It's holiday time. And when we think holidays, we think family. Of course today, "family" is increasingly likely to refer to stepfamilies, the fastest growing domestic arrangement in the US and Great Britain.
Across the country, it's holiday time. That means holiday cards. These cards often highlight family and particularly children. Usually the card itself is a family portrait, or a portrait of the kids. Ever wonder why?
If you're a woman with stepkids, you might already know the answer. How are you and your husband or partner with kids celebrating Thanksgiving? With or without the kids? Together or apart? Your relatives, his, or both? Who's cooking?
Those trust funds of New York's finest families are fraying, as author Wednesday Martin describes Manhattan’s ever-shifting hierarchy of status.
The tribe of privileged parents I study and write about in my upcoming book Primates of Park Avenue (Simon & Schuster, June 2015) mostly summers in the Hamptons. But wherever you are for June, July, and August, you may be feeling the Dreads about Labor Day approaching. Anthropology gives us new ways to understand and handle the back-to-school, post vacation, return-to-regular-life Fall segue.... Hope you will have a read!
Are your kids at camp? Did you go to camp? When I was growing up in Michigan, sleep away camp was not a big thing. But now that I'm a Manhattan mommy, I'm surrounded by parents who send their kids to "sleep away" for all or part of the summer. Day camp is popular, too. On my Psychology Today blog, I write about why we send our kids away for the summer...
I have an eye twitch as I write this. I usually focus on the ways the tribe of Manhattan women with kids I study is different from other moms across the country and around the world. But in June I am reminded of the many similarities between contemporary privileged Manhattan childhood and motherhood and regular old childhood and motherhood in the midwest where I grew up several decades ago.
Developmentalist Jean Piaget famously observed that "play is the work of children." But in some places, work is the work of children. And that's not a bad thing.
Lacy Crawford, author of Early Decision, analyzes school application insanity.
The Manhattan tribe I study lives in a state of ecological release. Basically, that means life is good. As is the case for the fortunate of the industrialized world, subsistence is a given — my tribe are not struggling to get enough calories for themselves and their kids to avoid starvation, not by a long shot. They are not at war (even when their country is). There is little competition for abundant resources. And they face no predators (now that Bernie Madoff is in jail).