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    Blog Posts by Mira Jacob, Shine staff

    • When being a "bad" girl is a good thing

      By Mira Jacob, Shine staff | Parenting – Tue, Sep 8, 2009 6:23 PM EDT

      What does society expect of a good girl? When author Rachel Simmons asked a bunch of middle and high school aged girls that question, the answers she got were nothing short of amazing. A few favorites:

      Blue eyes
      Always busy
      Quiet
      Polite
      Organized
      Enthusiastic
      Flirtatious
      Skinny
      Good grades
      No opinions on things
      Doesn't get mad
      Well rounded
      Popular
      Doesn't show skin
      Listens

      What? Aren't all good girls all of these things?

      Well, for those of us who were disqualified from the first answer (and the rest of us who failed to be both enthusiastic and quiet), Simmons new book, The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence, is a way out of the madness.

      No, this isn't the final installment in the Nancy Drew series. It's a practical guide, complete with worksheets, scripts, and q&a's designed to help parents avoid passing on a confusing set of values which "erodes girls'

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    • Is it OK to write the worst about your kids?

      By Mira Jacob, Shine staff | Work + Money – Thu, Sep 3, 2009 10:19 PM EDT

      It's fair to say that Julie Myerson was ready for the storm this time around. The author of The Lost Child: A Mother's Story, which chronicled her then-teenaged son's slide into alleged marijuana addiction, was ambushed by controversy upon its release in England last March. At the center of the controversy? The "lost child" himself, her now 20-year-old son Jake, who maintains that he is not addicted to pot, and that his mother exaggerated and even fabricated incidents in the book.

      "What she has done has taken the very worst years of my life and cleverly blended it into a work of art, and that to me is obscene. I was only 17, I was a confused teenager, I was too young really to know who I was or what was happening," Jake told the Daily Mail at that time.

      Still, in her New York Times interview earlier this week, Myserson was "cautiously optimistic" that the American release of the book this week would be treated with more understanding for her decision to publicly detail her

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    • The Daily Mira

      By Mira Jacob, Shine staff | Parenting – Thu, Sep 3, 2009 1:16 AM EDT

      So Swine Flu is on a comeback tour, Jaycee Dugard's 18 years in captivity has terrorized the collective parental mind, and Levi Johnston is critiquing Sarah Palin's mothering skills in a Vanity Fair tell-all? Sounds like the perfect week to go back to work!

      Hi, I'm Mira, Shine's new Parenting editor. As the parent of an almost-1-year old, I'm a relatively new mom and a slightly obsessive reader of all things related to parenting, which, as you know, can make anyone straight-up crazy.

      For the record, I prefer to think of myself as slightly crazy with a dash of wry. I also prefer to think of myself as a pretty good mom, a task that gets a little harder when faced with twin drumbeats of preparedness and paranoia. There's so much to know! So much to do! So much to know you were supposed to do! You know that dream where you show up at work/school/Dancing with the Stars naked? I've been harboring the take-away emotions from that moment since I became a mom. Exposed? Check.

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