Elana Sztokman

My 16-year-old daughter pierced her nose today. After months of negotiation and debate, in which her family members tried a variety of methods to deter and discourage her (ranging from the rational, “Won’t it hurt when you sneeze?” to the more primal “Eeewwww!”), I finally made a deal with her. I said she can do it on the condition that she lets me blog about it. How’s that for 21st century parenting? I figure, if she gets freedom of expression, so do I…. READ THIS POST ON THE SISTERHOOD BLOG OF THE FORWARD Read the rest of this entry →

As the air changes and we start to feel the occasional cool breeze marking the end of summer, I soak in the bittersweet emotions of milestones passing, the world shifting, and life moving on when we weren’t looking. This summer was my daughter Yonina’s bat mitzvah. The third in the family – we now have a houseful of teenagers, it seems – each event was marked differently, reflecting not only our evolution as a family but also the changing climate in Orthodoxy around girls in synagogue. Read the rest of this entry →

Singing the Pirates of Penzance with my five-year old daughter, Meital, reminds me that children are joy. Sure. But that doesn't mean we should be encouraging young couples to have lots and lots of kids fast, as did a recent Ynet columnist. I much prefer to hear the wisdom of Kolech's Malka Petrekovsky, a brave trailblazer in promoting family planning for religious couples. Read the rest of this entry →

The incoming Knesset, if all remains as it stands today, will have 21 women, the highest ever in Israeli history, or 17.5% total. This puts Israel at 68th in the world, along with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, slightly behind the Sudan and Lithuania, but remarkably just slightly ahead of the Unites States, which stands in 69th place with 75 Congresswomen and 17 Senators, or 17.4% and 17.2% female representation, respectfully. This is an improvement over 82nd place in the world, which is where we stood just yesterday. Read the rest of this entry →

All these years, I thought I was alone. I thought I was the only one who struggled nightly for hours on end, letting go any hopes of having some relaxing time with my family after a long day of school and work. I did not realize that everyone else who has school-age children in Israel also spends every evening battling homework.

I really did not picture parenthood this way. Before the kids enter school, nighttime is often a time of bath, books, stories, and play. At 8PM, all gets quiet and my spouse and I can have some quiet breathing time to remember what the other one looks like. But as soon as school starts, the dream of creating a family life slowly fades into the distance. My kids are doing homework until way past my bedtime, and there is never, ever a release from pressure. I find myself telling young mothers who are deliberating over work and home balancing that the balance is easy when the children are little. It’s when they get into school that they really demand your time. That’s when we have to teach them all the subjects that teachers drop in our laps.

This past weekend, I learned that I was not alone.

The new American First Lady Michelle Obama has declared that she is officially on a "mommy track". What can you do, her husband has the entire free world to think about, so he can't be busy reading bedtime stories to the girls. Of course, way before Barack was elected president, his career was already coming first. Michelle, like so many other women I know, may be a great mother, but she is also a model for women trailing men. Ruth Marcus in today's Washington Post explores how Michelle Obama has become more like Jackie Kennedy than Hillary Clinton, and what this election, in which we could have had a smart, savvy women for president and instead got a smart, savvy woman for "first mommy", has done for the status of women in society. A must read, in my opinion. Read the rest of this entry →

In the 15+ years that I've been a parent, I have probably been to over 100 parent meetings of different types. Since we've lived in four cities in three countries during that time, and since our four kids have switched frameworks a few times before finding the right match, I would say I have probably experienced close to 30 different schools and preschools as a parent. And from my informal observations, the one thing that is consistent across communities and continents is this: both teachers and parents at these meetings are predominantly women. Prof. Amos Rolider, an amazing educational researcher whose work I have cited elsewhere on the issue of school violence, recently conducted a fascinating study that confirms my observations. He claims that 95% of school events that require parents are handled by mothers. This is significant not merely because of the classic double shift that it places on women -- that women are doing a disproportionate share of childcare duties -- but also because of the implications for fatherhood. Kids need their fathers, Rolider argues with a passion for the common sense. Kids need active fathers, and fathers need to be around for their kids. Read the rest of this entry →

Here's a fantastic anecdote from my friend Reuven Lerner about how kids do prayer:

I used to take my daughter, Atara, to children's services every Shabbat, which I led. But somewhere around her fifth birthday, she lost all interest. But recently, she came back from camp and said she loved the prayers there. I asked her, 'What can I do to make the children's services on Shabbat better?' She laughed at me and said, 'Abba, you can't! You don't know how to play guitar!' It reminds me of the famous story from Camp Ramah lore: A child comes home from camp, and on the first Saturday night at home, the parents say, 'Let's say havdallah.' The kids replies, 'You can't - we don't have a lake!'

This is printed in today's Jerusalem Post. There is a running joke among parents this time of year: The kids' vacation is over on August 31, and the parents' starts on September 1. Well, not for me. I really do not see the start of school as a vacation. For me, as a parent, school is a lot of hard work. It's the morning routine, the afternoon routine, the homework, the meetings, the endless notes, the forms to sign, the messages from teachers, the arrangements, the special events and extra instructions, the packing lunches and constantly buying rolls and on and on and on. I always manage to miss something, despite all my efforts, and someone always ends up upset. Honestly, I hate school. Read the rest of this entry →

On a sweltering Tuesday afternoon during the August summer vacation, a 30-something woman with bleached blonde hair pulled back in a clip wearing a mauve and gold bikini stood at the edge of a shallow swimming pool in Maccabim, shouting instructions to a toddler in orange floaties, presumably her son. A meter away from her stood another bleached-blonde 30-something woman wearing a denim skirt, elbow-length patterned stretchy shirt, and purple hair bandana pulled over most of her shoulder-length hair, also trying to get the attention of her swimming child amid the throngs of little, wet, giggling and jumping bodies. Around these two women were clusters f chairs and tables filled with adults and their offspring escaping from the heat with water, snacks, and conversation. There was only one thing glaringly absent from this picturesque scene: men. Read the rest of this entry →