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    Mariko Zapf

    Mariko Zapf

  • Why it's important for girls to see their dads do housework

    As a gift for your husband on Father’s Day, a good choice might be a simple mop. When children see both parents share cleaning chores at home, it can affect their career aspirations, especially for girls.

  • Vanity No Longer Bonds Me to My Elegant Mother

    Like my mother, Nana didn’t wear pants and wouldn’t socialize without wearing a broach. Now it is my turn to influence my daughter’s perspective on beauty.

  • How I Finally Learned to Quit Late Night Screen Time and Just Go to Bed

    On more than one occasion, I gave myself permission to look something up on the phone, but even if I then had the willpower to return the device to the drawer at a reasonable hour, I was no longer sleep-ready, according to Shawn Stevenson, author of?Sleep Smarter. “Just two hours of computer screen time before bed,” Stevenson writes, “was enough to significantly suppress people’s nighttime release of melatonin.” Moreover, he and most sleep experts agree that even reading on?an electronic device before bed makes falling asleep more challenging and results in less melatonin being released.

  • How My Kids’ Blunt Observations Have Helped Me Age With Grace

    What he wasn’t aware of was that, as a newly minted 40 year old, I had been applying Frownies adhesives at bedtime for months in a desperate attempt to mitigate the pesky grooves that were making me always look angry.

  • I Decided to Shut Down the Mommy Cocktail Party

    To kick off the week leading up to?Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life?— the highly anticipated revival of the quirky, poignant mother-daughter series that everyone, it seems, will be cozying up to on Thanksgiving night (12:01 a.m. on Nov. 25, to be precise) — we’ll be celebrating some cool moms we know and the parenting styles that are uniquely their own, through a weeklong essay series, #MyMomStyle.?