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Written by Joanne Wallenstein

Published: 19 November 2014

Created: 19 November 2014

Last Updated: 19 November 2014

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We recently had a reunion dinner of the "train ladies" from the 7:58 am Metro North train from Scarsdale to Grand Central. When I first moved to Scarsdale I became a part of this informal group of moms who commuted together and formed our own mobile coffee klatch and support group.

Five days a week, we arrived at the platform breathless from the race to make lunches, tell the babysitter who was going where, and put ourselves together in professional attire. On more days than not, one of us would have our skirt hem jammed into the waistband, (rear exposed), had a run in a stocking or realized that we'd left the house wearing shoes from two different pairs! All this before the workday had even begun.

When the train pulled in to the station, we elbowed the men for the seats and jammed in together for a solid 35-minute download on whatever was going on at home. One train lady used the time to apply her make-up, another to munch on an energy bar. My specialty was balancing an uncovered cup of coffee -- that more days than not-- would end up overturned on the floor, sending a stream of hot liquid trickling beneath the seats into someone's briefcase. Conversation focused on the kids, failed tests, scary teachers, bullies and sports team tryouts. As the years passed the discussion about the playground yielded to woes about middle school house placements, advanced math, the SAT's, tutors and finally to college applications.

Through it all, we wondered silently and out loud if our kids were suffering from our absence. It was a commonly held belief that the kids of working moms got the worst teachers as we were not there to buddy up to the principal or "get in good" with our children's current teachers. The same thought applied to the highly competitive youth soccer teams where our kids were often told they didn't make the grade. Were they "on the bubble" and not on the team due to the fact that we were not there to befriend their coaches?

The situation posed daily challenges. When our kids forgot their homework or their lunch – there was often no one at home to bring it to school. So on top of bearing the guilt of not being there to help, grades suffered and stomachs growled. But since we had mortgages, tax payments, camp fees and even our own student loans to pay off there simply was no choice but to buy our monthly passes and keep the trains running.

And then there were the stay-at-home moms who could have helped out but realized their efforts would never be reciprocated. At times they didn't invite our kids into the carpools because when it was our turn to drive, it was the babysitter behind the wheel. On half days, when moms would make plans to take their kids to lunch, our kids were not invited. No one could blame them –the disparities came with the territory.

But getting back to the main question: would there be long-lasting effects for the children of working moms? Would they turn out to be less confident, less successful, or even worse, unhappy?

As I was enjoying dinner with my former train buddies the other night I started to reflect on that question – and inquired about all of their children. As it turns out, for the most part they were doing well, in fact very well. Most had graduated college, or graduate school and were gainfully employed at jobs they actually enjoy. After work they play on teams, play in bands and party hardy. If they lost out in anyway because we worked when they were young, it is difficult to see the impact now.

Though memory has cast a rosy glow on the time my three kids were home, it now seems that perhaps the children accrued some benefit from being children of working moms. They learned self-sufficiency and people skills, as they had to adapt to a series of babysitters who took the place of their moms. When they had a problem with a teacher, they couldn't call on us to step in so had to find a way to resolve it themselves. Maybe they also saw that work had its rewards and modeled their own professional aspirations on their parents' success. Whatever the reasons, as parents, our decision to work does not appear to have adversely affected our children's lives.

I asked a few of the "train moms" for their thoughts on this issue and here is what they said:

"It was quite the challenge jugging motherhood with a demanding career. And certainly, I had moments when I ruminated on whether my absence from the girls was harmful to them in any way. I simply didn't know. There were no studies, no longitudinal data surrounding this issue. We were on uncharted ground. Here's what I know now. I have two, healthy, loving children, each prospering in their respective careers. They have made it clear that my path influenced theirs, for which they are grateful. So am I." (P.N.)

"My working gave my son and daughter the freedom to develop their individuality without worrying about my reactions to their missteps. Had I been a stay at home mom I would have been overly invested in my children's every action. This would not have been good for my kids or me. So my job gave us the distance we needed to develop and maintain our authentic selves." (M.F.)

"Finding work/life balance is essential. My sons understood that my career was part of who I am and respected me for it. They knew what I was working on and showed interest in it. Over time, they had as many opinions about my projects as I had about their homework. What worked for my family was spending a lot of time together – both quality time and just time." (A.S.)

"There are many paths to happiness. We chose the one that was right for our family. My work has always been an important part of who I am. When you feel good about what you do and what you have accomplished your kids feel it and flourish. Oh, and having a great husband and babysitter doesn't hurt either." (S.D.)

Of course this is not a scientific study and the sample size is not statistically significant. But anecdotally, it does appear that the children of the working parents are thriving along with their friends whose mothers were home. All of us might tend to congratulate ourselves and we did. After all those frenzied train trips, moments of apprehension and panic, we can now safely say the kids are all right.

Joanne Wallenstein is the Publisher of Scarsdale10583.com and a former train lady who worked in the city when her kids were at home – and now works at home while her kids work in the city.

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Written by Marjorie Rosenblatt

Published: 04 December 2014

Created: 04 December 2014

Last Updated: 04 December 2014

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Scarsdale mom and physician Marjorie Rosenblatt contributed the following article on how she keeps track of her kids: I was never one of the "powers-that-be" mothers, able to ensure my child's role in the school play or acceptance on a team as a result of personal contacts or social status. Nor was I ever a helicopter parent, preoccupied with the minutiae of the everyday lives of my offspring. I attended as many parent-related meetings and school performances as I was able. If I missed something, it was not lack of interest or desire for involvement but rather my rigorous work schedule that kept me away.

As a result, we ate dinner as a family every night, during which my children were subjected to painstaking interrogation regarding the details of their day's occurrences. The fact is, however, that I was the primary breadwinner and therefore, my employment had to be a priority, leaving my husband to serve as the Friday "pizza mom," the parent organizing "learning from our differences" and the yearbook photographer at the elementary school.

Thank you social media!! Now, with the ever-growing number of communication-oriented applications, as my children get older, I have discovered myriad ways to spy on them – to make up for lost time, if you will. I have become an obsessive electronic stalker. I wake up and check Snapchat to see if my son, now a college freshman, has posted any of his numerous drunken snaps to his story.

I proceed to see how many of his new snarky tweets can be found on Twitter. Instagram is the next stop on my surveillance train, where I view photographs posted by my ninth-grader, and then on to Yik Yak, where my two college student's universities are readily accessible under the heading of "my peeks." There I have the opportunity to learn what is "hot" at their schools, while silently playing the always-fun game – "guess which yaks were posted by my own children." (For those unfamiliar, Yik Yak is an anonymous posting site, designed for college communities.)

Facebook is next, where I view the walls of all of my children; I note new friends (whose walls I may then also peruse), recent posts and, of course, photographs. Not surprisingly, I am not infrequently met with a look of disgust when my older daughter mentions her friend Jim, for example, and although I have never actually met either, I ask "Jim Smith or Jim Jones?," oddly familiar with both from having previously surveyed their Facebook pages.

I may also review the Facebook pages of my daughter's a cappella group, or my son's fraternity, just incase a minor detail of their lives has escaped me. Finally, before I retire for the night, I examine Find My iPhone, intended to help trace a lost phone, but employed by yours truly to find comfort in the fact that my children have made it home safely yet another night.

Why, one may ask, do my children consent to what they refer to as my "creeper" behavior? The choice is not theirs. It is our house rule that when one gets Facebook, he/she must accept his/her parents as "friends." Similarly, as we pay for the iPhones, we must be allowed to track them if lost. Neither my husband nor I ever comment on what we learn from our voyeuristic activity; it is our hope that as long as we stay in the shadows, the multitudinous modes used to follow my children remain in their unconscious...out of sight, out of mind. Alternatively and, I suppose, preferably, as they become adults, they simply may not feel they need to maintain secrets, as they did when they were younger.

I (and others) often question why I participate in such obsessive behavior. An easy answer would be that I feel as if I have missed significant pieces of my children's youth, for which I am now over-compensating. It is also possible that I am overseeing, trying to make sure that they are employing good judgment and avoiding trouble. More accurately, I believe, is a need to remain connected with my children as each day they inch toward independence. Perhaps I am trying to diminish the sadness and loss that I feel, as they become more self-sufficient and create their own autonomous worlds. There are evenings when I crave having their once tiny bodies snuggled up against me in search of comfort. I am no longer the first face they see in the morning, or the last at night; in exchange, I have made them my first and last association of the day.

And so I stalk. Snapchat. Twitter. Facebook. Instagram. Yik Yak. Find my iPhone. These sites are enablers, supporting my pathology, and providing me a pseudo-sense of continued involvement in the daily lives of my children. The tiny bits of information I glean serve as few stitches in the gaping hole in my heart.

Time to go...social media awaits...

Marjorie Rosenblatt is a physician, wife and mother of three. She enjoys writing about her experiences and passions, including (but not limited to) her family, medicine and karate.

This post originally appeared on Grown and Flown. Find them on Facebook and Twitter.

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Written by Barbara Kapetanakes

Published: 10 November 2014

Created: 10 November 2014

Last Updated: 10 November 2014

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This article was written for Scarsdale10583 by Barbara Kapetanakes, PsyD.
I heard through the grapevine recently that one of our local school districts had to deal with the malicious use of new technology. Just a day after one of my adolescent patients told me about YikYak, a new anonymous social media app, someone used it to make a threatening comment and the school was put on alert. While many of these anonymous social media outlets monitor their sites for threatening or inappropriate content and remove it, they obviously cannot do this immediately, and with social media being what it is, information flies through cyberspace in seconds, making the process of removing content too little, too late. Even if it's a prank, which it usually is, there is wasted time, manpower, and angst spent trying to find the source and ascertain safety.

There are other anonymous apps as well such as Whisper and Secret, as well as an app that allows people to share pictures or comments for only a few seconds before they disappear, called Snapchat, which many teens use for sexting and sharing risqué pictures. Even with programs such as Facebook, a person can make up a fake persona to hide behind. Because of my profession I use Facebook with a fake name and keep my privacy settings how I want them, but I could easily have a half dozen accounts with different email addresses and use whatever pictures I want to create a persona. In fact, it is so easy to steal photos and other material off the Internet that not too long ago a teenager was arrested for taking pictures from a photographer's professional site and using them on her own blog where she lied to get sympathy. The photos were of the photographer's young son, but the teen used them claiming to be a woman in her 30s who had lost a child to cancer. She set up an entire site dedicated to this supposed dead child and blogged about her loss. The site caught the attention of other grieving parents as well as sympathetic souls wanting to provide support. Only by dumb luck did she get caught when a friend of the photographer was doing a web search for something and saw pictures of a familiar little boy.

Considering the amount of fraud that can go on online, as well as anonymous cyber-bullying, parents are often confused as to how to protect their children. For one thing, the kids seem to keep up with technology much more quickly than their parents, and by the time a parent learns about an app that may be of concern, the child is on to the next one. In addition, as kids get older they want and need more freedom so that they start to make their own decisions, engage in unsupervised activities, and otherwise get ready for the outside world. It's a very difficult line that parents have to walk—letting their kids grow up while trying to keep an eye on what's going on.

While technology is a far cry from what it was when most of today's parents were coming of age, the way that you would protect your child's safety and health is still very much the same. Though most kids use only their cell phones today rather than home phones, you can still keep track of who they are communicating with and what is happening in their lives. For one thing, you can take your child's gadgets away after a certain hour. Yes, some kids use their phones for an alarm clock, but there's a solution for that. It's called an alarm clock. While I may have tried to sneak in some late phone calls as a teenager, if I talked too loud I'd get caught. Today, kids can (and do!) text well past midnight, some texting virtually all night with friends, and their parents are none the wiser. Taking the phone at bedtime, unplugging the computer, and otherwise removing distractions makes it less likely that your child will be up during the night chatting online or sexting on Snapchat.

Presumably if your child has a phone and computer, you are paying for this. From time to time check the call and text logs by going into your account through the carrier's website to assess the amount and patterns of usage. Typically my mother answered the phone and took a message if I was not home, so she had some sense of who was calling, but today's parent can check the phone logs and see what numbers come up a lot, or at odd times. When did we become a society who has no idea who our kids are talking to because we all have our own personal phones and never use anyone else's? Which brings me to...

....pick up your child's phone if it rings. Isn't it strange that we live in a world where most of us would not pick up our spouse's, child's parent's, or sibling's telephone? What could be so personal? Barely a decade ago we shared phones with the rest of our families. If a call came in it could have been for anyone in the household, so anyone answered it. In fact, kids were often the first to go running for the phone hoping it was for them. Not too long ago a teen lamented to me that she had her phone taken away as punishment for something or other, so she was unable to call any friends because she only had their numbers in her phone. She needed to speak to a friend about a legitimate school concern and could not. I suggested that she find out the house number and call the friend there from her own home phone. She told me that this behavior was "sketchy," because no kids called to or from landlines anymore. Bizarre. Calling a phone where a parent might answer and your supposedly innocent call would be public knowledge is more "sketchy" than calling cell to cell where the call can be "Kept on the DL" as they say.

You can check the history on your computers and put parental controls in place so your child can't go to sites that would be inappropriate. Many families have computers in high-traffic areas of the house so that parents can casually glance at the screens while their children are using them. Also, with a parent close by, kids are less likely to hop onto a site or app and start sending inappropriate messages or get involved in bullying.

If you find out your child has gotten in over his head—whether by misusing social media or as the victim of cyber-bullying, treat it as you would the same situation without technology. What would you do if you found out your child was being bullied on the playground? What would you do if you found out that your child took a nude Polaroid and gave it to her boyfriend? Technology does complicate things, since the Polaroid may have been shared with a couple of kids in a locker room in the past, but the jpeg can now be sent to the entire school with the touch of a button. And while a bully on the playground is a known entity, a bully online could be anonymous or using another child's name. Don't be afraid to get the school involved, as they may have a handle on how best to do damage control—this is not likely to be the administration's first rodeo.

It's also very important to educate kids in the first place. I take many opportunities to pursue this topic when it comes up with kids I see in therapy. Most are not looking for trouble, they truly have no idea how much information they make available on the Internet. Think about prom and graduation season—how many beautiful photos do parents and kids take by the limo, in the cap and gown, in the beautiful dress and then post online? Has it ever crossed your mind that in those photos could be your home address, your license plate, the sign on the corner of your street? When you and your children post those pictures on social media, what privacy settings are used? Who can comment on them? Once, in doing a presentation for young children on Internet safety I showed them how easy it was to take something off the Internet and make trouble for someone by right-clicking and saving a photo off my cousin's Facebook. I then used an editing program to write insults on the photo. Then I went to strangers' pages and again "stole" their profile or other pictures, and downloaded them onto my computer. Once something is on the Internet it can be downloaded, and if your child has 1500 "friends" or "followers" all those people have access to that information. Educate your children about being careful and smart. Before posting a picture make sure there's no information you wouldn't want out there. You would freak out if your child gave out your home address, but what about those lovely brass numbers in the background behind the beaming graduate, or the street sign off to the side?

Parents often say "we live in a different world today" to justify helicoptering over their kids. Yes and no. We do live in a different world, a world where you can go online and find out if convicted sex offenders live in your town—that, to me, sounds like a safer world in some respects. Technology does make this world different, and it changes the way humans interact, including children and teens who are still working out social interactions and the nuances of relationships. Parenting has to keep up with new technology, but the bottom line is not that much different. When my parents put a separate phone number in my bedroom, that was the latest technology, and they continued to parent me as they had when we shared the one phone on the desk. Today's kids use newer and newer technology, but you should still be aware of the technology and supervise them as appropriate for their ages. Kids will always get things past their parents—that's reality—but don't underestimate parental intuition, benign snooping, or direct questioning. The same way my mother warned me not to keep my keys in my purse while riding the subway or walking around, since my purse contained ID and a mugger could run off with my address and keys, today's parent has to advise his children about how to remain safe in different, more modern circumstances. I STILL keep my keys separate from my wallet, and hopefully we will teach the next generation how to remain safe in the swirling eddy of the information superhighway. It's here to stay, so we may as well learn to coexist.

Dr. Kapetanakes is a psychologist practicing in Sleepy Hollow. She specializes in working with teens and young adults, school issues, divorce issues and divorce mediation, and neuropsychological evaluations.

Disclaimer: Although Dr. Kapetanakes is a board member and past president of the Westchester County Psychological Association (WCPA), the views in this article are hers and not the views of WCPA. WCPA is a professional organization of local psychologists that furthers the study and practice of psychology through workshops, meetings, community outreach, and involvement on state and national levels.