have well and truly gummed up the poor old country (I'm looking at you, Koch brothers). These people may all collectively be the Great Satan, no doubt they are, but they'd be as helpless…

And yet these idiots are still projected to win the Senate and a lot of state and local offices as well. So now, even as I mock the Republicans, I'm just hellaciously depressed about the American people in general.