Photo Credit Illustration by Ben Wiseman This article appeared in the March 9, 2014 issue of The New York Times Magazine. Bones should be jarred, for their own good. Past experiments have definitively established that subjecting bones to abrupt stress prompts them to add mass or at least reduces their loss of mass as people…
Photo Credit Got seven minutes? We’ve got the app. Today The New York Times is offering a free mobile app for the popular Scientific 7-Minute Workout and the new Advanced 7-Minute Workout. The workouts, reported by Gretchen Reynolds, our Phys Ed columnist, can now be installed on your smartphone or tablet, or used on your…
Photo Credit Lars Blackmore When The New York Times started Motherlode in 2008, the name was a play on words that marked our entry into the world of parenting blogs. But like many readers, I questioned the name of a parenting report that, by definition, seemed to exclude half of all parents. Over the years,…
Photo Credit Illustration by Abigail Gray Swartz “Can you tell me again, Mommy? Can you tell me who decides whether I get to stay here?” I turn to see my 4-year-old foster son staring at our house through the back window of my car. We’ve just returned from dropping my 5-year-old biological son, Ryan, off…
Photo Credit Joyce Hesselberth Lenore Skenazy, a New York City mother of two, earned the sobriquet “America’s Worst Mom” after reporting in a newspaper column that she had allowed her younger son, then 9, to ride the subway alone. The damning criticism she endured, including a threat of arrest for child endangerment, intensified her desire…
Photo Credit Getty Images Middle school parent-teacher conferences are tomorrow and I can’t bring myself to think about going. It’s not the two hours I’ll wait sitting on hard chairs in the hallway, anticipating my allotted five minutes of playing musical chairs with each teacher. It’s that I haven’t heard a teacher say one nice…
Photo Credit iStock Sometimes every parent needs advice. For our occasional advice column, we post readers’ questions that we know (or at least suspect) plague more than one parent. You — the readers — provide the advice: How have you made this work better in your family? I invite an expert to add to the…
Photo Members of Diane Stanley’s family gathered in the courtroom on the day the five youngest children were adopted.Credit Diane Stanley has seven children in her home: her biological son, Cooper, 18; her foster son, David, 22, who is intellectually disabled; and five younger children whom she and her husband adopted in November 2015. Those…
Photo Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times One kid-favorite Panera cinnamon crunch bagel: 430 calories. Add a medium low-fat strawberry banana smoothie (260 calories) or even just a lemonade (240 calories), and your 7-year-old is well into his 1,600-calorie budget for the day. Of course, kids rarely finish what’s on their plates, and it’s unlikely…
Photo Credit Getty Images My father isn’t the first person to ask my son if he has a girlfriend. The question pops up frequently when we’re visiting friends of my mother’s over the holidays or talking to affable cashiers at the supermarket. It’s always asked in the same way — with genial good humor and an…