Author Archive
Posted April 30th, 2013 by Valerie Young
It is very loud in the second-floor meeting room of a public library in a medium-size eastern city, the noise coming from twelve toddlers, all under the age of four, running around the room. At this meeting of the local NAMC chapter, eleven group members have put their chairs in a circle in preparation for [...]
Posted April 29th, 2013 by Valerie Young
A lot of press about single mothers seemed to surface recently. I’m not sure why. It’s on my radio (NPR, Tell Me More) and in my morning paper (The Difference Between Feeling Like a Single Mom and Being One, WashPost, 4/18,2013). Whatever it used to mean, as an identifier “single mother” it is not very helpful [...]
Posted April 11th, 2013 by Valerie Young
There is a significant change coming, and I expect the lives of our daughters and sons may not play out so much like ours as we expect. Researchers looking at how we live, love and commit have found that women are less inclined to “put a ring on it” and willing to embrace motherhood without [...]
Posted March 23rd, 2013 by Valerie Young
I opened my daughter’s history book the other day and it hit me all over again. We may be in the 21st century, but our history is still the history of men. Men who were kings, who invented machines, conquered weaker nations, compelled religious conversions, made scientific discoveries, sailed to foreign lands, and slaughtered each [...]
Posted March 12th, 2013 by Valerie Young
This story originally appeared in the Woman in Washington blog. “Success for me is that if my son chooses to be a stay-at-home parent, he is cheered on for that decision. And if my daughter chooses to work outside the home and is successful, she is cheered on and supported.” –Sheryl Sandberg, NPR’s Morning Edition, March [...]
Posted March 7th, 2013 by Valerie Young
I could not be more delighted about the furor over Marissa Mayer’s nixing of the telework option at Yahoo! Really, it’s all good. Anything that puts the focus on women, motherhood and work makes me gleeful. The fact that these issues finally get a public airing has been so long in coming. Fully integrating women into all [...]
Posted March 5th, 2013 by Valerie Young
Trying to keep up with all the pixels and ink spilled lately about Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Marissa Mayer’s office roll call at Yahoo!, the 100th anniversary of the Suffragists’ Parade, all hot on the heels of the the 50th anniversary of The Feminine Mystique, has been making my head spin. I will simply have to [...]
Posted February 24th, 2013 by Valerie Young
My favorite part of the President’s State of the Union address was his plan for expanding pre-kindergarten to all four-year-olds. The idea has been around for decades, and it did once very nearly become law until it was vetoed by President Nixon. But in the past 40 years, two big parts of the early education picture [...]
Posted February 17th, 2013 by Valerie Young
As the 20th anniversary of the Family Medical Leave Act focuses attention on how unnecessarily hard it is to be both a worker and a mother or other family caregiver, Danelle Buchman writes of her own experience. She was a part-time employee at a organization too small to be covered by FMLA when she became [...]
Posted February 10th, 2013 by Valerie Young
Wonky Washington is making merry about the 20th anniversary of President Clinton’s signing of the Family Medical Leave. This was the federal law that required some employers to allow some employees to take up to 12 weeks away from work, without pay, to deal with the birth or adoption of a child, a family member’s serious [...]
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