Parenting

Tips for coping when your startup is out of cash

My company is running out of money again. Well, really, it already happened. But it's happened so many times that I am sort of used to it. It’s a routine. You may recall that part of the routine is not paying my electric bill. But there is more.
1. Focus on something you can control.
You might …

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6 Tips for being a CEO without ruining your kids' lives. I hope.

I get questions all the time about how I manage having kids and a startup at the same time. After trying to answer the question a few times, I realized that there’s the pretty-much-BS answer about how it’s all about being clear on your values. Or there's the complicated, too-long-for-interviews answer.
To really get tips for …

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Take Your Child to Work Day should be cancelled

It's time to admit that Take Your Child to Work Day is an outdated relic of 1970s feminism, and we can put the whole thing to rest.
Do you remember that the day started as Take Our Daughters to Work? It was the 70s, and women wanted their daughters to know that they could do anything. …

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Work stuff that makes me happy

It’s a season of joy, right? You are probably thinking that you can count on my blog posts to be a respite from seasonal joy. But still, I’m susceptible to peer pressure. Mostly because I think it’s an obligation of a friend to be sort of cheery. Because cheeriness is contagious. And on some level, …

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Feeling special is just as important as fitting in

Tomorrow is Yom Kippur, and you can bet that there will be no big financial announcements. This is because Jews make up a disproportionately huge number of people in finance. So when the Jews take off work for Yom Kippur, there is not enough liquidity in the financial markets for anything really big to happen. …

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3 Things to learn from the crashing careers of the super-rich

The market crash is going to mean a new era of banking, but it is also bringing along with it a few new ideas about how to manage one’s career. This is not the first sector to experience catastrophe, but it might be the wealthiest one. And we can all learn a little about managing …

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Palin’s children should take priority over being Vice President

Okay. Look. I wasn’t going to tell you what I think of Sarah Palin, but so many people are asking, so fine. Here it is. She is nuts. And the Republicans are nuts for putting her on a ticket. She has a five-month-old kid with Down’s Syndrome.
Why is no one writing about this? I have …

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Gen X are the revolutionaries (and the NYT coverage of shared care stinks)

How ironic that right after I post about dangers of Mommy Porn, the New York Times exacerbates this problem to include men. Take a look at the insipid photo that illustrates the article about shared care by Lisa Belkin.
But first, a disclaimer: I know Lisa, she’s super nice and fun, and she talked with me …

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The hardest part of my job is that everyone lies about parenting

When I was growing up, there was lots of chatter in the media about how models gave girls bad role models. Today that’s old news. What we should talk about now is how the media portrays moms.
Take a look at the spread in People magazine of Jennifer Lopez and her one-month-old twins. The photos are …

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Guest post: What life’s really like for a stay-at-home dad

I have never let anyone guest post anonymously on this blog before, but today is an exception, and you’ll see why if you keep reading.
Every time I write about stay-at-home dads, tons of them write to me. They always want me to tell their story. The only emails I get that say “contact me if …

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Advice from the top: Marry a stay-at-home spouse or buy the equivalent.

I just hired someone to take care of my house for $50,000 a year: A house manager. This is in addition to the full-time nanny I have. And the cleaning service. And the assistant I have at work.
I know the first thing going through your mind is that I’m loaded and I’m lucky. But I’m …

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Choosing the next company you work for: Leverage research about how Gen Y is parenting

One of the hardest parts of managing your career is getting clear on what’s most important to you in the work you do. And it’s ironic that the true-but-cliched exclamation from new parents — “the kids force me to see what is really important in my life” — comes after we have navigated …

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Quit work for a while to have kids. Your career will be just fine

It’s a myth that time away from the workforce will undermine your career. This myth is based on outdated ideas of the workplace. And it’s an important myth to bust, because in today’s post-feminist workplace, the majority of women say that given a choice, they would not choose full-time work when their kids are young.
Here …

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Stop thinking you’ll get by on your high I.Q.

My son’s I.Q. is in the top .05% of all preschoolers, but he attended preschool in a special education classroom. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism typified by a distinctly high I.Q. and a notable lack of emotional intelligence. Asperger’s is thought to be genetic, and it is surging among kids in places …

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Stop worrying that your twentysomething is lost

Here is an open letter to all the parents, aunts and uncles who write to me asking for advice about the twentysomething in their life who is an incorrigible underachiever:
Lighten up! No one should be labeled an underachiever in their twenties! The first thing you should ask yourself is whose standards are you using? …

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What to teach kids so they’ll do well at work

The skills that help us most in life are not the skills we learn from homework. In fact, Time magazine reports that homework is wasting kids’ time on a number of levels, and in his book “The Homework Myth,” Alfie Kohn rails against the massive amount of family time that’s lost to homework. Finally, …

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Business schools shift to accommodate the biological clock

Harvard just announced that it will change the timeline of business school enrollment as a way to attract “a wider range of applicants” Read: Women. Right now women start businesses at two times the rate of men and women do better in school than men do, but women make up less than one-third of the …

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Interview with Sallie Krawcheck, CEO of Citigroup's Global Wealth Management

I loved listeing to this interview with Sallie Krawcheck so much. I have been following Sallie’s career for years, and I had no idea I was going to see her in person until I showed up for the Forbes Executive Women’s Forum for a speaking engagement, and there she was, speaking right before I did. …

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Gen X updates outdated work and family goals

Every generation revolutionizes something, and Generation X is revolutionizing the intersection of family and work. There’s a new emphasis on keeping families together over career aspirations, and it’s what makes me most proud to be a part of Gen X.
Generation X knows that the belief that both parents in a family can have demanding, time-consuming …

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My own marriage and the myth of the stay-at-home dad

For those of you who don’t know what’s going on in my marriage, please read My First Day of Marriage Counseling, and maybe you will want to leave a comment about how if you were my husband, you’d divorce me for blogging about my marriage.
My husband, in fact, has brought up divorce for other reasons. …

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