It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons

Description

The most popular question any pregnant woman is asked aside from "When are you due?" has got to be "Are you having a girl or a boy?" When author Andrea Buchanan, already a mom to a little girl, was pregnant with her second child, she marveled at the response of friends and total strangers alike: "Boys are wonderful," "Boys are so much better than girls," "Boys love their mothers differently than girls. " This constant refrain led her to explore the issue herself, with help from her fellow writers and moms, many of whom had had the same experience. The result is It's A Boy, a wide-ranging, often-humorous, and honest collection of essays about the experience of mothering boys. Taking on topics like aggression, parenting a teenage boy, and wishing for a daughter but getting a son, It's A Boy explores what it's like to mother sons and how that experience may be different, but no less satisfying, than mothering girls. "

Andrea J. Buchanan is the author of Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It (Seal Press). Her work has been featured in the Christian Science Monitor, Parents, and Nick Jr. magazines, in the collection Breeder: Real-Life Stories from the New Generation of Mothers (Seal Press); and on numerous web sites, including hipmama.com and phillymama.com, for which she writes the popular web-syndicated column "The Dark Side" and her blog literarymama.com. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and two children, Emily (5) and Nate (almost 2).