Every mom I talk with is worried about the food-related aspects of Kindergarten.  Everything from the brain-filling breakfast fuel, the lunch line, afternoon snack and of course, whether to have fresh cookies and milk waiting on the counter at three o’clock so as to entice a full report of the day.  Food is the bribe to get the goods on how many friends were made and whether the teacher is nice.

I’m not worried about the food.

I’m worried about the rest of it.

All of it.

All of me, mine, gone.

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It’s been 3 months since kindergarten started, and so I recently decided I was ready to scale the Mt. Kilimanjaro of child-parent socializing. Yes, it was time to set up a playdate with a parent who was not actually a friend of mine. A blind playdate, if you will. This had all been suggested by my child’s teacher after my 5 year old had a few social problems at the start of the year. “Set up a few playdates with kids from class,” she urged. “It will do wonders.”

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I have learned that “thinking out loud” when applied in the appropriate way can be very useful.  However, be careful: when used indiscriminately, it can cause trouble.

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Hi, my name is Lola Howle and I just became a “parent blogger” for Empowering Parents. Here’s a short run-down of where I am now: I recently got the Total Transformation program and began using it to help me with my 13-year-old ADD son. He is a genius at running over me, using abusive language, stopping just short of physical aggression. I look at my introduction to the Total Transformation as going back to Square One in my own childhood and learning structure, patience and logical consequences. I can’t remember ever having a curfew or structured consequences in my upbringing, so have nothing to draw upon in dealing with my son.

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This weekend I found myself repeating my mother’s words, who no doubt repeated her mother’s words, who no doubt was repeating the ancient wisdom of all the mothers before her. My litany went something like this:  “Get dressed, brush your teeth, clean up your room, wipe your shoes, don’t let the screen door slam shut (slam!) behind you!” ( Cavewomen  didn’t have screen doors, but I’m sure they said something along the lines of, “Don’t let the sabertooth skin flap into the fire” when their kids ran by.)

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“Mean Mommy” reared her ugly head again last week when my 5 year-old son glared at me, licked his lips, and spat on our living room floor. The look on my face must have been pretty scary, because he then squeaked, “I had a bug in my mouth! It was an accident!” and ran behind the couch to hide. I now understand what it means to “see red” when you’re angry, because I felt like a cartoon character with smoke pouring out of my ears and hot lava spewing from the top of my head.

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Here’s a dirty little secret: I long for the type of family bedtime that you see in the movies. You know, the one where the parents read their children a book, kiss them on their freshly-scrubbed foreheads with an “I love you,” and softly shut their kids’ bedroom doors at 7 p.m. Read more »

I was on the phone with a good friend of mine the other day when she stopped me cold with a comment about working moms. She said, “I never wanted to put my kids in daycare. I could never do that to my children.” It took me aback because 1) I’m a working mom and 2) I’ve never thought that having my son in daycare was a form of torture for him, or that it made me less of a parent somehow. As usual, I got flustered and said something like, “Er, well, it hasn’t been that bad…”

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