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    Lisa Belkin - Huffpost

    Lisa Belkin - Huffpost

    Senior Columnist, The Huffington Post

  • Here's Why IVF Is Becoming Less Likely To Result In Multiple Births

    In science, the astounding regularly becomes the commonplace, and such is the case with reproductive technology. The chart below illustrates how action leads to reaction, and how the spike in multiple births that has become to seem a little like the norm in recent years, may soon be a memory of an moment in reproductive time.

  • How I Met Your Mother (Or Father): Real-Life Love Stories From Parents

    Daddy and I met in the fifth grade. At the reunion, I saw Daddy across a crowded room and did not recognize him. Your Daddy shows me every single day that there is nothing more important to him than the two of you and me.

  • Author's Ode To Motherhood Is One You'll Want To Pass On To Your Friends

    The essay was printed in the paperback version of her first book, The Middle Place, about love, family, and her fight with cancer. There’s a new video, too, with a standalone essay, "This Is The Great Adventure," which you can watch above. “Cycling between the kitchen, the desk and the carpool, it can be hard to revel in the domestic litter of backpacks, laundry baskets and jockstraps, much less the cacophony of clashing siblings, or the near silence,” she says.

  • The Simple Gift Of Parenthood That Shouldn't Go Unnoticed

    Four years ago Jennifer Senior wrote a much-read cover story for New York Magazine about the paradox of raising children. Called “All Joy And No Fun,” it examined why anyone in their right mind has children since one study after the next showed that being a parent sure doesn't make a person happier. Today, Ecco Press publishes Senior’s book of the same title, expanding on her conclusion that while the day-to-day stresses are often greater for parents than non-parents, the long-term satisfaction and feeling of purpose can be greater as well -- an equation that the human race seems to have found worth it over time.

  • WorldPost Staff Compare The Ways They Parent

    In Tokyo, a single mother who works as an editor for HuffPost Japan rises at 5 a.m. each workday to pack a lunch for her teenage son before leaving for her office an hour later. In British Columbia, a news editor for HuffPost Canada nurses her baby, while her husband makes breakfast for their toddler. In Madrid, a HuffPost Spain editor and father of two school-aged girls says he has "chaotic" mornings.

  • 12 Lessons From Moms Who Raised Olympians For All Of Us

    My son was born a few years after the 1988 Games in Calgary, and by the 1992 Games in Albertville, I was stunned at how someone’s children were receiving these medals, and became misty at the sight of their beaming parents in the stands.

  • One Year After Sandy Hook, Newtown Families Have Just Begun Emotional Marathon

    A year ago, Mark Barden hadn’t really thought about his views on gun violence. Alissa Parker did not yet know she was a writer. Nicole Hockley spent her days as a stay-at-home mom in Newtown, the suburban Connecticut town she’d recently moved to after nearly two decades in her husband’s native England. It has been both an eternity and a moment since the Bardens, Parkers and Hockleys lost people they loved in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.

  • Millennial Women Are Closing The Wage Gap (For Now)

    If the goal is parity between men and women at work, the good news is that Millennials -- those between the ages of 18 and 32 -- have closed the divide more than ever before. Women in that group now earn 93 cents for every dollar earned by men, the narrowest gender wage gap since measurement began.

  • Will Anxious Parents Have Anxious Kids?

    Researchers have found evidence that we (well, mice) really can pass life experience down through the generations. A study this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience is one more data point in the field of “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance” -- marrying the cool detachment of science with the messy emotion of life, exploring how we are the product of our individual experience, and all of humankind’s. Specifically, a team at the Emory University School of Medicine subjected mice to the scent of acetophenone a relatively pleasant smell, somewhat like almonds or cherries.

  • Adoptive Mom Under Fire For Fantastical Children's Book

    Sitting in the pediatrician’s waiting room watching her 5-year-old fall apart was a pivotal moment for Berta Serrano -- as life-changing as the appointment in another doctor’s office when it was made clear she could not become pregnant, as clarifying as the Nepal morning when she met the boy who would become her son. Berta had thought he understood everything about how he’d come to be hers. “So little,” Berta had cooed when her son first noticed the infant.

  • Should Your Children Be The Center Of Your World?

    In the latest parenting post to go viral, Stephanie Metz reaches an important conclusion for all the wrong reasons. How will our sheltered, coddled, indulged children -- raised to believe the world revolves around them -- handle their first critical professor or unhappy boss?

  • The Family That Lives Apart, But Very Together

    How does a family define “home”? “For most people it’s where they do their laundry,” jokes Angela Anandadappa, who has more reason than most to be looking for an answer. Anish, 8 and Nishela, 4 -- live, work and go to school in a combination of four different states.

  • Should We Blame The Parents Of The Nevada School Shooter?

    I have been very public about my disagreement with those who would have guns in homes with children, and even going so far as to call it lax parenting. But is it criminal? And is punishing parents when children do the wrong thing the way to keep other children from doing the same?

  • Do You Snoop On Your Children? Do You Tell Them?

    It gives us more to snoop with (GPS tracking devices on kids' phones, keystroke surveillance on their keyboards) and more to worry about (a diary entry with a lock and key couldn’t be shared round the world with the click of a mouse). A Harris poll released today says that many of us do. Of the teens surveyed, 43 percent said their parents "occasionally" check the messages on their smartphones, and a corresponding 43 percent of parents say the same thing... that they monitor phones with their kids' knowledge.

  • One More Time: ARE Parents Happier?

    To those who believe that there is an inverse relationship between parenting and happiness, there is the parallel finding that these “parents find caring for their children to be much more exhausting than the work they do for pay.” So we are enriched by our kids, but all that enrichment can be tiring? Makes sense to me.

  • Are We Teaching Our Children To Cheat?

    With a broad, illuminating and discomforting brush, Lisa Miller’s written-to-be-controversial article in New York Magazine this week paints parents as ethically challenged at best and downright venal at worst. Parents persuade themselves that these little short-cuts and legs up aren’t all that big a deal, she says -- but many of her own examples really AREN’T that big a deal, and certainly not by comparison to the others.

  • A Very Hard Week To Be A Struggling Mother

    First the Federal government shutdown halted the WIC program, leaving 9 million mothers and infants without vital nutrition assistance. Then NIH turned away dozens of children who were scheduled to begin experimental cancer treatments, also because of the shutdown. The events are all examples of what should be the fundamental responsibility of society -- supporting and protecting its most fragile citizens -- and how we are failing miserably at the job.

  • Working Mother Magazine Announces 100 Best Companies Of 2013

    The “2013 Working Mother 100 Best Companies” list is out today, and, as always, it is a reflection of both the importance and the limitations of the of the ongoing effort to make the workplace more flexible and accommodating. As Karyn Twaronite, partner of Ernst & Young LLP and the EY Americas Inclusiveness Officer (EY has been on the list for 17 years and this year is once again among the Top 10) told me in an interview: “We want to be the most progressive firm for working moms. This year, for instance, the maternity leave requirement was changed from “some paid” time for new mothers to “at least one fully paid week.” Other policies that companies need in order to qualify: flextime, telecommuting and on-site lactation rooms.

  • What Parents Should Do When Kids Twerk In Their Face

    Most recently -- and publicly -- it was what Miley Cyrus more or less did for four much discussed minutes during prime time last month (click here to read the outraged complaints to the FCC). As Dr. Claudia Gold, the head of an early childhood emotional health program in Mass, told Time Magazine earlier this week: “Unequivocally, it’s a bad thing to do and certainly has negative long term consequences.

  • How She Changed Paths At 42 And Became A Bestselling Author

    Best-selling author Laura Lippman is a reporter-turned-novelist, whose best known character, Tess Monaghan, is a reporter-turned-sleuth. Lippman spent 20 years as a journalist, the last 12 at the Baltimore Sun, writing mysteries in her "spare time" until finally turning exclusively to fiction in 2001 after she'd already finished seven novels in as many years.