50 Best Towns to Raise a Family

Avoid the five most common mistakes parents make with newborns

(NEWSER) - Babies don't come with manuals, so it's hard to get everything right. CNN asked pediatricians to spill: What are the most common mistakes new parents make? Their responses:

1. Letting your newborn sleep through the night.

'I wasn't always there for them,' he told biographer

(NEWSER) - Steve Jobs authorized a biography of himself so his four kids could "know him," author Walter Isaacson reveals in Time . "I wasn't always there for them, and I wanted them to know why, and to understand what I did," Jobs told Isaacson in their final interview just weeks ago at Jobs' home in Palo Alto. Jobs was curled up in pain in a ground-floor bedroom because he could no longer walk upstairs. "His mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant," wrote Isaacson, whose book will be published later this month. More»

Eden Prairie beats out suburbs of Washington, Boston, Seattle

(USER SUBMITTED) - If you follow the advice of Money magazine, you'll want to live in a non-diverse suburb of a not-too-gritty city. The top five places to live are Eden Prairie, Minn.; Columbia, Md.; Newton, Mass.; Bellevue, Wash.; and McKinney, Texas. The rest of the list is dominated by more suburbs and lots of towns in rural areas. The largest place on the list is Scottsdale, population 235,000, at No. 71. According to Money, the list spotlights places with "plenty of jobs, great schools, safe streets, low crime, lots to do, charm, other features that make a town great for raising a family." Read the full article . More»

Kids stress us out—but we still find them rewarding

(NEWSER) - Ask parents if their children make them happy and they’ll likely say yes. So why does almost every study on the subject show that having children tends to make people less happy—and that, in fact, many parents love their kids but hate parenting? In an extensive New York article , Jennifer Senior explores how parenting, and Americans’ reasons for having children, have changed over the decades. More»

(NEWSER) - The latest trend in nomenclature rings false to at least one person who recently realized that "Mom" has become "the now generic name for every female parent in our country." Thinking it over, Anne Albeck dates the phenomenon to the early '90s, but familiarity—and overfamiliarity—really does breed contempt. "Being called Mom by everyone from the shoe store clerk to the pediatrician is a little too intimate for me," Albeck writes for the Chicago Tribune. More»