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    Valerie Isakova, Shine Parenting Editor

    Valerie Isakova, Shine Parenting Editor

  • The 10 Most Famous and Infamous Moms of 2012

    As we review 2012, we realize that a puzzling amount of parenting controversies involve breastfeeding. Why baby + breast should be such a big deal eludes us, but apparently it is. Read on to find out about the best (breast?) and worst parents and parenting moments of the year. ...

  • Should School Shootings Replace Abduction as Parents' Worst Nightmare?

    Every era has its unlikely but terrifying nightmare scenario that haunts parents, and often their children too. In the wake of the Newtown shooting, of course, it's school safety that's at the forefront of every parent's mind. "I want to weep, cry, and hug my kids," one Babble mommy blogger wrote. Another mother posted a controversial article on her personal blog saying "I am Adam Lanza's mother," and going on to confess her fears that her own mentally ill son might go on a killing spree. ...

  • Unsolicited Advice: Just Have the Baby

    To the lady I met at the grocery store café yesterday:You are the well-dressed late-30s professional who squealed when you saw my little boy, in his stroller, making a revving sound and running his toy car over his own legs and arms. He has big blue eyes, strawberry-blond hair, and comically fat cheeks, and he was loudly saying "bbbbrrrrrbbbbbrrrr beep! beep! bbbbrrrrbbbbbrrr". It was heartbreakingly cute, I will admit, though I am his mother. ...

  • Angel Grad Student Delivers Woman's Baby at Bus Stop

    They say that every woman's birth story is unique, but having a baby at a bus stop, assisted only by a grad student in English Literature with a cellphone and a shoelace is more unusual than most.Student Emily Brewer, 36, was heading for her bus stop at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill on Wednesday, with her almost three-year-old son, Dylan, when a woman she didn't know approached her and asked for her help. Brewer followed her into the bus shelter to find the woman's friend, in a squat position, heavily pregnant and in distress. ...

  • The Knot Tries to Help Weddings Flooded Out by Sandy

    Most brides have the fear of a disaster on their wedding day, and for many happy couples planning on getting married in storm-affected areas of the East Coast this weekend, those fears have been realized. Venues and caterers are flooded or without power, flights are cancelled, hotels are closed, transportation has ground to a halt in New York City and much of New Jersey.The bride's best friend, wedding site The Knot, is trying to help with a web page, "Helping Brides in the Wake of Hurricane Sandy," where vendors can offer services or brides can post for help. ...

  • Winners: Shine's "Halloween is for Babies" Extravaganza

    The winners are in! Thanks to all the wonderful Shine moms who sent in photos. See the full album of contestants <a rel="nofollow" title="" target="" href="http://on.fb.me/TsKMAT">here</a>. And the most hilarious costumes you inflicted on your babies were... <br>

  • Dying Woman Humiliated at Sea-Tac Airport by Security Search

    A young, female leukemia patient says she was humiliated by a security search at Seattle's Sea-Tac airport last week. Security officials lifted bandages from recent surgeries, lifted her shirt to check feeding tubes and broke open an IV bag of saline solution, all in full view of other passengers, according to a report by Seattle's KOMO News.More on Shine: My Breast Cancer Journey Part One: The DiagnosisThe Detroit-area woman, Michelle Dunaj, who is dying of leukemia, was taking an "end of life" trip to Hawaii, flying through Seattle. ...

  • National Bullying Month PACER Video's Cute Teen Stars Say: Be Nice!

    October is National Bullying Month, and the PACER Center: Champions for Children with Disabilities has rounded up teen stars like Annie Thurman from The Hunger Games (a home-schooled, 90-pound redhead who played the tribute from District 9) and mop-top Mikey Reid (Sinjin on Victorious) to tell kids that "the end of bullying begins with you."We love the message. But will the bullies listen? Those kids who bullied their bus monitor would probably chew the nice actors up and spit them out like so much playground gravel. ...

  • Mom’s Story: Writing to Survive a Son’s Prison Term

    As we get older and become parents, life gets hard in ways we could never have imagined. It happened to Raleigh, NC mom Max W. Miller, who describes herself as an ordinary middle-class mother who tried everything to control her rebellious oldest son, but did not succeed. Miller's son started selling drugs when he was a teenager. In 2005, when he was 19, he was sentenced to 92 months (seven and a half years) in federal prison. ...

  • Sultan of Brunei's Daughter's Wedding Might Cost $20 Million, is Going on for a Week

    Possibly the most lavish <a rel="nofollow" title="" target="" href="http://yhoo.it/PHJNtu">wedding</a> the world has ever seen is happening today, Friday September 21st, in <a rel="nofollow" title="" target="" href="http://bit.ly/P6w7XY">Brunei</a>, where the Sultan's daughter Hajah Hafizah Sururul Bolkiah, 32, is marrying a 29-year-old civil servant as part of a week-long celebration estimated to involve 2,000 guests and set to end on Sunday night. The ceremony itself, according to the UK paper <a rel="nofollow" title="" target="" href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2206241/Now-THATS-Royal-Wedding-Sultan-Brunei-celebrates-marriage-daughter-32-spectacular-ceremony-straight-Arabian-Nights.html?ITO=1490">The Daily Mail</a>, will take place in the Istana Nurul Iman Palace, a 1,700 room palace that's home to the Sultan and his family. The princess's older brother, heir to the throne of Brunei, married in 2004 at a speculated cost of $5 million, <a rel="nofollow" title="" target="" href="http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2011/02/photos-worlds-most-expensive-royal-weddings">reports say</a>, but wedding planner Maya Kalman, founder of <a rel="nofollow" title="" target="" href="http://www.swankproductions.com/">Swank Productions</a> in New York City confirmed Yahoo! Shine's suspicion that this wedding might cost much more than that. "The rule of thumb for our average luxury wedding is $1,000 per guest," Kalman says. "I would guesstimate that a no-holds-barred event like this could easily be $15 to $20 million." Those figures include only wedding itself. Additional celebrations throughout the week could be an additional $15 to $20 million, Kalman speculates. --Valerie Isakova <br>

  • Who Wants to Be a Sh*tty Mom?

    I'm just going to be humorless for a second and say, No. I'm not a Sh*tty Mom, and I'm tired of the juvenile, wine-in-my-sippy-cup culture that celebrates parents behaving like teenagers into their 40s. I will drink wine, but probably not while I'm the adult responsible for watching my kids, and I will do it in a wine glass. ...

  • Hollister Models Post Racist Photos from South Korea Store Opening, Get Fired

    Surf-prepster brand Hollister's dude posse of shirtless "lifeguard" models got into trouble for racist photos and actions at a recent store-opening in Yeouido, South Korea. 

 More from Shine: Hollister: Hell on earth One all-American-appearing brand ambassador in a "Hollister Surf Guard" t-shirt posed making fake "slanty-eyes" in front of local tourist attraction, Royal Gueongbokkung Palace and posted the photo on his personal Twitter account. When a follower commented 'please look at how many Asians liked that picture... ...

  • September 9th is Grandparents Day! Read Our Thank-Yous to Amazing Moms and Dads

    If you are a parent in America, chances are your parents--now repossessed by some small people and turned into grandparents--have been helpful this year. I know mine have been, amazingly so. When I'm done with this post, I'm going to call them, ask them to drive a 7-hour round-trip to take my son for four days (I know they'll say yes), and say Thank You, and Happy National Grandparents Day (Sept 9th). This, fellow parents, is an important holiday. Below, we asked some Yahoo Contributors to write open letters to the life-saving, dearly loved grandparents in their family. ...

  • Men: Do We Really Think They Can Be 'Over'? and What Are They, Anyway?

    Are men 'over'? This is really a question being debated, in new books like The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, by Slate editor Hanna Rosin. "Who wears the pants in this economy?" The New York Times Magazine asks this weekend, in a story adapated from Rosin's book that focuses on female bread-winners who have been forced into the workplace by their partners losing their jobs. ...

  • Diana Vs. Kate: A Style Comparison

    <p> Looking through iconic photos of <a rel="nofollow" title="" target="" href="http://yhoo.it/PD01Hz">Princess Diana</a> on the anniversary of her death on August 31, 1997 reminds us, once again, of how lovable she was. How photogenic, how stylish, how fully alive and still real she seemed in the firestorm of publicity that surrounded her. Her successor, <a rel="nofollow" title="" target="" href="http://yhoo.it/PvI213">Kate Middleton</a>, now Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, is enormously popular as well, and seems to have achieved some of her departed and dearly missed mother-in-law's grace, adding to it her own tough, polished aplomb. If Diana was a romantic princess, Kate is a professional princess. And if Kate struggles with her weight or her inlaws, none of us expect to hear about it the way we did with Di (and Kate's husband, and <a rel="nofollow" title="" target="" href="http://yhoo.it/RslEoN">his father</a>, and his father's <a rel="nofollow" title="" target="" href="http://news.yahoo.com/photos/britains-queen-elizabeth-ii-l-talks-prince-edward-photo-222315177--oly.html">mother</a> are probably thankful for that). Kate Middleton and Princess Diana have both also achieved status as style icons, in very different ways. Their signature looks for some of the same occasions and milestones tell us worlds about both their personalities, the style of their respective decades and the changing faces of womanhood.--Valerie Isakova <br> </p>

  • Can You Prevent Autism?

    For the past few decades, autism has been one of the scariest mysteries of parenting, with debate swirling around its definition, how rapidly the epidemic is growing, and most urgently, what causes it. 

That's why we were surprised to read a claim this weekend by science writer Moises Velasquez-Manoff in the opinion section of The New York Times that scientists have figured it out: In at least a third of cases, autism is an auto-immune disorder that starts in the womb. "The mother's attempt to repel invaders - her inflammatory response - seems at fault," the story says. ...

  • Fake Baby Bangs: Cute or Too Much?

    Would your little girl be so much cuter if only she had hair? We don't think so, but apparently the creators of Baby Bangs! do. This brand-new feminizing hairpiece for baby came to our attention here. It turns out to be the creation of "hair replacement artist" Lisa Griggs-Campbell, who started experimenting with the idea when granddaughter Wren was born without hair, as babies often are. ...

  • Transgender Kids: What Parents Need to Know

    The question is "What's so bad about a boy who wants to wear a dress?"That's the teaser for a New York Times Magazine article upcoming this weekend.There's no way to write about this subject without acknowledging that for probably 99 percent of Americans, the answer is self-evident: Boys don't wear dresses. A boy in a dress will be ridiculed by his peers and it's mom and dad's job to protect him from that. Even assuming you're in favor of (or indifferent to) adult men in a free society wearing dresses if they're so inclined, it doesn't seem like a choice a child is ready to make. And so on. ...

  • Study Indicates that Fighting in the Home Affects Babies, Even when They're Sleeping

    Surprising, but sadly not-surprising: A recent study, soon to be published in the journal Psychological Science, has found that children are affected, most likely negatively, by their parents fighting, even when they're sleeping. The kids are asleep! How can they know what's going on? That's why parents wait till after bedtime to fight!? But any parent whose baby has had a restless night, woken up crying or otherwise seemed to be responding to parental strife, even while sound asleep, may have suspected that the child is picking up on something. And those suspicions turn out to have grounds. ...

  • The Daily Essential Kids Aren't Getting Enough Of

    Many parents find that they have difficulty convincing their children to consume one of life's most basic essentials--water.Though of course, it's not that kids truly hate water-no thirsty person hates water--it's that they much prefer drinking juice, sports drinks or even soda.Related: Water is the new gold"I stupidly went down the juice-as-a-main-beverage path," one L.A.-based mother of a two-year-old told Yahoo! Shine, "And now C. thinks water is the devil's juice. ...