All the weekly parenting news you probably didn’t have time to read last week.
– Katie Rophie, who famously compared newborn care to narcotics, wonders why single motherhood remains taboo, even in otherwise “tolerant liberal” circles. (Slate)
– Ketchup: Three decades ago, America was all but ready to classify it as a vegetable; today, the French don’t even want it as a dipping sauce. The French government has ordered school cafeterias to reign in their use of ketchup. And the condiment is banned from being served up altogether when traditional French dishes, like beef bourguignon, are on the (school lunch!) menu. (Fox News, via Babble)
– In an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association, two Johns Hopkins epidemiologists reaffirm the health benefits of circumcision, and call efforts to ban the practice “ethically questionable.” The authors also come out against cutting Medicaid funding for the procedure. (JAMA, via Science Daily)
– What do you do when your little boy wants to attend the annual Purim spiel dressed as Queen Esther? That’s the subject of one of the 19 monologues in “Motherhood Out Loud,” a new off-Broadway production that parses the range of maternal experience. (The New York Times)
– Over at Salon, one young mother who has begun to recognize her mother’s overprotective tendencies in her own parenting style searches for “the origins of the Jewish mother mentality.” (Salon)
– And Haaretz book critic Shoham Smith takes issue with the new Hebrew-language pregnancy guide “OMG, I’m Pregnant,” calling the lighthearted manual, which devotes ample ink to pregnancy weight gain and maternity fashion, a “dangerous” piece of “bimbo lit.” (Haaretz)
