April 3, 2025

By Courtney Wise

But first, Motherly features one mom, marketing executive Nicole Ramirez, who decided that  “Motherhood is just marketing.” Here’s why, she said: “My toddler hates fish but loves chicken. So last night, for dinner, I told him the salmon was ‘Beach Chicken.’ He cheered, ‘Yay! Beach Chicken!’—and ate the whole thing. It’s not lying; it’s rebranding. Know your customer.” (One of our editors, also a mother, laughed but disagrees; she says we have enough lying and “rebranding” going on already in our federal government.)

Finally, a mom and journalist who graduated from Barnard years ago delivers a stinging rebuke to the censorship, police brutality, and arrests of students in Ivy League schools who’ve participated in protests over the war in Gaza. 

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Retired grandfathers buddy up, staying healthy and nurturing the next generation

Jim Isenberg is outgoing and retired, a combination that proved difficult. After a lifetime of work, he found himself at loose ends, looking for groups for men his age. “There were a lot of things with grandmas,” he told NPR, but nothing for grandpas.  The search proved so challenging that Isenberg, with his friend Frank Williams, decided to found Grandpas United. 

In his role as executive director of the White Plains Youth Bureau, Williams saw an opportunity for the group. “A lot of guys don’t play golf,” he said. “What do you do? You can give back, you can serve. So many children are growing up without a male figure or a father. And here we have men who are retiring from work and careers. They have skills.” And now they’re passing them on – in JumpStart for Dads, grandpas share their parenting wisdom with the next generation, and a range of programs for those aged 5-21 is offered through the bureau as a support service. 

Every two weeks,  a group of grandpas spend lunch time with a group of fourth-graders at Church Street Elementary School. They talk and play games like Connect 4, catch, blocks, or even hacky sack. Along the way, the kids pick up skills they’ll need once they’re a little older.”One of the things we’ve pushed is getting them used to interacting with people who are adults,” said member John Steward. That includes teaching the boys how to shake hands and play board games. The boys say it’s fun. “He’s teaching me to play chess!” one boy playing with Steward excitedly told a friend.

Best of all, everybody benefits. The boys get emotional support and guidance from the men, while the men maintain their cognitive and social health. Social interaction like this is something retired men urgently need, said Linda Fried, a former geriatrician and current dean of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Besides offering meaningful connections and mental stimulation, volunteering reinforces the feeling that each grandpa can do some good and that good work matters. 

Doing all of that in the group helps them build strong bonds. “One of the things that I love about Grandpas,” said member Marc Sharff, “it’s not only with the kids, it’s the camaraderie and building new friendships. There are people I never knew before. We’ve developed relationships, and I cherish that.”

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Doctors begin to challenge childbirth drug testing

Hospitals in the US are obliged to notify child welfare agencies if a newborn is affected by substances. For decades, that’s meant they test patients in labor as well as newborns, often without their knowledge. Sharon Ostfeld-Johns, a physician at Yale New Haven Health, had done it plenty before a request came in from child welfare authorities that gave her pause. This mother had used cannabis to help her eat and sleep during pregnancy, and had been referred to the authorities as a result. Those authorities now wanted Ostfeld-Johns to test the newborn for drugs. 

There was no medical reason to do it. The infant was healthy and the mother had other children at home who were well cared for. What Ostfeld-Johns did realize, however, was that a positive drug test would cause harm to the family, so she refused the test, she told Mother Jones. As a medical researcher in race, bias, and advocacy in medicine, Ostfeld-Johns understood that her patient’s background, as a Black mother on Medicaid, would likely bias investigators’ decisions, potentially meaning her children could end up in foster care. 

The experience made Ostfeld-Johns reflect on other similar cases. “Why did I ever order these tests?” She thought, considering the hurt a test could have caused her, then a mother to a young son, and now to two children. “You try to imagine what it would be like if it was you,” she said. “The hurt that we do to people is overwhelming.” 

Looking into it later, it turned out she too had been tested for drugs during pregnancy, without consultation. Since the incident, she’s pushed for changes to her hospital’s drug testing policy – the network now only encourages testing to inform medical care. 

At Yale, where Ostfeld-Johns works, a policy change that followed her research on drug testing seems to have nearly halved child welfare referrals. There’s been no increase in the number of babies returning to the hospital needing treatment for drug withdrawal. “No safety events were identified,” she said. The data Ostfeld-Johns has collected confirms what Mark Vining has seen after similar changes at UMass Memorial Medical Center, where he serves as director of the newborn nursery. Reports to protective services are down, he said, adding, “I don’t think we’re missing babies” who were exposed to harmful substances. Besides, he said, a newborn drug test “rarely adds any information that you didn’t already know.” 

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Dad Calls For More Mental Health Awareness for Athletes

Brian Monday remembers his oldest child Eric as a kid who loved
wrestling but was himself wrestling with a greater private battle –
depression.

At age 21, Eric lost that battle.

Since Eric’s death in 2009, his father has been on a mission to help
youth confront the stigma and silence about mental health struggles by
training coaches to offer more support along the way. In 2019 in Vienna,
Virginia, he established the Eric Monday Foundation to raise
awareness about the stigma around mental health in the athletic
community.

“Nobody talks about players, or student-athletes and their mental
health and I think it’s important to talk about, even though it’s like a taboo,”
Monday said. “Nobody is immune. It’s part of a natural part of life
that we are going to go through some mental challenges.”

Alongside his wife, Holly Monday, he has partnered with
local organizations to amplify their message. Their focus is to work with community leaders, local schools, coaches, educators, and mental health experts to spread mental health awareness in an effort they call #TAKEDOWNTHESTIGMA. Read the rest of this Youthcast Media Group story here.

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In other news…

Are you the parent of a preschooler? If so, may your immune system endure. I say that with all the gravity Kathryn Schulz intends in this deeply relatable and hilarious essay, about the havoc young children wreak upon their caregivers’ general health simply by attending school. Read it here in the New Yorker. 

Want to experience fascism firsthand? Enroll in my alma mater, says author Fatima Bhutto, who was a freshman 25 years ago at Columbia University affiliate Barnard College. In a bitterly satirical essay in Zeteo, she explains to parents how Columbia students can get valuable first-hand knowledge of what it’s like to exercise free speech in an authoritarian regime. ”Think of the exposure your child will have to the finer workings of government at Columbia: raided and detained by ICE, beaten and arrested by the NYPD, investigated for terrorism. Where else can you experience fascism firsthand like this?…With Columbia’s innovations of censorship and authoritarianism coming at such breakneck speed, how will prospective students ever be able to keep track of them while deciding where to begin their college experience? It’s springtime, and your son or daughter is receiving envelopes and emails from admissions offices. Will they get into Columbia or its affiliate, Barnard? Should they go? As an alumna, I’m here to help.”
– D. Hembree

Before a Breath: Were I to ask my husband how many children his parents have, he’d answer three. His mother, on the other hand, has always told me four. Her first child, about 7 years older than my husband, was a beautiful full-term baby, she said, but born dead. More than 50 years later, the stillbirth continues to shock her. “I felt my baby move all the time,” she told me, convinced her baby shouldn’t have died. Today, over 20,000 pregnancies across the nation  end in stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more in the womb. With research finding that 25% of those deaths may be preventable, there’s more that can be done that the U.S. isn’t doing.. “Before a Breath,” a documentary film from ProPublica, follows three mothers of stillborn babies, as they advocate to make pregnancy and birthing safer. It is available to watch in its entirety on YouTube.

Adolescence, a gut-wrenching UK miniseries now playing on Netflix, explores the influence of the manosphere and internet culture on developing young minds, following the story of a 13-year-old boy accused of murder. Slate’s Rebecca Onion contends that the 4-episode program “is about the fracturing of society, and the way that kids transitioning between childhood and adulthood see it for what it is—and make up their own stories to explain it, for better or for worse.”  A terrifying, multifaceted glimpse into one of the worst nightmares a family can imagine, it’s a clarion call to parents, urging more awareness around what our children do online, and how to support them growing up in this strange interconnected world.

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If you or someone you know is in crisis or experiencing suicidal thoughts, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and connect in English or Spanish. If you’re a veteran press 1. If you’re deaf or hard of hearing dial 711, then 988. Services are free and available 24/7.

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