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TAGGED : ask mary jo

Phone use column generates response

Last week’s column about phone use drew some reactions. Here are a few of the emails/texts I received: Q. Thank you! I have a 14-year-old, and we fought about phone use on the regular. I read your column of March 5th and took the suggestion of creating a contract with our daughter. We sat ...

Field kids’ tough questions with honesty

Q. I saw your recent response to a parent and thought – I can ask my question too! I hope that’s okay. I’m the mom of a very inquisitive 5-year-old. When I say inquisitive, I mean there isn’t an hour of the day when I’m not asked something. I actually enjoy it. She keeps me on my ...

Parenting with passion, commitment

Q. You were my teacher/mentor when I had a baby as a teen. That child is almost 21 and I have a 2-year-old. My husband is a great dad and gives compliments to my parenting. He sees the rest of my family and tells me that I’ve broken the cycle of poor parenting. If that’s true, it’s ...

No love for Valentine’s Day

I decided to rerun this column from Feb. 13, 2020, for three reasons. It echoes sentiment I continue to hear from young people, the peer educator response was honest, and it is especially poignant to me since it ran about a month before the pandemic. Q. I hate Valentine’s Day. I once loved ...

Snow days, middle school pose challenges

Responses to my Jan. 29 column on snow days: Q. As a parent, I reacted to your column about remote snow days much like the teen who wrote to you. When I was a teen, we did have days off for snow, but they weren’t like today. My brother and I would wake up to listen to the radio and then go ...

Snow day frustrations

Q.: I hate snow days. Wait a minute, let me explain. I hate the kind of snow days we have now. I don’t care if you call them remote learning or flexible instruction days or remote instruction days, they are horrible! I’m the kind of student who needs to be in the same room with my teachers. ...