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Denene Millner of MyBrownBaby

Denene Millner is a parenting and relationship expert who’s written or co-written 18 books exploring all manifestations of love -- between men and women, parents and children, siblings, and friends. She also pens a monthly column for Parenting as a member of the magazine’s Mom Squad of experts, who help women negotiate the ins and outs of motherhood.

When she isn’t penning her column or writing entertainment, relationship, and travel features for magazines like Essence, Odyssey Couleur, and Heart & Soul, she’s working on her blog, MyBrownBaby (www.mybrownbaby.blogspot.com), where she provides thought-provoking, insightful, wickedly funny commentary on motherhood, for and by moms of color. Through her posts, Denene lifts the voices of African-American moms looking for the 411 / advice / a high-five on everything from pregnancy and childrearing to sex, work and relationships -- all filtered through the lens of the African American experience.

She’s also ridiculously obsessed with African American art and children’s books, and, in her next life, will be an interior designer with the astonishing ability to whip up drapes and fancy pillows. Denene lives in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia with her husband, three children, and super cute goldendoodle, Teddy.


Friday, July 29, 2011 - 11:39
Stink Box
by Denene Millner of MyBrownBaby
The Parenting Post
When I was little, my mother had, like, a million names for my “unmentionable.” The stand-outs: Pum Pum. Pee Pee. Gina. Stink Box. Down There. I don’t think I learned the real name for my lady part until I got to that one “Scared Straight” health class in the seventh grade—the one where they separated the boys from the girls and showed us a really mind-blowing movie about our bodies morphing into boobs and hair in weird places and, if we looked too hard at the really cute boys, big-headed babies. By the time the instructor finished with us, the word “vagina” was the least of the things I needed to know about myself.

I never really considered what I would call it when I had my own kids—not until I got my first baby, Mari, around Nick’s mom. She’s a nurse. And a vegetarian. And grown. And she believes in calling a spade a spade and a vagina, well, a vagina. I liked her philosophy on it: If you make up names for the baby’s private parts but call everything else on her body by its anatomical name, you’re telling her there’s something wrong with her vagina—that it’s embarrassing and secretive and not to be discussed with you. 

All of this has been on my mind this week after the massive uproar over the Summer's Eve "Hail To the V" commercials. If the company was looking for us to talk about our vaginas, well, mission accomplished. But Summer's Eve loses. Big time.

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Thursday, July 21, 2011 - 23:43
Indulging and Encouraging
by Denene Millner of MyBrownBaby
The Parenting Post
When I was little, I wanted to play the piano like Stevie Wonder and speak French and travel to far away places like California and Hawaii and Harlem. Alas, these things happened only in my mind. My parents, after all, were factory workers—bound to blue collar paychecks, limited vacation days, and a work schedule that stretched from sun up to can’t see. Lack of time, money and sleep meant I could be a world-traveling, French speaking, piano playing wonder child only in my dreams.

Of course, I hold no ill will toward my parents for this. But I promised myself that things would be different for my girls—that they’d grow up having known the excitement of exploring a new land, learning about new cultures, and, above all else, having their wishes indulged.

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Friday, July 15, 2011 - 10:40
The Most Important Advocate
by Denene Millner of MyBrownBaby
The Parenting Post
Of all the coverage I’ve read on the Atlanta Public School test cheating scandal, the quote that stood out to me was from one teacher explaining why she participated: “I had to give them [students] the answers, those kids were dumb as hell.”

As a mother, that hurt me to my core. Because this woman was in charge of those babies. And thought nothing more of them than that they were unteachable idiots who didn’t deserve to learn.

I’d like to think that my mom Spidey sense would have sniffed this woman out—that I would have instinctively known this woman meant to do my kid harm and that something wasn’t right if my child was coming home with failing grades but passing the CRCT with flying colors.

This is what parents do. You pay attention and you stand up for your kid.

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Thursday, July 7, 2011 - 23:45
The Art Of Disciplining
by Denene Millner of MyBrownBaby
The Parenting Post
I promised myself that when I had children of my own, I would use different tactics to get them to obey me—tactics that didn’t involve physical, verbal or mental intimidation. My goal: To have my children respect rather than fear me. Instead of hitting, I reasoned—rather than holler and scream like a banshee when they did something wrong, I praised when they did something right. “You’re the adult and therefore smarter than them,” I’d tell myself. “Use your Mighty Isis smart powers to get them to bend to your will.” At least that’s what all the parenting books said I should do. None of those books warned me, though, of the visceral reaction I'd have when my kids started taking my kindness for weakness. Nope—they sure missed that one.Read Full Post
Friday, June 24, 2011 - 09:41
Race Matters
by Denene Millner of MyBrownBaby
The Parenting Post
Here’s the thing: no matter how much white parents think their silence on the matter will help their kids maintain their innocence when it comes to race, the world will work overtime to feed kids the crazy—kind of like what happens when parents refuse to talk to their kids about sex and then he hits the locker room and some boob tells him he can’t get a girl pregnant if he pulls out or that he’ll grow hair on his hands if his uses them to masturbate or he can’t get HIV from oral sex, and then the kid with all the bad info shows up with a baby or an infection. Like sex, skin color will become one of those things that sticks out like a neon target. It will become a very relevant thing. Maybe not for the mom who asked me why she should teach her son about race. Or her sweet son. But for plenty more, I assure. And if the discussion doesn’t come up in your house until there’s a problem, well, the discussion is way too late.Read Full Post
Friday, June 17, 2011 - 00:50
Black Fathers
by Denene Millner of MyBrownBaby
The Parenting Post
I totally heart me some President Barack Obama, I promise you this. But he ticked me off to the highest of ticktivity a few years ago when he took to the pulpit in a black church on Father’s Day to excoriate African American dads for falling down on their job as parents, saying that all-too-many of them “act like boys, not men.” He added infamously:  “Any fool can have a child.  That doesn’t make you a father. It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.”Read Full Post
Friday, June 10, 2011 - 00:11
A Baby No More (And Happy Birthday, Lila!)
by Denene Millner of MyBrownBaby
The Parenting Post
With only nine years under her belt, my Lila is quite the rabble rouser. Seriously, she’s a goofy goober who keeps the Chiles family home jumping—with lots of practical jokes, shrill singing, Michael Jackson-worthy dancing, and enough little sister antics to keep her big sister and brother on the run. The girl can even conjure up crocodile tears faster than Angela Bassett on the set of What’s Love Got To Do With It, and then, with sal water streaming down her cheeks, give a maniacal giggle to show you she’s not really crying.

Nick and I regularly wake up with night sweats just envisioning the kind of teenager Lila might be—the one making it hot for anyone and everyone involved. Phone attached to the ear at all times, shooing away little boys, orchestrating a gaggle of girlie hangeres-on, brilliant but too fabulous for school work or anything that requires more thought beyond which skirt, lip gloss, and phone number she should use next. “I don’t know why that boy is outside in the car crying, mommy,” I hear her teenage voice whisper to me. “I told him it wasn’t going to work and he should get the hell on, but he claims he’s too distraught to drive. Loser. Anyway, I’m going to the movies with Bobby, k bubkins?”

Heaven help us. My baby isn't a baby anymore.

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Friday, June 3, 2011 - 00:07
Her Sister's Keeper
by Denene Millner of MyBrownBaby
The Parenting Post
My daughters love each other. I think. At least this is what I tell myself most days when the two of them are going for each other’s jugulars. Honest to goodness, there are moments when their knock-down/drag-outs feel like the ninth round in a Tyson-Holyfield fight—sweaty, loud, nasty, brutal. Alas, Mari and Lila are sisters. And this is what sisters do. They fight. They make up. They play. Somebody gets on the other’s nerves and then they start the whole thing all over again—usually precipitated by Lila, the little sister, doing something annoying and Mari, the bigger one, acting like the Earth is going to fall off of its rotational axis if the 9-year-old doesn’t get out of her face, pronto. This bothers me. A lot.Read Full Post
Thursday, May 26, 2011 - 23:25
Why I Make the Big Bucks (And the Kid Can't Have A Cell Phone)
by Denene Millner of MyBrownBaby
The Parenting Post
There they were, a restaurant table-full of 11-year-olds in their glittered shirts and multi-colored sneakers and dangling neon earrings, holding their colorful phones at arms length and making googly faces as the built-in cell cameras took goofy shots, one after the next. Honest to goodness, to me, it was like a tween cell phone convention. But to my daughter, Mari, it was a deliciously brutal form of tween torture.

Mari, you see, is not allowed to have a cell phone. Oh, she’s begged, pleaded, bribed, and prayed to the Good Lord Above for one, but yeah—no matter how much she claims it’s “just a gadget” and promises not to glue it to her hand and dial up friends willy-nilly, her father and I refuse to budge on this simple rule: No kids of ours shall have cell phones until age 14.

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Friday, May 20, 2011 - 11:22
Ugly Black Girls
by Denene Millner of MyBrownBaby
The Parenting Post

My daughters are, simply, beautiful girls. I tell them this often. Not just because I believe it to the core, but because the world conspires to tell my babies different—to ingrain in their brains that something is wrong with their kinky hair and their juicy lips and their dark skin and their piercing brown eyes and their bubble butts and thick thighs and black girl goodness. I promise you, it feels like I’m guarding them from a tsunami of “you’re ugly” pronouncements; magazines and TV shows and popular radio and movies and all of the rest of pop culture insist on squeezing all of us women into a ridiculously Eurocentric, blonde-haired, light-eyed standard of beauty, but good God, unless you’re parenting a little black girl, you have absolutely no earthly idea how exhausting it is to be media whipped for not being a white girl. I mean, for all the cocky, “I love me exactly the way I am” declarations we black women make, some days, I wonder why we are not hurling our collective bodies off the side of Mt. Kilamanjaro and just ending it all. One need only to consider the gut-check of this study, released this week on Psychology Today: "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women," to understand where I'm coming from as a mom.

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