The Whole Family Happiness project is two things: first, and foremost, it’s an exercise in exploring what it means to attach our personal happiness to a larger understanding of happiness as a kind of all-encompassing wellness that connects us with each other and the world. But it’s also this: a…

Dear Emilia, Today, you turn eleven years old. Ten years, ago, I wrote you a letter for your first birthday. It was a letter that I imagined you might read many years from that date, perhaps when you were eighteen. I wrote then that I didn’t know — couldn’t know…

Because we’re still stuck in a culture that contradicts our best ‘girl power’ intentions. — The current issue of Discovery Girls magazine has a feature on how to pick the right bathing suit, because apparently it thinks that girls (8–12, if we’re going by DG’s target demographic) should be worrying about that. Which, of course, they shouldn’t. But Discovery Girls magazine, for some reason, thought…

My Son Loves My Little Pony, And That’s Kind Of A Radical Feminist Act My seven year old son, Jasper, loves My Little Pony. A lot. He watches the show; he reads the books; he collects the mini-figures. He can tell you everything about the Equestria universe and the creatures who live there. He can tell you, for example, that the world of My…

Because it sends the wrong message to girls — and to boys. The whole conversation started because I don’t like the word “tomboy.” “Mommy,” my daughter Emilia said to me one day some months ago, “I think that I’m a tomboy.” “What makes you say that?” “Because I like a…