There were other stories of children who'd gone missing before Etan Patz. Sometimes even sensational cases. But this one was different. He wasn't a famous person's son, like Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. He was just a kid doing what kids did back then. Roaming freely on his street. And unlike the nearly 30 children who disappeared and were murdered during the same period in Atlanta, Patz had a father who is a photographer. Overnight, New York City was plastered with images of his sweet-faced little boy under the chilling word "Missing." Eventually that face became the first to appear on a milk carton.

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Hey, you turkeys. Listen up. I need you to listen for five minutes. I'm going to impart a little wisdom. You can take it or leave it. For what it's worth, I'd rather you took it.

The advice is this: David Bowie's "Hunky Dory" is a perfect album, and, since perfect albums are a rare commodity, it is worthy of deep and repeated listenings.

I'm listening to "Hunky Dory" as I write this. How many times have I listened to this, my favorite record? Like a million? And it never gets old.

I discovered "Hunky Dory" by accident. I was a sad, lonely little kid. Eleven years old and obsessed with Joan Jett, another artist I imagine you kids would enjoy. Back then, the radio was still a real thing that people listened to, believed in and learned from. I stayed up past my bedtime one Saturday night during the Christmas holiday to listen to a weekly show called "The King Biscuit Flower Hour" featuring a concert by my secret girlfriend, Joan Jett. At the end of the set, she played a cover of a song that would forever change the course of my budding musical tastes, "Rebel Rebel." As it turned out, "Rebel Rebel" would never be one of my favorite Bowie tunes, but I could detect, within its lyric, a narrative voice to which I could relate. Like really relate.

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Back on April 11, the 21-year-old Washington state man settled in with his girlfriend to enjoy "Titanic" in 3D -- right in front of a boy known only in police documents as KJJ. What ensued led to a night in jail and a charge of second-degree assault.

According to the Associated Press, the boy, who was at the theater with three friends and his mother, says "they were watching the movie and talking when Kim told them to be quiet." KJJ maintains that they settled down, but when he later whispered something to a companion, Kim "jumped over the seat, threw an iced drink at them and punched KJJ in the face." He says Kim told him something like, "You know what, I paid a lot of money to see this movie."

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I don't know how to put this any way but bluntly, so here goes. My mom let me and my brother breast-feed really, really late-- until we were 4 or 5. She let us touch and play with her breasts for years after that. She never told us what sex was, and later when I found out for myself, my body changing on its own, I felt revulsion at the all-too-recent memories of how I touched, and wanted to touch, my own mother. I hated that she hadn't stopped me.

Now I'm 18 and have a little sister. Just like with me and my older brother, Mom breast-fed her really late, and now at 9 years old, my sister still likes to feel my mother's breasts. My sister is my mom's last child, and so in several areas Mom persists in regarding her as a baby.

I try to understand my mom. I realize the idea of her last kid growing up must be scary and depressing. But this behavior is disgusting to watch or even to know it is going on when you're not there. Additionally, it's delusional and perverse to excuse, and even encourage, such behavior in a growing young woman on the grounds that she's an infant. Who knows why I wanted, and now my sister wants, to touch my mother's breasts at age 9? Certainly not because we wanted to breast-feed. But Mom's so convinced of my sister's innocence that she refuses to consider she could be encouraging inappropriate impulses that my sister is too unaware to understand.

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Last fall, Broviak says, her 13-year-old daughter's suburban Chicago school forced her to let them access her Facebook account and scour her private information, a policy Broviak says is commonplace in the Geneva Middle School South. In a blog post in April, Broviak added that when the incident happened, "the vice principal called me to demand I come to the school immediately to read through [my daughter's] private messages."

Broviak told MSNBC Friday, "What a violation of my daughter's privacy this whole episode was," adding that the experience took "a huge toll on my daughter, who ended up crying through most of the rest of the day and therefore missed most of her classes. She was embarrassed and very upset." She says when she confronted the school about the issue, they told her it was routine policy to investigate students' social networking pages and cellphones.

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Better than talking about these things, she penned an advice column in 2009 with her daughter, Aretha, then 19, for the ladyblog Jezebel. Their answers to questions about everything from porn to Paxil were unflinching but playful, and at times controversial. Now the pair have collected those columns into a new e-book, "Mother/Daughter Sex Advice." Together, they read as an irreverent version of "Our Bodies, Ourselves" for the Internet age. The mother-daughter team also reflect on what the experience of writing the column was like, and it turns out it wasn't as weird as many would think: For the most part, it was just a continuation of conversations they had been having throughout Aretha's life.

I spoke with them both by phone about sex-positive parenting, where they draw the "TMI" line with each other, and their tips for making "the sex talk" less awkward.

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This problem has been eating away at my brain and heart for a while. I cannot decide what to do. I know your answer will help me, even if you also don't see a clear answer.

One of my children was recently diagnosed with a rare disease. That is not the problem, but helps to explain how I developed a close, trusting friendship with the mother of a child with the same disease. She has helped us so much and has given good medical advice and emotional support. She also works as a baby sitter. For us, the arrangement was perfect: this kind, well-informed person needs money and we need her special medical skills. For months, my husband and I considered her the only possible baby sitter.

Recently, we were tipped off through the school PTO grapevine that she has a criminal record and is an addict, and that stories about her have appeared in the town paper, and also that she has been banned from volunteering in the school because of this.

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I wish I could tell you exactly why we didn’t get along. Maybe I resented my parents’ divorce, and because she screamed louder, I blamed her more. Maybe I blamed her for seeming to hate me. (I was what was called, back before all children were pathologized, a “difficult child.”) She felt mothers should be respected universally, and I felt like we should talk everything out. I wanted to be understood. She wanted me to understand that I wasn’t her friend, I was her daughter. When she hears my sister using the parenting language of today on her son – “I hear that you’re frustrated, because it’s frustrating to not be able to own a machine gun, but you just can’t have one” – she rolls her eyes and thinks back to the days when a kid who asked for something unreasonable could just be sent to his room.

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A year earlier, I had tumbled into a mid-life crisis. I had one child who was nearly three, and my husband and I were planning for a second. This had always been our intention, and I approached this second foray without much anxiety. But when my younger sister called to tell me she and her boyfriend were going to London, something inside my head was knocked loose. “Damn,” I thought. “I’m going to be a MOMMY.”

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: You’ve been a mommy for three years. Get over it.

But it wasn’t the prospect of becoming a parent that freaked me out. I loved my little boy and wanted to add another goofball to the family. What threw me into a tizzy was the prospect of being a mommy and all the cultural baggage that came along with it. With one child, you could be that interesting woman with the cute kid who still retained a modicum of cool. But the second child would define you. This is faulty logic, I know, but I believed it nonetheless: A mommy is invisible. A mommy has bad jeans and a minivan. Twenty-five-year-old boys would never check me out. I would never take off to London on a whim.

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Spurred by flexible work situations, mates with a more lucrative income, a sluggish job market, or simply the desire to be the one in the family who does the bulk of the child rearing, the population of fathers who stay at home with their kids is small but growing. The U.S. Census notes that 16 percent of our preschoolers are cared for by their fathers while their mothers work. In America in 2010, there were 154,000 stay-at-home dads caring for 287,000 children. We see them not only on the playground but also in popular culture on shows like "Up All Night" and "Modern Family," with prominent dad characters who've scrapped the career fast-track for play dates and preschool interviews. Yet just as decades of feminism haven't eradicated sexism, the glass ceiling and the elusive dream of "having it all," the growing numbers of men who challenge traditional gender roles on the domestic front haven't yet wiped out a different share of deeply rooted biases.

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Even down at the local LGBT center, it's still unusual to think of a young child as gay. Childhood is, after all, a fairly neutral time, one in which the concept of love is reserved largely for parents and ice cream. But just because a kid isn't yet engaged in the stream of romantic attachment, it doesn't follow that he isn't developing his sense of self. Who you are is not a single adolescent rite of passage like a bar mitzvah or quinceañera. Every gay adult was once a child. And in every classroom and playground in America right now are our future gay adults. So how do we raise those children – and all our children -- in a way that acknowledges and accepts that?

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Lizzie has been trying on bits and pieces of religions for years now, discarding each after a little wear. A few years ago, as we read the decidedly secular Nancy Drew together one night, she asked out of the blue if I believed in God. As she snuggled into the crook of my arm, chewing on a strand of dark blond hair, she waited for an answer.

“Well, some people believe in God,” I answered, carefully putting on the same serious but accessible voice I’d used to answer previous uncomfortable questions about where babies come from and why there are Republicans.

“Do you believe?” Lizzie said, stressing the you so I could almost see the italics flying out of her mouth. There was no getting around it. I had to answer.

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I tried to hold her, but she was hyperventilating a bit. "I’m 'the girl whose dad died when she was 13'?" she choked out. "Oh my God. That’s who I am now.  When people ask me what my dad does, or how we get along, or anything, that’s how I will have to answer: ‘My dad died when I was 13.’”

Words. Labels for things, for people. We spend our whole lives making sense of them, I guess. Figuring out which one is the best, most accurate choice.

So many words become insider jargon in families: We are the only ones who know that “black toast intolerant” means “lactose intolerant”; that “minimisize it” means “minimize it,” which big pot is the “pasta pot.” These special languages that families create are another way they are individualized, that a family becomes a unique organism of its own.

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I considered explaining to them that I had researched the topic thoroughly and found that modern hair dye chemicals likely pose little risk to a fetus in the third trimester. I considered mentioning that, just to be extra cautious, I was getting a semi-permanent color to limit my exposure to ammonia fumes. Instead, I buried myself in a copy of Us Weekly and tried to ignore the whispers of the other patrons.

I never thought I would be the type of person who would risk public scorn to get her roots touched up. I’ve grown increasingly granola-y over the past few years, and my forays into investigative journalism have made me wary of certain chemicals in cosmetics and other personal care products. These days, I consider myself dressed up if I leave the house wearing deodorant, let alone mascara. But that was before I was initiated into the world of upper-middle-class American pregnancy with all its hysteria and paranoia, and began feeling the urge to rebel.

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I had so many other questions to ask: What did he do for a living? Did he have other children? Was he married? Did he drink coffee? Was he happy? Were there pictures of me -- a smiling, chubby baby -- on the walls of his home or was it easier for him to forget I ever existed?

But I could not ask him any of this, because we had not actually met in person. At the age of 27, I saw my father for the first time when I found him on Facebook.

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Kilpatrick understands. While still in high school in her small town in Georgia, she founded the national peer mentoring organization Girl Talk, mostly as a means of helping her younger sister navigate the social minefield she herself had only just departed. With its emphasis on helping tween girls learn from teens who've survived their own drama years, Girl Talk now has chapters in 43 states and six countries.

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I didn't freak out when I found out my wife and I were going to have a son. But as the day approached, I had a crisis of confidence. We were living in a studio in Los Angeles, sleeping on a mattress that smelled like pumpkin beer from the previous fall, driving a two-door, 30-year-old car. How were we supposed to do this?

It turns out I was asking the right questions. We needed a new car and a new house; we got Ford’s least-monstrous SUV and a three-bedroom rental that cost as much as my old Brooklyn one-bedroom. And then, in the final weeks before our son arrived, we started watching "Game of Thrones." By the time our boy was born, I didn’t want to swaddle him; I wanted to thrust him to the heavens on top of a parapet and declare, “All this will be yours!”

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My young husband and I had moved to the Iron Range for a number of romantic reasons. We thought it was beautiful and in some way more “authentic” than the place we’d been living. We also believed the clean lake air would cure the asthma suffered by our younger son. What we failed to take into account was the 14 percent unemployment and a taconite-weary city with little but service work.

So Jim was stringing together two backbreaking, low-paying jobs and I — the 24-year-old mother of two — was trying to fill the long, icy, dark winter days. The library was my best bet. But on this particular afternoon, my nearly 4-year-old was behaving oddly. He wouldn’t sit with the other children for story time. He kept flapping his hand in front of his eyes. Twice, he jumped up and went to the wall, where he flipped the light switches madly back and forth.

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