Disclaimer first: I haven’t read the book yet… but I want to!

Just reading about the book made me feel better about the times when I haven’t been a loving, kind, and patient mother. It also got me thinking about the intense judgment of other parents that I am guilty of.

I have to say, though, that I am sometimes surprised by how vicious the Ayelet Waldman detractors are. The stories in Rosalind Wiseman’s QUEEN BEES have nothing on the attacks Waldman has undergone. Talk about mean girls! Wow! Mean, mean, mean.

I am also looking forward to reading the new Michael Lewis book about his experiences as a parent. Loved his other books.

Now back to the point about mean adults — this is related to an idea a friend and I have been talking about recently, which is how parents are as guilty as their kids are of abusing digital tools. There’s so much talk about kids and their compulsive text messaging, their inability to live without technology, their cyber bullying, etc — but who is more likely to take a cell phone call at an inopportune time: a kid or his mom or dad? The person who isn’t worried about being grounded or kicked out of class, I would think. And certainly being a bad mother is deeply connected to ignoring kids when the iphone is calling or buzzing or ringing or whatever it is that the device can do. Then of course there are the snappy and biting comments adults make on blogs — and sometimes, if not often, anonymously. How do these compare with what kids do to each other online? Seems to me that kids don’t have a monopoly on any of this.