Julie Pippert: Using My Words

When I sit back and think, I realize that I first began working in 1985. I took a job as a cashier at a local family-style restaurant. It was pure nepotism because my aunt knew the owners, but that also meant I had to be an exemplary employee or the family would hear about it and that would not bode well for me. I was always on time, diligent, and polite to customers. Back then, we were a fairly low tech society compared to now. For example, I had no cell phone with text messaging to distract myself with while I stood idle at the register between rushes of people. Instead, I'd reconcile my register or scrub down the counter. I also had no camera in my cell phone with which to photograph myself at work, nor did I have an online profile to which I could post that photo and some pithy commentary about how many times I'd had to dodge the pervy manager's grabby hands. It was more than a decade past that before I joined some rudimentary online sites and began building an online p

Last night I told my daughters, "You should be ashamed of yourselves." I know modern parenting has it that we should never let our kids feel badly, especially about themselves, but the truth was...by our family's morals and ethics my kids should have felt badly about what they did and about themselves. We had just returned home from a short four-day holiday visiting my mother. A couple of those days I was at the South by Southwest Conference, and to cover my absence -- which nobody seemed to notice much, a good thing -- the family went on the Fun Run: lake, picnic, boating, kite flying, park, and more. It was days of outdoors and good times, which the kids loved. After an easy and speedy drive, we arrived home shortly before dinner, and that's when the kids launched into bickering and insults that escalated into vicious behavior. My husband and I both tried several times to redirect, direct, intervene, and every other parenting measure in our arsenal, to no avail. I t

As my husband and I ponder the best place and path for our oldest daughter... our beautiful precious Angel, who feels so deeply and intensely, thinks so logically, and who is, apparently, not on the same track as her peers, completely, for intelligence or emotional development, and who is, allegedly, according to educators, just enough ahead to make it slightly challenging and uncomfortable As we ponder her amazing empathy remarkable insight deeply embedded and held intellectual curiosity inspiring self-motivated learning and accomplishing I asked her, off-handedly, for a real reason but no real reason what she thought of the kids in the grade ahead. The only one I really know, Mom, she told me, was really really rude, like mean. How's that I asked? Heart pounding in my chest, recognizing that here we go again I think In the bathroom, my beautiful precious Angel said, In the bathroom this girl told me that she hated me. Hated me echoed around the deep cavern in my chest created to

I recently spoke at the Mom 2.0 Summit , a wonderful event where businesses and market influencers converge in Houston to discuss what we're doing, how we're doing it, how it's working for us, and what next. I'm in the interesting position of being on both sides of that fence, and when I was invited to speak, I encountered a framing problem for my topic, " The Macro Impact of Social Media Engagement. " Despite this framing anxiety, I was honored to get a platform to speak, further honored by my amazing panelists ( Joanne Bamberger, extraordinary pundit and lawyer ; Loralee Choate, whose direct interaction with Valerie Jarrett regarding healthcare caused the entire Web to inhale sharply in admiration ; and JJ Lassberg, whose creativity inspires enriched marketing and communication ) and rich for choice about what to focus on in my panel. That's nearly as bad as having nothing, you know. But as I spoke with my panelists -- and by speak I mean I spent a lot o