Parenting

When you try to organize a playdate, I feel sick, and I make up an excuse so I can decline your invitation. I lie because my kids can never go to your place for a play. Ever. Because I don’t like your husband.

I know a lot of parents struggle with how to have these uncomfortable conversations. My friends and I have talked — and laughed — about our boys’ questions and the approaches to them. Some of them laid it all out there for their sons early on. Others insist their sons still don’t know the difference between boys and girls. (Love you, ladies, but give me a break.) So when I was asked to write an article about how to talk to your kids about sex, I jumped at the chance. Here are some of the main points all the experts told me.

As a mother of boys, I find this trend disturbing. Yes, we need to build up our girls. We need to empower them and teach them that they are capable and viable and powerful — that they are smart and that they matter. But we cannot devalue our boys in the process.

Anybody who has lived through those early days of parenthood (and let’s be totally forthright, here… those seasoned parents, too) knows e

Let’s just all as a human race hold hands, sing kumbaya, and admit that ultrasound pics look like something out of Dia de Los Muertos rather than an actual human baby.

A weekly trip to Walmart would end in tears — first theirs, then mine. Them pining in the toy aisle. Me saying no. Over and over. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to buy my kids whatever they wanted, it was that I couldn’t.

You’d have a hell of a time if you ever dared to crawl through the recesses of a first-time mother’s brain.

This article originally appeared on The G