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I was in my early 20s when Etan Patz first went missing. Children – anyone's – were the last thing on my mind. His disappearance kind of went in one ear and out the other. I didn't even know how to pronounce his name. I thought it was “Eaton.” I remember another editor at Good Housekeeping, where I was working at the time, mentioned his name and agonized over how horrible it all was. I gave her a blank stare. Almost four decades later, everything has changed. I now have a child of my own and though he's a teenager, that doesn't stop me from worrying. No one in their right mind would call me a free-range parent. I was a helicopter from the word “go.” I would barely let our son go down the hall to his bedroom by himself when he was a toddler. Thinking now of what these parents have gone through – How did we let him walk to school by himself? What were we thinking? We're the worst parents in the history of children – I can feel their guilt...

Though they both happened long ago, they are still among two of the worst experiences of my life. I'm talking about miscarriages.  Now a new study is finding that most people don't know the first thing about them, and what causes them.  It's not stress.  It's not doing something wrong.  It's not even alcohol or smoking.  It's almost always genetic -- something wrong with the chromosomes in the fetus. And even though this may soothe, somewhat, the women who suffer them, we still suffer shame, guilt and heart-breaking sadness.  The worst part?  No one talks about it. I remember after finally becoming pregnant with my son, mentioning in passing to a salesperson that I'd had two miscarriages (I can't for the life of me remember why!), and this huge look of relief spread over his face.  "My wife had one!" he said.  You don't tell people because you feel like you are defective.  Your body let you down, couldn't do it, especially some...

Big news. Unemployment can change a person.  But maybe not in the ways you might think. I was unemployed twice and it wasn't pretty.  It was actually quite depressing.  Both times happened in my 20s, and I wound up with better jobs eventually.  But only after a very long, dark period in my life. The first time, I was let go from a large company that manufactured chemicals -- pesticides, household cleaners, that kind of thing.  I actually flew around the country to interview farmers on their use of agricultural chemicals.  No surprise it didn't work out.  Of course it didn't help that the owner of the company tried to sexually harass me and I had nowhere to turn.  Come to think of it, that's why I lost the first job, too.  In those days you got away with it. Then I got one of my favorite jobs, working as an editor for Good Housekeeping magazine.  It was a temporary position and they let me go after six months, due to office politics...

It was one of the worst days of my life. Last week I learned that exercise may make you gain weight.  That's right.  I said, gain.  Not lose. I had been wondering about that for a while, as, last summer, when I ramped up my exercise routine - running, swimming, doing the elliptical, all in the same day -- I began putting on the pounds. I couldn't believe it.  Someone suggested I wasn't eating enough (yeah, right).  But I didn't start losing weight until I scaled back my exercise in the fall. Now a new study is saying it wasn't all in my head.  (Or the scale.)  I was right.  Gretchen Reynolds writes at The New York Times that this provocative new study shows that a substantial number of people who take up an exercise regimen wind up heavier afterward than they were at the start, with the weight gain due mostly to extra fat, not muscle. Say what? A recent review of studies related to exercise and weight control found that in most of...

Remember how Mom always nagged you to get your sleep?  She may have been right. At least, if you're a fruit fly. A new study says that " lack of sleep in young fruit flies profoundly diminishes their ability to do one thing they do really, really well – make more flies," according to newswise.com. Research   links sleep disruption in newborn fruit flies with a critical adult behavior: courtship and mating. Scientists, who investigated  the link between sleep disruption and human neuropsychiatric diseases, used the fly – which is far more genetically pliant than mammals -- to ask two basic questions: Why do young animals sleep so much? And, what is the implication of altering those patterns? What is the consequence of sleep loss? Increased dopamine in young flies (who sleep a lot) not only causes sleep loss, but also affects their ability to court when they’re older. “The flies spend less time courting, and those that do usually don’t make it all the way to the ...