From our March issue, a selection of thought-provoking, laugh-inducing, and just plain interesting facts and quotes from the web and the world of parenting.
| RESOLUTION “Need to spend less time doing Sisyphean house stuff like organizing a bazillion loose toy and game pieces. As Sabrina would say, what-ever. When I am 92 years old, will I give a crap that I managed to keep every single Lego piece together? Exactly.” —Ellen Seidman (@LoveThatMax) on her smart, funny blog that, over the past four years, has created a vibrant and wide-reaching community of special needs parents and beyond; subscribe at lovethatmax.com for Seidman’s wisdom, advocacy, amazing product recommendations, but mostly for her heart |
| “Adults want to think that everybody’s nice to each other and all the bad stuff happens by mistake. None of them can remember what it’s really like, and none of them can do anything about it, either.” —the sixth-grade narrator in Eric Kahn Gale’s (@EricKahnGale) young adult novel The Bully Book (HarperCollins), which the NY-based author calls “an account of my life in elementary school through the lens of a mystery novel”—and which has been hailed by kids as “addicting,” by teachers as “enlightening”; go to harpercollinschildrens.com for related content for kids, parents, and teachers |
 “Travel with children is not always a postcard. There’s the getting there, and the being there, and the getting back home. This involves gear, planning, and patience in quantities unimagined before you started bringing them along.”
—Lisa Belkin (@lisabelkin), the must-read HuffPo senior columnist on life/work/family (huffingtonpost.com/lisa-belkin), in a post entitled “The Importance of Family Travel”; Belkin lives in Westchester with her husband and two sons. |
| WRONGFUL BLAME “Let me clear up a few misconceptions. For one thing, Asperger’s and autism are not forms of mental illness; they are neurodevelopmental disorders or disabilities. Autism is a lifelong condition that manifests before the age of 3; most mental illnesses do not appear until the teen or young adult years. Medications rarely work to curb the symptoms of autism, but they can be indispensable in treating mental illness like obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.” —Priscilla Gilman (@priscillagilman), author of “The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy,” in a New York Times op-ed piece entitled “Don’t Blame Autism for Newtown”; NYC native Gilman speaks frequently about parenting, education, and the arts, and is a scholar/facilitator for the New York Council for the Humanities; she lives in Manhattan with her family. |
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40% of adults say they feel their elder parents’ retirement plans are “none of their business” —from the recent Intra-Family Generational Finance Study conducted by Fidelity Investments (@Fidelity), which found that adult children are not only anxious about their own finances, but also their parents’ future health, retirement security, and estate plan; read more of the findings at nymetroparents.com/elder |
