Retailers Pitch Tweens, Moms Age-Appropriate Wares

Selling advice to parents is just adding stress

(NEWSER) - Thanks to offhand comments from her son ("You're a mean mom!") and underhanded comments from other parents ("Your son's very competitive!"), Karen Houppert wakes up at 2:30am every day, wrestling with self-doubt. The newest parenting trend—family coaches to perfect your child-raising skills—joins the already $2.1 trillion "mommy market" of advice and enrichment for sale. "And what if you resist such costly 'enrichment' for junior?" she writes for Salon. Answer? "Bad mommy!" More»

(NEWSER) - Teens forced to move often by their parents’ jobs are much more likely to attempt suicide than those who stay put, MSNBC reports. Kids between 11 and 17 who moved three or more times were twice as likely to try to kill themselves as children who grew up in the same place, Danish researchers found. If a family moved 10 times, the likelihood of suicide quadrupled the average. More»

Think before offering 'constructive criticism,' then ... keep it to yourself: Warner

(NEWSER) - The maternal resentment has evidently been building up for a while, and New York Times blogger Judith Warner is letting loose. She recounts slights perpetrated against her and her friends and wonders: "Why do people so often permit themselves to dump—verbally, emotionally, with a surgically precise ability to wound viscerally—on mothers? And why do we put up with it? " More»

Average family now spends $1,078 on big dance

(NEWSER) - If you have a teenager nearing prom age, hopefully you've got good credit. Between dresses, flowers, limo rides, and hairdos, the average family with a teenager is expected to plunk down a whopping $1,078 on prom this year, up from $807 last year, according to a new Visa survey spotted by USA Today . "This is social-arms-race spending," says the head of Visa's financial education programs. "It's extreme." More»

Children of caring mothers have larger hippocampi: study

(NEWSER) - A mother's care may affect the physical development of a child's brain, a study suggests. Researchers found that preschool kids with more nurturing mothers had larger hippocampi than their peers by the time they were school age, reports HealthDay News, via the Philadelphia Inquirer . The hippocampus is a part of the brain that deals with learning and memory, among other functions. The study "provides very powerful evidence of the importance of early nurturing for healthy brain development and has tremendous public health implications," says its author. More»