Words matter. These are the best Kim Brooks Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I have no choice but to admit that, for a while, I was a casual viewer of ‘American Idol.’ By ‘casual viewer,’ I mean I watched every episode aired between 2004 and 2007.
I’m sure all of us can find fault in our own education, and I certainly wished at times that I’d had other options. My own K-12 education may have been free and easy, but it wasn’t necessarily very good.
What an awful burden we mothers and fathers, Jewish and not, have to bear – to hatch a thing we love more than ourselves into a world so fundamentally unworthy.
It shouldn’t be normal to be anxious all the time about your children, so women should seek mental health help if they’re having excessive levels of anxiety.
When I first learned I was pregnant with my son, I had only two firm convictions about parenting: I knew it was important, and I knew that I wanted to get it right. I was 29 at the time.
Lke so many depressive, creative, extremely lazy high-school students, I was saved by English class.
A father who is distracted for a few minutes by his myriad interests and obligations in the world of adult interactions is being, well, a father. A mother who does the same is failing her children.
Motherhood has become a battleground on which prejudice and class resentment can be waged without ever admitting that’s what we’re doing.
Serious relationships draw us away from the circle of friends that seemed so adequate, so fulfilling. Marriage cements these inward movements. Children draw partners closer, but they can also draw you further away from the friends and lives you once knew.
We’re really doing children a disservice when we underestimate what they’re capable of.
It is impossible to make it a crime to take your eyes off your children without also making it a crime to be poor.
I love food, but I can’t bear to read about it, to talk about it, to discuss the consequences and context of how we consume it. And this is more or less how I feel about raising children, too.
When I earned my diploma from the University of Virginia in the spring of 2000, it never occurred to me before my senior year to worry too seriously about my post-graduation prospects. Indeed, most of my professors, advisors, and mentors reinforced this complacency.
I think that the expectation on parents has changed from giving your children shelter and love and support and guidance to this idea that observation and structure and sort of watching them all the time – that that’s what a good parent does.
The desire to keep television out of our son’s life was one of the few parenting priorities my husband and I agreed on from the beginning. We debated the pros and cons of co-sleeping, of pacifiers, of chemical-free crib mattresses and baby sign language. The television question, on the other hand, was a no-brainer.
In spring 2011, I was arrested for allowing my son, then 4, to wait in a car with the windows open for a few minutes.
A slice of perfectly buttered, warm-from-the-oven bread has been known to bring tears to my eyes.
I always knew my mother loved me, but I also knew just as surely that there were moments, hours, days, when she could hardly cope with her own life, much less motherhood. Often, these episodes came without warning, like a change in weather, and so I became a meteorologist of her dysphoria.
I love my husband. I love my family.
Having children, entering the realm of parents and parenthood, changes our relationship to the world in ways we could not have anticipated and might not have signed up for. Before I had children, for example, I believed strongly in the nobility of suffering.
People don’t think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They think it is immoral and therefore dangerous.
I think part of the way in which kids develop emotional and psychological resiliency is by having some independence.
We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second.
I worked as a restaurant hostess and tutored English-as-a-second-language without a formal work visa.
Sometimes we do things not because they’re fun but because they’re important.
We need to challenge this assumption that any child who’s alone, who isn’t being directly supervised and observed, is a child in in peril.
In college, I’d gone abroad to get away from a campus where I felt I didn’t fit in. And I started writing fiction, at least in part, because it was a way to feel like I was around people, to feel the energy and hum of others’ inner lives, without the real-time frustrations and difficulties of actual relationships.
I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-’90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility – no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading.
If you’ve driven your kids to the store, and you leave them for five minutes, by far the most dangerous thing you’ve done is just put your kid in the car and driven them to the store.
I had never intended to be a stay-at-home-mom.
