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This is a going to sound a little dry, but go with me: Five hundred years ago, Leonardo Da Vinci discovered that when a tree branch forks in order to grow two new branches, the total surface area of the two new thinner ones will equal the surface area of the thicker original—exactly. Each newbie, in turn, will produce two even thinner branches using the same formula....and so on, as the tree grows out and up, as if it has a brain capable of doing math.

Last week, NPR reported that a French physicist figured out why. By reproducing its area in this precise way, a tree is best able to withstand high winds and not fall over during storms and hurricanes. The writer suggested that architects and engineers might use its structure as a model for constructing buildings. I, however, am beginning to think I may need to use it as model for dealing with life. I'm no Renaissance-era genius, but it seems to me what the tree is doing is divvy the amount of space it takes up in the world—getting smaller and more flexible, the further it gets from its sturdy center, so that that it can sway when stressed.

These days, I have a pretty good idea of what lies my own sturdy center: kids, husband, job. About these things I am rigid. There must be time made for them, period! This has come about as a result of a brutal learning process, during which I had previous thought a lot of other things (say, my buckling tile bathroom) were also at my center. Sadly, they are not, and my first impulse was to chop all those other things off. No time to see friends for dinner? Then just don't have friends. No time to shop? Just wear your old bras until your babysitter sees the black one in the dirty laundry basket and thinks it's a part of a ripped spiderweb costume. But the truth is, these lesser things need to remain on the tree or you'll end up broken and blown away. The trick probably is finding the right branch for each expectation: a stout one for my friends (meet them for a quick coffee instead of dinner), a slender bendy one for my new bras (order several online and count on at least one fitting), and even a potentially breakable tiny twig for the bathroom tile (fix it next year...or maybe never). Not only will the structure protect you from high winds and stress, but it might also protect anybody who'd like to lean against you.

Read More:
How to tell if your bra fits
The stress-detector test

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As a preteen devotee of the original Baby-Sitter’s Club series, I strove to be as an inspired babysitter as the girls in those books. In return, my charges adored me: I recall one young boy saying, “Can’t we just watch a video? We usually just watch videos when sitters come over.”

What never occurred to me was that babysitters are a relatively recent phenomenon. Ruth Graham writes about the cultural history of the American babysitter in a smart, funny piece for Slate, explaining how the Depression created the babysitter, and dissecting the ways babysitters have been portrayed in the media, from the perfect (the aforementioned Baby-Sitters Club) to the bumbling (Jonah Hill in the new movie “The Sitter”) to the deranged (Marilyn Monroe in the 1952 thriller “Don’t Bother to Knock”).This piece is a must-read for anyone who ever was a babysitter, hires one now, or just enjoys smart analysis of American family life.

Read the original article on Slate, complete with an excellent slide show. 

Read More:
The Truth About Mothers and Nannies
The Nanny Dilemma

What if you were locked in your body, without a way to communicate with the world around you? What would be your first words after being “unlocked”? This is what Kate Winslet asked some of her famous friends, from Anna Wintour to Meryl Streep to Ricky Gervais, including their responses along with self-portraits with the hat in question in her new book, The Golden Hat. The book, a moving attempt to raise awareness for autism, was inspired by Winslet’s work narrating a documentary about a mother seeking help for her non-verbal autistic son.

I can’t get through the documentary trailer without getting weepy. The documentary focuses on Margret, a mother who embarks on a quest to get help for her 11-year-old son – she’s not even sure he understands what’s happening around him, or what is going on in his head. What these families go through, having kids they can’t communicate with – what the kids go through, unable to interact with the people around them! The thought of not being able to communicate makes me immediately, dramatically uncomfortable, maddeningly squirmy in my own skin. I’m sure that my first words after being “unlocked” would be, “Thank you.” 

A Mothers Courage trailer from Amothers courage on Vimeo.

Visit the Golden Hat foundation website to learn more, and to read the heartbreaking origin story of the golden hat itself.

Read More:
Jenny McCarthy Battles Autism
How Pet Can Help Autistic Kids

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You know what’s really super easy and fun? Making parenting decisions before you are a parent. My husband and I were anti-princess before our daughter was even considering sleeping in a tiara as she may or may not have done recently. The princess thing was, we knew, weird and anti-feminist and disenfranchising, and our kid was going to be busy working on long division, not waiting for a prince to come. Well, hmm. A few years later, we find ourselves engaged in the battle of the ballgown. Luckily for us, Naomi Wolf, of all people, says the princess thing is okay.

As Wolf writes in her great piece for the IHT Magazine, feminists have long seen fairy tale princess narratives as forms “of hypnotism, designed to seduce women into marriage and passivity...[but] If you look closely, the princess archetype is not about passivity and decorativeness: It is about power and the recognition of the true self.” It's certainly true of all the mini-princesses I know that their interests lie in the princessiness itself, and never in the prince. Come to think of it, I'm not even sure they know about princes at all.

So it rings true when Wolf equates princesses with action figures – role models that are both powerful and magical. The article includes a thorough exigesis of today’s princesses, namely, the inspirational Diana Spencer and Kate Middleton, both of whom embody the stories we like to tell about ourselves: that a commoner can become royalty, and that a princess can help the world through good works (and great dresses). Kate Middleton is pretty and fancy enough for any little girl to get into, and yet she seems smart and kind, too. Even Disney princesses get a pass; “They are busy being the heroines of their own lives.” As Wolf puts it, “Today’s princesses are visibly juggling a lot of balls, just like the rest of us working wives and single or married mothers.”  

So just because every little girl you know is leaping around in a pink sparkly gown doesn’t mean she’s prepping for a life of dancing and kissing princes, in Wolf’s words, “it just means, sensibly enough for her, that she wants to take over the world.”

Read more:
How to talk to little girls
Rebranding the whole "girl" concept

 

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There is an old "Phoebe and the Pigeon People" comic my mother found hilarious and had up on the wall of our basement playroom ("our" being me and my brother)—in the comic these hippie parents are explaining that they don't believe in gender typing and thus have given their little girl a tool set. Cut to the next frame, where the daughter is holding the hammer and saying for it, "Barbie, would you go to the prom with me?" The wrench girlishly replies, "Oh Ken, I'd love to!" I'm know the mother of a girl and a boy, and I get it: We think the differences between boys and girls are socially constructed and that we can outsmart them, but then we see how early the differences manifest themselves, as if by magic. But could it be that we are influencing how boys and girls act, perhaps without even realizing it?

At the recent annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, five researchers held a panel on this very topic, discussing the difference in male and female brains, and how superior the female brains actually are. (Kidding!) The actual findings can be read in this terrific summary on Slate, which details who's afraid to be "neurosexist" and which girls are whomping boys in math, but here are a two highlights for those of us dealing with actual little people:

"Anyone who dismisses boy-girl differences as cultural artifacts...isn’t accounting for similar patterns in animals, such as research showing that male monkeys prefer to play more with cars and less with dolls than female monkeys do." That's right. On one hand, any parent can tell you that little boys are magically drawn to wheely things, while girls will, you know, turn a wrench and hammer into dollies. But monkeys? Really?

"Maryjane Wraga, a psychologist at Smith College, presented research on stereotype threat, showing that women perform worse at mental rotation (compared with other women) when they’re told that men are better at it. So if scientists go around saying girls are bad with numbers, tests might appear to validate that prediction, but the prediction itself will be the culprit."

(Let us all now run to the girls in our lives and chant, "Girls are good at math. Girls are good at math.")

More:
Dr Oz on the differences between men and women's health
Why males and females react so differently to emotions
How (and why) to talk to little girls without saying "You're so pretty!"

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To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy family vacations are alike; every unhappy family vacation is unhappy in its own way. My in-laws love to talk about their much-scrimped-and-saved-for trip to Hawaii, which my brother-in-law allegedly spent scowling in the backseat of the rental car, reading "Dungeons & Dragons" books and refusing to look at anything. My parents often memorialize the infamous Boundary Waters camping trip when days of unceasing rain turned canoeing into Xtreme drudgery and sent my brother and I to the tent to read aloud to each other in a kind of REI-sponsored radio show. I could go on and on — after all, everyone loves to recount their bad vacations, like veterans slinging war stories.

After all, there's more to tell if everything went wrong. Holly Robinson writes of this phenomenon in her Huffington Post piece called, fittingly enough, "Cherishing the Memory of Bad Vacations." (Read the whole piece for some hilarious descriptions of family fun gone very wrong.) She writes: "Here's the thing: bad vacations are the real family keepsakes, because you survive them together (ideally). You have to play games or tell jokes, you have to get each other through the hail or the flat tire or the flu. Surviving a bad vacation as a family requires everyone to step up and show determination, loyalty, and yes, even courage. Blue skies, sunshine, and a white beach are all pleasant, but what fun is that kind of vacation to reminisce about later?" It's true—what I fondly recall about our disastrous canoeing trip is how my brother and I made our own fun, in a time of our lives when at home we mostly ignored each other.

A good thing to remember as we plan our own family vacations. Every time I organize even the smallest of weekend getaways, I am struck by an urge to make it perfect, as if each botched meal or tantrum-punctuated outing were a major parenting failure. But nothing ruins vacation fun faster than a stressed-out, crabby parent. Robinson's story of beloved, terrible trips seems to me a call to be easy on ourselves, to remember that the most disastrous family dinner or, ahem, holiday gathering might end up being the one you all cherish the most.

In the immortal words of Clark Griswold, "I'm just trying to treat my family to a little fun."

Give yourself a break:
A reformed perfectionist on setting yourself free
3 ways to focus on the positive

Photo: Thinkstock

In a world where 18-month-olds nonchalantly scroll through photos on smartphones, it's no wonder we're hearing about the Inevitable Death of the Picture Book. Last year the New York Times published a story about how more and more parents were forgoing picture books in favor of chapter books, in the hopes of helping their children get further faster in school.

Good thing it's the inaugural Picture Book Month for a few more weeks yet. Started by a group of authors, storytellers, and illustrators, Picture Book Month works to remind us of the value of actual, paper picture books, and how key they are in children's lives. Every day the site features a different children's book writer or illustrator, talking about why these books are so important. Some highlights:

Jane Yolen, author of more than 300 picture books: "I have always believed that literature begins in the cradle— the poems we say to the babies, the stories we tell them—prepare them to become part of the great human storytelling community."

Librarian and folklorist Margaret Read MacDonald: "This sense of owning a book—of having a book belong to them—sets the path to a love of books and learning."

Illustrator Elizabeth O. Dulemba: "People need three things to survive—food, shelter, and wonder."

The official Picture Book Month site has lots of ideas for ways to celebrate (even if you don't have a kid to read to), as well as information on the benefits of picture books. Personally, this is shaping up to be my favorite thing to celebrate this month. Let's see, I don't have to cook or clean or buy anything. All I have to do is pick a favorite picture book —I think we'll start with Oh What a Busy Day, or wait no, Knuffle Bunny, or wait no, Henry In Love—snuggle up next to my daughter, and read. 

More about books:
Picture books for grownups
A book for strong girls
Make reading fun for kids

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It appears that some day my tiny toddler daughter is going to go off on her own into the world (today, actually, if I’d let her). And it also seems to be the case that she may possibly have hard, bad, sad things happen to her, and she will feel upset, and this will be heartbreaking to me: whether it’s someone saying something mean about her, or her having marriage troubles, or, you know, losing a bid to be the presidential nominee. I’m sure she could bear anything – but me? I’m not so sure.

Dorothy Howell Rodham, the mother of Hillary Rodham Clinton, died early Tuesday, at age 92. According to the Daily Beast, Rodham had been living with her daughter since 2006, just before Clinton launched her campaign for the presidency. Whatever you think of Clinton, can you imagine how proud her mother must have felt in those days, and how worried for her child? Rodham moved to Little Rock to be near Hillary when her marriage was in trouble; when the Clintons were in the White House Dorothy spent time there too, helping to raise Chelsea and support Hillary. (Read the original article on the Daily Beast for a heart-wrenching description of the difficult childhood Dorothy Howell Rodham overcame).

This is going to sound silly, but this article was the first time I ever thought of the Secretary of State as being someone’s little girl, of how hard and weird it must be to be the parent of a politician, whose life becomes so brutally public. Isn’t it amazing, what mothers go through, and help us through? 

More about mothers:
Oprah on the value of motherhood
 The truth about being a mom

Men! What are they thinking? We can't always answer that, but we'll be posting our favorite glimpses into their world in this space every Thursday.



* For toy-lovers: The mother of all Hot Wheels tracks. (Devour)

* NPR investigates how we become sports fans, and even if you're consistently getting your heart broken by the team your father saddled you with as a child, take comfort in the fact that "sharing a team with your dad is a point of connection for both sons and daughters." (Krulwich Wonders)

* If sports never caught on with you, but you still want your dad—or uncle or brother or husband—to open up, here are nine easy ways to connect with the men in your life. (Oprah.com)

* "Picture the coolest brasserie in your hometown, that’s what this is. It’s the hottest-looking restaurant in this town. We have to get rid of a few stigmas attached to the word volunteering and making a difference."—Jon Bon Jovi on the pay-what-you-can restaurant his foundation has opened in Red Bank, New Jersey. (Grub Street; Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation)

Men! What are they thinking? We can't always answer that, but we'll be posting our favorite glimpses into their world in this space every Thursday.


* In the above video, renowned Australian chef Ben Shewry passes his father's wisdom about the sea down to his son. (Vimeo)

* And for a slightly less solemn take on parenting, read this hysterical John Jeremiah Sullivan essay about allowing the TV show One Tree Hill to film in his house—and then not allowing it anymore: "And so, for primarily petty and neurotic reasons, I made a decision that negatively impacted our financial future. It's called being a good father." (GQ)

* The many faces of Darth Vader. (Wired)

* How Sal Khan is educating the world, one video at a time. (O Magazine)

* And finally, real men are kind to animals: This gorgeous National Geographic photo of orphan elephants with their caretakers is a guaranteed smile. "It's not for the wages," explains one veteran keeper. "The more you're with them, the more you satisfy yourself. You just love them." (National Geographic)