Parenting

• 10 Ways To Get Your Kids To Talk To You

  Parents can often be frustrated by their kids’ unwillingness to share their lives with them. Whether your kids are toddlers or teens, there will be times when it’s difficult to “break through” and find out what’s really going on. Here are ten ideas on how to create opportunities for your kids to open up and share their lives with you.

• Toddler Skills For Personal Responsibility

  Children need to learn how to self-nurture. This means that they need to learn how to take some responsibility for their own feelings. Infants often self-soothe with their blanket, thumb, or pacifier. But as they grow older, they need to learn other ways of self-nurturing because they will not be taking their blanket or pacifier to school.

• Playing With Baby

  Babies need to move in order to learn! Following are several activities all of which promote motor and cognitive development and deepen the bond between baby and you.

• Homeschooling With Literature

  Even some elite colleges employ literature-based learning. Their tools are the Great Books; their principal technique, discussion. The Literature School is not only a successful school, it is the ideal multi-grade family school. Books can be read aloud together, with each child processing the information on his own level.

• Kid Camp Paradise

  In sending our first child to camp, we did find a general all-around sleepover one. When camp day arrived, I had the normal trepidation as my wife and I dropped him off with what seemed to be enough supplies to comfortably survive twelve years alone in the wilderness, while also having the capability to change clothing six times a day and never run out of T-shirts and shorts.

• Please Don’t Go: Alleviating Separation Anxiety

  The separation process can be difficult for all involved. Separation anxiety is the conflicting feelings that children have when they part from the person or people to whom they are most attached. At the end of the school year, many children experience anxiety when saying goodbye to teachers and classmates. Many experience it again at the end of the summer when it’s time to go back to school.

• The Tally Of My Life

  As a mother of four, I often like to peruse the birth announcements in the newspaper, mostly to convince myself that having more than the requisite 1.5 children is in fact a smart and trendy thing to do. It’s either that, or the “misery loves company” theory I’m employing.

• Hello Muddah, See Ya Layda

  “And try to remember to have more than one shower in a monthor at least make sure that the one shower is just before you come home.” With these words, I sent my eleven year old son off to camp. Okay, technically he was ten, and he would celebrate his eleventh birthday at camp, without me. Does that, plus the fact that I was really looking forward to having one less kid in the house, make me a bad mother?