I'm going to confess something that might sound shocking coming from a writer who often takes as her subject the complex and sometimes dark experience of mothering young children . . .

My wife, Lael, and I had repeatedly been cautioned by our experienced friends to expect severe, relationship-altering sleep loss after the birth of our daughter. The truth was, though, that we looked forward to the challenge.

The other morning, I was digging around for something in the back of my closet when I found a framed photograph I’d stashed there in one of my fits of manic tidying.

When I was 32, three years into my blessedly peaceful second marriage, 16 months into the motherhood gig, five months pregnant with our second child, I sat on the floor of our New York apartment in stunned silence.

When my oldest son started his first day of Kindergarten I, like many mothers, cried the minute he sat down in his classroom. He was a big boy now. He was entering a new phase in his life, yet I still remember the first day I held him in my arms as a newborn.

My brother Sean and I were sitting at our round kitchen table eating lunch one sticky summer afternoon in the middle of my childhood, when my father opened the freezer to survey its contents and figure out what he’d make for supper that night. This freezer was always unreasonably disorganized and packed to the gills...It was like an unexploded mine, waiting to combust and assault you with frozen shrapnel the moment you opened its door.

Two types of safety education work well for parents and children and can easily be added to their family’s safety plans: pre-planned discussions and spontaneous opportunities to teach.