Jenny Odell’s best-selling book How To Do Nothing, which came out in April 2019, wasn’t marketed on its inherent appeal to moms and dads, but resonated with those of us feeling our time squeezed between our jobs, the ping of social media, and the…

After trying to conceive through nine cycles of IVF, unsuccessfully, Alexis Cirel’s doctor suggested she and her husband take a different route: a gestational surrogate. “It was a hard decision and it took months of introspection,” says Cirel, an…

When my number was called in the hospital waiting room, I was given a bill: $7,662.50 — $4,500 of which was due upfront to cover surgical costs of a dilation and curettage (D&C) I would have two days later. Small amounts went to the hospital…

February usually comes and goes with a few mentions of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks in schools, along with some modern-day Black leaders. But Black History Month is an opportunity to start an ongoing dialogue with kids about race and…

Alice Gottlieb recalls her doctor screaming at her so loudly that the entire office could hear. The topic was her weight. “He yelled at me because I gained five pounds,” Gottlieb says, thinking back to the time she ate Chinese food before her OB-GYN…

In classrooms around the country, young students are sharing Valentine’s Day cards with their classmates and friends to mark relationships and connections and show care for one another. However, this light-hearted rite of passage — often filled with…

When my firstborn turned six months old, I decided that this milestone was definitely worth celebrating. And what started as a one‑off event quickly became a family tradition: For my kids’ half birthdays I make half a cake (it looks like someone…

My 3-year-old is going through a potty-training regression and my husband still allows his mother to fold his washing, sometimes. In that respect, we are the quintessential millennial family: we are worried about hitting milestones, and parent our…

It would be great if we could anticipate, ahead of time, what we’ll get sh*ttier at after we have kids. New parents instead have to learn, like a toddler trying to jam a star-shaped block into a square hole, that you can’t fit 34 hours of effort…

Romper is conducting a year-long conversation with members of the Mom 2.0 community about how to "make it." Get inspired here. The person behind That’s Inappropriate, Meredith Masony, is talking to me via video-chat in her studio when her husband…

Our resident advice-giver-outer Jenny True provides shouty, full-hearted answers to your niggling questions about pregnancy and parenthood in her column Dear Jenny. Warning: This is not a baby-and-me singalong, this is about yelling into the cosmos…

Families of all different abilities drove hundreds of miles to visit Barbara Butler’s first adaptive play structure, The Magical Bridge Playground, opened in Palo Alto in 2015. Butler, an artist, had been designing and building custom play…

The Jan. 31 release of Miss Americana, the Taylor Swift documentary streaming from Netflix, has been anticipated in part because it promises to lift the veil on Swift's political evolution, and in part because we are used to orienting ourselves to…

Sometime around the 25th week of my first pregnancy my baby bump went from fairly invisible to the size of a child's soccer ball. From that point on, everyone wanted to touch it — everyone. The acquisition of my body into the public domain bothered…

Romper is conducting a year-long conversation with members of the Mom 2.0 community about how to "make it." Get inspired here. Pivot. Pivot. PIVOT. Why is shifting course, rounding the corner, so difficult? “Making changes is hard because we have a…

The blood begins to course down the door in a sheet that grows thicker and heavier, then thwacks its way up the walls with terrifying fanfare, exploding into a frothy wave: it is a horror scene, an analog for monster periods after birth. YOU KNOW…

It's hard to know if we should teach our kids to worry about nothing, or everything. It's easy to nail up "Be Yourself" banners in their bedrooms, and harder to explain why it is has been so hard to be ourselves. This problem is universal, but…

Our resident advice-giver-outer Jenny True provides shouty, full-hearted answers to your niggling questions about pregnancy and parenthood in her column Dear Jenny. Warning: This is not a baby-and-me singalong, this is about yelling into the cosmos…

Around the dueling pianos of work-life and home-life, there is a school of thought that says a true feminist doesn’t go silently into the night: she brings her baby to work. This way, she need not choose between career and motherhood: they will…