Meg St-Esprit

For Brittany Daily, the owner of two daycare centers in Youngstown, Ohio, business never closed. Catering to the children of essential employees, she actually expanded services due to demand. “We are bleaching and sanitizing toys constantly,” she…

For over two months, America did a really good job of social distancing. We did such a good job, we began to pat ourselves on the backs. Cell phone movement analyzed by Reuters showed that the majority of us stayed home through March, April, and…

In Lowville, New York, Jessica Zehr just completed her nursing degree. Mother to twin 5-year-old boys, one of whom has Down syndrome, and wife to Elias, who is three years post-lung transplant, she has spent a great deal of time making medical…

In mid-March, as the nature of the novel coronavirus was becoming more clear, much was unknown about how bad things would get. Work-from-home orders and school closures began in Seattle in early March, and rolled across the nation over the weeks…

We have now entered the “social distancing” stage of the novel coronavirus pandemic, and parents know that kids find this impossible to do. The World Health Organization advises against touching your eyes, nose, or mouth, and keeping a 3-foot…

What is better than a giant animatronic mouse and his band singing happy birthday while a dozen kids chow down on mediocre pizza? What is more exciting than racking up points to earn tiny plastic trinkets that will break by tomorrow while parents…

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…

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…

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…

After a miscarriage, Stacey Ramsower, a doula, felt in turmoil. “I had this being pass through my body, but I wasn’t breastfeeding, laying in bed resting, or anything,” she says. Everything we do for mothers after birth “focuses on the physical…

Five-year-old Oren Lev in Pittsburgh is famous for his love of his “Raggy.” Raggy is a promotional towel that was given out when his family toured the Alcosan Sewage Treatment plant in 2015 (yes, this is an actual thing people do), and became real…

As of October 30, 370,000 Chicago students had been out of school for 10 days as the second-longest teacher strike in the city’s history raged on. Contract negotiations are bitter, teachers have been arrested, and parents and students alike are…

“The early stages of a cancer diagnosis is a difficult time,” Bridgett Spillers, a mom of three and two-time breast cancer survivor, tells Romper. “There are more questions than answers, and no matter how hard you try, it’s difficult not to think…

As a mother of four, I know that “every child is different,” but when it came to potty training my twins, it really was night and day. My eldest child basically decided one day to just use the toilet, so by the time our next two were preparing for…

As a child, the pure magic of Halloween — the ability to be someone else, to dress up as your best self, to be as silly or spooky as you want — completely captured my heart. Imagine how absolutely amazing it was, then, when my first baby was born on…

I grew up at the end of a gravel lane. While the farm down the road had an awesome haunted hayride every fall, we had no trick-or-treating whatsoever in our rural Pennsylvania community. We were one of those families that drove to the only version…

Homelessness and pregnancy are two incredibly vulnerable states, and when they intersect the risks to both mother and child are astronomical. A recent study by the American Academy of Pediatrics showed that infants born to homeless mothers were more…

Thurston Day is an 8-year-old who has been studying ballet since he was 6. A bit over a year ago, he came home saying he wanted to quit. “Girls in his class started to tease him, saying that ‘ballet is for girls,’” explains his mother Kelly, who…

At a recent early childhood event, 4-year-old Amelia Thompson was asked what wishes she would want to hang on “The Wishing Tree.” Her mother Erin, 34, of Bellevue, Pennsylvania, expected her daughter to name something outlandish, something…