She had ten grandchildren. Her life was BIG. Yet we shared an intimacy — a world unto our own — that I’ve found it difficult, in all my years and relationships, to replicate. We’d curl up and watch Remington Steele together (she had a thing for Pierce Brosnan). She made me an 8th birthday cake with a Barbie stuck in the center, layers of creamy blue frosting forming the skirt of her ballgown. Whatever I happened to be eating — pigs in a blanket, raw brownie mix, Cinnamon Toast Crunch — she’d pat me and say, “You enjoy, Cookie.” She’d tell me that when I was a baby, I’d sleep on her for hours and hours and just pee all over her, which made me laugh hysterically. She read Harlequin romances by the pile and only took baths, never showers, always with a shower cap. She had a signature perfume. She would have adored my kids.

I wonder what she’d make of sharenting. Of mom shaming. Of The Snoo. Read More >

When I was a latchkey kid in the ’80s and ’90s, there was a PSA that aired every night before the news: “It’s 10 p.m,” an ominous voice would intone. “Do YOU know where your children are?” This nightly scolding was such a cultural sensation that Andy Warhol and Joan Rivers recorded versions of it. Irony of ironies, it even inspired a Michael Jackson song.

It also perfectly illustrates how much parenting has changed in just one generation. Now, with phones and smartwatches enabling geo-tracking, and even devices that allow parents to monitor their teen’s driving speed or turn off their kid’s car music remotely, we are empowered with the tools to communicate with our children every moment we’re apart. Can you imagine parents today not knowing where their kids are at 10 p.m.? Absurd. Especially since they are probably in their rooms, scrolling TikTok. Read More >

Jett and Campbell “Pookie” Puckett can’t really go out anymore. In Manhattan, Jett says they get stopped for a selfie every 30 seconds. It’s not that different in Nantucket, Paris, Florence, Aspen, or wherever their life as a jetsetting TikTok power couple takes them. “It’s way too overwhelming, especially with Pookie being pregnant,” Jett, 34, explains via Zoom from his hunting lodge-style Atlanta home office. “When we go to restaurants, we need to arrange with management to have a more secluded table. Some even put security near us. And certainly, if we go to any sort of sporting event or concert, we have to be in a box or VIP area. As wild as it is, we can’t really be in the general public anymore.”

All it took was a big helping of Wife Guy Energy. The genteel content creators — he’s a finance guy with an JD-MBA from the University of Pennsylvania, she’s a former flight attendant who’s been... Read More >

Last spring, my kids and I rescued a bird. Until then, I had been only vaguely aware of a nest somewhere up in the maple tree in our front yard. But late one afternoon, while I was cooking dinner, overseeing homework and revving myself up to run the bath-book-bedtime gauntlet, a friend dropping something off asked if I knew there was a baby bird covered in flies dying in our grass. I did not.

My children, then 4 and 7, ran to the window and immediately demanded we save it. I felt an overwhelming urge to stick my head in the sand, return to my mac and cheese, and march on with our evening routine. If my kids go to sleep significantly late, I feel myself becoming unglued. Then again, I couldn’t see where “traumatic bird murder” fit into our bedtime ritual. So, after panicked calls to several local animal hospitals, I learned the following: 1) It was nearly 6 p.m., they were closing and, no... Read More >