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My Family and Other Globalizers | There are no bad places – only unfamiliar ones
In India we wait for the rain, in Belgium they wait for the sun. But the celebration of “fine” weather, when it comes, is the same.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | Travails of the picky eater
When the child is hungry, she will eat, all the books told me. But my son could just keep going, skipping meal after meal until I broke down and took away the broccoli and fish...
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My Family and Other Globalizers | Parenthood is the test that most feminist husbands fail
Ultimately, even the most feminist of husbands often fail the equal parenting test because they assume less responsibility for the time-sensitive, human resource side of child rearing.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | Potty training can be a parent's personal Everest, or Mt Abu at best
Parents: the struggle is real, but worth it. #biology
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My Family and Other Globalizers | Practising motherhood on cats
Pets were to be our gateway drug to babies. They required care, grooming and discipline. They curtailed spontaneity. No longer could we just pack up our bags and leave for a vacation.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | Taking motherhood out of purdah
By failing to discuss the poo-soaked labour of motherhood, society conspires to set up mothers to fail.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | Horrors of plane travel
As all parents and fans of Dante are aware, there are layers to hell, and anything that does not involve caring for a baby on a plane, is in the outer circle.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | The Kahlil Gibran in every child
Every child has an inner Kahlil Gibran. Get down low and close enough to them, listen with attention and you might just hear the words you’ve always been waiting for.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | The value of kids as unpaid labour
The contemporary justification for having kids: they provide parents with so much joy just by being themselves that their existence vindicates their cost - in terms of time, career, opportunities forgone, and hard cash.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | The best parenting tip? Do less of it
Kids are not robots that parents can program, but their own people over whom we only have limited control.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | The joyous misery of parenting
Parenting can be profane, punishing, and painful. Being a parent can feel sublime, rewarding, and pleasurable.
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My Family And Other Globalizers | Teaching your kids by fighting with your spouse
We’re doing our children a disservice if we have them believing that relationships are about perfect consonance.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | Learning “incompetence” from our children
Being bad at new skills helps to develop a growth mindset: The feeling that the future is capacious and holds many possibilities.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | Raising readers
How to get children excited about books when their days are filled with gadgets and play dates.
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My Family And Other Globalizers | To be or not to be: A Tiger Mom
Amy Chua had kept her daughters up until midnight perfecting their Chinese characters, but I heaped Ishaan with praise if he merely managed to distinguish his “b” from a “d”.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | In praise of the letter
It is ironic that even as communication technologies have made it almost unimaginably easy to stay in touch with people across distance, people have in fact stopped communicating meaningfully.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | Raising feminist boys
If we want to the world to be a more equitable place, bringing up girls to be feminists is necessary but hardly sufficient, for it neglects a rather important part of the equation: boys.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | Nudity and kids: Where’s the line?
Touch is the first language mother and child use to communicate, but not all touch is equal.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | Generation gap: the only constant of parenting
Descriptions of my school years have the effect of a horror story on my boys.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | Some people believe in God, others in the Internet
The Internet can answer the most random of any child’s queries within a moment or two. It can inform them accurately, and entertain them endlessly. But only parents can teach them kindness.
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My Family and Other Globalizers | When home is the world
At bedtime, my younger son would pointedly raise the question to which I had no clear answer: “What does it mean when people say, ‘Where are you from?’ What is ‘from’?”
