Category — Parenting Headlines

I’m sure we all remember dreading homework in our own schooling days, but what if it is actually hurting us? Sara Ben­nett and Nancy Kalish wrote a book entitled The Case Against Home­work: How Home­work Is Hurt­ing Our Chil­dren and What We Can Do About It that addresses this question.

The truth, accord­ing to Sara Ben­nett and Nancy Kalish, is that there is almost no evi­dence that home­work helps ele­men­tary school stu­dents achieve aca­d­e­mic suc­cess and lit­tle evi­dence that it helps older stu­dents. Yet the nightly bur­den is tak­ing a seri­ous toll on America’s fam­i­lies. It robs chil­dren of the sleep, play, and exer­cise time they need for proper phys­i­cal, emo­tional, and neu­ro­log­i­cal devel­op­ment. And it is a hid­den cause of the child­hood obe­sity epi­demic, cre­at­ing a nation of “home­work potatoes.”

You can read more from Sara Bennett on her blog StopHomework.com, and you can pick up the book at Amazon.com.

Photo via NYTimes

If you’re a mom blogger, chances are you heard the recent buzz about the New York Times article entitled “Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy Building My Brand.“  The Blogosphere and Twittersphere reacted quickly and pretty loudly, with a lot of mom bloggers taking offense to the article.  Today, Meredith Lopez posted her thoughts on the article to the Huffington Post in her post “What It Feels Like For a Mom.“  In her post, Meredith gives the NY Times a fair shake, but admits to “feeling somewhat sheepish” after reading the article.  She goes on to share her reasons for becoming a mom blogger.

…while it was a teensy bit validating to read about how so many SAHMs are earning a little bit of extra cash by allowing advertisers on their blogs, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit put-down by the article. Maybe it was the fact that Mendelsohn compares mom-blogs to the Tupperware parties of the 80s (which my mom went to and bought us cool stuff that she still uses today), but I left the article feeling somewhat sheepish about, well, this space right here, where I update weekly on the goings-on in the world of new parenthood. The article wasn’t really that bad, but I got the distinct feeling from the tone of the piece that mom-blogs are seen as little more than a cutesy way for modern mothers to make themselves feel important.

Read the full post on The Huffington Post.