David Altshuler, M.S.
(305) 978-8917 | [email protected]

Category: Parenting

The City Mouse and the Country Mouse

  Running with half a dozen buddies in the early morning on New Year’s Day, I asked a  friend what she and her teen-aged children had done the night before. “Just stayed home and played Parcheesi,” Danielle said. “Then the kids and I started to watch a movie, but I

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Bear With Me

In June of 1973, eight of my Troop 64 buddies and I hiked a portion of the Appalachian Trail in Western North Carolina for a week. Although the exact locations and distances of this trek are lost to memory, it is no exaggeration to say that the last words we

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Constructive Criticism

The woman at the 72nd Street pay phone had strands of dirty tinfoil in her matted hair and an enormous collection of broken pieces of plastic in her rusty shopping cart. She turned to show me the enormous ring of keys in her hand, insisting that one of them would

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Zits Okay!

To promote my new book, Love the Kid You Get. Get the Kid You Love, I was pleased to be interviewed by Roxy Vargas of “Six in the Mix.” I was not nervous about being on television having participated in this medium once before–with Chuck Zinc or, “Skipper Chuck” as

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Some Expert

As long suffering readers will doubtless acknowledge, I am all about making brownies with young children. Making brownies is all about math: if three teaspoons is one table spoon, how many teaspoons is two table spoons? Making brownies is all about chemistry: mixtures, combinations, reactions, and-more rarely-explosions. Making brownies is

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Kill the Ref

Can you imagine? A gentle reader suggested to this author recently that I am harsh and–gasp!–judgmental. My thoughtful critic went on to say that I give advice (if I remember correctly, the word “pontificate” was bandied about like undergarments on a clothesline) but no solutions and that what I recommend

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Enough is Enough

This column will be just as helpful without the joke—equal parts old, offensive, and terrible—in the following paragraph:Having fasted for three days waiting in the snow, the woman is told by the disciples that she may finally speak to the great guru whom she has traveled half a world to

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Helpful Running

As dedicated readers of these Tuesday newsletters are endlessly aware, I have been running with the same group of balding, paunchy, sweaty, middle-aged folks for a number of decades now. Older, slower, stiffer though we may be, our group has survived the disruption of hurricanes, the ravages of divorce, and

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Bad Trip

Last night I dreamt I was trapped at a dinner party where a woman whom I didn’t know, a pro po of nothing, addressed me as follows: “It is beyond my understanding why the fascist authorities insist on restricting my civil rights and try to forbid me from driving 70

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Copyright © David Altshuler 1980 – 2022    |    Miami, FL • Charlotte, NC     |    (305) 978-8917    |    [email protected]