Parenting: The Challenge

Summer time is a great way to teach your child about how things grow and maybe even give them an appreciation of how they get their fruits and vegetables. Gardening is a great way to spend time with your child and get them involved with keeping a garden. They may even be more interested in [...]

Summer is on it’s way which means school is out, what do you do with the kids? If you’re on a tight budget it can be even more difficult to plan fun and educational things for your kids to do. If summer camp is not on the horizon there are other opportunities. The library is [...]

The first 4 years of life for toddlers are the most important for they have a lasting impact throughout their life. Research that was reported on MSNBC.com has shown that the quality of daycare at an early age can influence the behavior of a child as well as their ability to learn. 1300 children were [...]

Hobbies benefit children in many ways. It gives a child an opportunity to express themselves, and it allows them to discover themselves and build self-esteem. They are also great educational tools. A child interested in rock collecting learns about geology and science, and a child in writing stories learns about sentence structure and proper grammar. [...]

As Children get older it can be harder to have them keeping their room clean. What are your options besides just keeping the door closed? Offering rewards in order for them to clean their room will only teach them that will get something for doing something, which won’t help them after they leave home and [...]

My parents live in France during the summer. When they are here during the winter they take my son every week overnight. They have created a strong bond with him where he has gotten used to their presence. Now that they have left the regular visits have ceased. how do they keep their bond strong? [...]

If you’re looking for a gift for a toddler it can be a bombarding experience, so many toys are branded now and it can be hard to find something that they will play with for a while. Surprisingly my three year old likes digital voice recorders. Who knew? He will walk around the house for [...]

Sometimes it can be a fight to get your kids to brush their teeth and you don’t want it to be a power struggle. You want to start early enough that it becomes a routine so that big problems don’t develop later on.  Have them be involved in the process of picking out their own [...]

Facebook just keeps growing and more parents are allowing their teens to create an account. It can be a challenge understanding how the privacy settings work to be sure that private information about your teen does not go out into cyberspace for all to see. The default settings that facebook puts into place are probably [...]

It’s fairly normal for teens to experience angst but when is it considered depression? I recently read that an estimate 20% of teens will experience depression at some point before they reach adulthood. 20-40% will experience more than one depressive episode within two years and 70% will have more than one depressive episode before they [...]