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My daughter loves to read ''And Tango Makes Three,'' although we haven't read it in quite some time. She loves penguins and thinks that lil Tango is ''oh, so cute!'' Through the book and other real life interactions I believe that she has a good grasp on the idea that families come in many different varieties. But I've been intentional in this ...

In January of 2006 Newsweek put four white boys on their cover with the headline ''The Boy Crisis.'' Inside they told the tale that was so shocking that the myth grew so fast that the factual evidence that quickly came out was ignored. What was this myth? That boys were being left behind. By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in ...

In case you haven't heard, the Chicago Public Schools will be opening a few new schools next year and they are magnets plus a gifted center. So you CPSers know what that means - LOTTERY TIME! More choices in that whole ''school choice'' thing. In reality we know it's more school luck than choice, but put as the commercials say, you can't win if ...

We all know that the Chicago Public Schools are in a state of um, flux. They are trying things that other school systems don't do or maybe even, don't need. One of the experiments that seem to work in some schools is the Local School Council:Local School Councils (LSCs) are elected bodies at nearly every Chicago Public Schools (CPS) elementary, ...

Do you ever read headlines and you interpret them as your failure? That's what I did when I read yesterday that 1 in 4 teenaged girls have a STD.The overall STD rate among the 838 girls in the study was 26 percent, which translates to more than 3 million girls nationwide, researchers with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ...

This action alert just popped into my inbox from MomsRising.com: Right now, more than 40,000 kindergarteners are home alone each day afterschool, with a total of more than 14,000,000 school-age kids on their own afterschool. Surprised? The reality is that most parents work now, and there are too few affordable and accessible afterschool ...

What do you do when the temperature drops and it's Christmas time? Head outdoors, of course! A few weekends ago we took our daughter Lincoln Park's annual Zoo Lights with one of her buddies & his family. It's our third year attending with this family and we think it now counts as a tradition. Considering that our kids are both 4 years old, ...

The gift giving season is here! All the big stores have their catalogs out, the commercials are running non-stop, and Santa's waiting line is longer than the Hannah Montana ticket line. But here you are, burnt out on princess garb, too scared to buy anything from China, and frankly out of ideas for the girl (or boy!) who has everything. Look no ...

In part one we defined the problem with the increase in sexualization of girls, in part two we discussed some of the criticisms of the APA report, and here we'll talk about what we DO to combat our girls' childhood being taken away from them. Let's get to it! Luckily for us the APA report [pages 36-42] does an excellent job at suggesting many ...

When do you know when you are ready to have a baby? That question is fundamental to today's women. We have so many choices that it is overwhelming. A few years ago Sylvia Ann Hewlett tried to scare us all into getting pregnant by stating that if we're not pregnant by 27, our best eggs are gone! In her memoir, Baby Love, Rebecca Walker ...