Abi Cotler O'Roarty

Say you're a woman with both a child and a mother in your life, a MWM. Perhaps there's even a grandmother still in the picture. MWMWM. If so, is it gauche to ask whose day is Mother's Day, anyway?

As a woman with two young daughters of my own...

It's all SpongeBob's fault? I knew it.

Such was my thought when I heard about that recent finding that watching just nine minutes of SpongeBob SquarePants can cause immediate short-term attention and learning problems in 4-year-olds. "This is why we don't watch TV in...

Currently, my 1- and 4-and-half-year-old are basically media-free. They don't watch any TV or movies and have only seen a handful of two- to three-minute YouTube clips in their lives. Well, okay, Ginger, the eldest, has just recently seen a Pooh-bear movie and "Babies" (a great first film) while sick,...

Recently I held a reading of a new anthology I have an essay in. I read aloud a sort of audio-word cloud of some of the words that polka dot its pages:

guilt, should, competitive-mothering, just a mom, bad mommy, crazy mommy, balance, fluidity, exhausted, having it all, choices,...

Family counselor, Waldorf educator and public school trainer Kim John Payne, M.Ed., says that when he would take on a new client, he'd often offer them a choice between a year of therapy, or having him spend just one day at their house.

"Many of today's behavioral issues come from...

The place was packed and several were turned away. We all arrived with the same baggage: the concern that the love of our children and our desire for them to be happy could make them miserable. When the film was over, we knew it could actually be true, miserable and...

Recently, 37-year-old, Andrea Staunch Green of Charlotte, North Carolina started a Facebook furor by posting a scanned letter to Washington Post advice columnist, Carolyn Hax. The letter writer wanted to know, what do stay-at-home moms do all day? Hmm. She claimed many friends in that role and they...

In the summer of 2008, my husband, twenty-month-old daughter and I subleased our place in San Diego and took off for Australia and Indonesia for three months. What else do families do with severance checks from Corporate America, we thought. The economy...

It seems patients of Dr. Robert Biter's are everywhere here in North County San Diego. For a long time now, I've enjoyed playing the game of mentioning him when I meet one and just buttoning my lips to listen to the glowing stories that...

Recently, my two kids and I stood alongside dozens of pregnant women, actress/activist Ricki Lake and hundreds of others to protest Scripps Encinitas Hospital. Some of the women holding up "Bring Back Dr. Biter" signs were so far along, they looked like they...