The child psychologist Selma Fraiburg wrote about a phenomenon she called ghosts in the nursery: the unexamined, maybe even unremembered, feelings from our earliest days that haunt us when we become parents. We all have them, those unmet needs or wishes from our own childhood, the painful bits that creep in and affect how we parent. I’m sure I’m haunted by more than one, but the one I know best is the bedtime ghost of fear and loneliness.

The first murder I remember was a ghost story, told at my summer camp in Michigan. I was around 12, so this was in the time of disco. At night, in a dark cabin, a girl told the rest of us about her older sister’s friend. Or maybe her friend’s older cousin: one of those twice-removed protagonists of a supposedly true account.

Last weekend the New York Times published an article about women and marriage and names—a perennially complicated topic that touches on matters of family, identity, feminism, and choice. The piece, by Claire Cain Miller and Derek Willis (more on their names in a minute), states that more women are opting not to take on their husbands’ surnames upon marriage, instead keeping their original names—about 20 percent, they report.

Everyone’s favorite big box store made a big announcement Friday. Target will no longer direct shoppers by gender when it comes to the toys, entertainment, and home furnishing sections. No more “boy toys” and “girl toys”—toys will be shelved according to type (“dolls,” “building sets,” etc.) and no more implicit judgment on whether you ought to want that princess movie or blue camo sheet set.

Last week our family took its annual soul-crushing road trip: a cool 1,000 miles each way from Atlanta to the eastern end of Long Island. Along the way, my 8-year-old son got to experience a series of wonderful adventures: his first-ever visit to a Stuckey’s, corny staple of my own childhood road trips (they still sell Miner’s Gold gum!)

Homeschooling gets a bad rap. After all, perhaps the most well-known homeschooling family right now is the Duggars. Among some circles, they were often touted as a homeschooling success story. In the wake of revelations concerning eldest son Josh’s sexual abuse of his sisters, we’ve learned that the organization providing curriculum and support to the Duggars and other conservative Christian homeschooling families has rather extreme problems of its own.

“I’m not about to hire you if your name is Watermelondrea,” said former child star Raven-Symoné on daytime TV’s The View earlier this month. “It’s just not going to happen. I’m not going to hire you.”. The women of The View were discussing a video of the “60 most ghetto names” that was making the social media rounds as such things do (me, I probably was watching these baby goats cavorting in pajamas and missed the thing entirely, which I’d rather link to than the stupid “ghetto name” video).

A friend of mine, an experienced mother who had her children before I had mine, told me once that every parent would find one of the basic biological functions of her child a nearly impossible challenge. Other parents wig out over elimination, getting locked into potty-training power struggles, endlessly strategizing over their little one’s constipation.

It could be anything, the question that stops you in your parental tracks. A 5-year-old, his sweet voice filled with the kind of moral certainty that comes easy to a kindergartener, points out that smoking cigarettes is so bad and wrong: “Why would anyone ever smoke, Mommy?”. Or your 10-year-old, noticing for the first time that you don’t seem happy to go on the annual holiday pilgrimage to see your parents: “Why do you hate Grandpa?”.