I often find myself staring at my phone, ignoring my children for too long, and I assume that many parents end up in a similar predicament. To be clear, I do not believe that parents have a responsibility to be fully engaged with their children as long they are awake. I feel no obligation to focus my energy on them at all hours, or deprive myself of escapes into mindless pursuits to temporarily avoid chaos. I just think we could all do this a little less in 2025.
Read MoreWhether you are a great parent or a bad parent, your children will enter adulthood with some scars and issues. This is the nature of life. This does not mean you should not try to be a good parent, but you absolutely should not beat yourself up when you fall short in 2025.
Read MoreWhen a child hits their sibling, tells a lie, disrespects an adult, or any number of other offenses, we must decide if we will allow it or address it. If your kids are like mine, the number of offenses stack up so high and so fast that it becomes overwhelming to deal with every single issue. For most situations, I come in strong on the first offense. As the child continues to commit the crime repeatedly, my tolerance for the situation marginally increases as well. Intentionally annoying their sibling, refusing to get up and complete a requested task, and other offenses are ignored for a time. Sometimes I circle back around to addressing the issue with a somewhat elevated voice coupled with some borderline extreme consequences. Occasionally my reactions solve the issue. Many times, my kids lose some screen time, but they don’t reform.
Read MoreExasperated and exhausted, I recently looked to the only reasonable source of advice in this day and age: artificial intelligence. The most brilliant computers in the world surely know how to parent better than I do, so I was certain they would have the perfect solution. Below is the advice that our robot overlords would give to parents seeking relief from a house in turmoil. My reactions in parenthesis and italics.
Read MoreFor the first few years of a child’s life they are absolutely incapable of doing literally anything for themselves. Every moment of the day it feels like we, as parents, are personal servants for cute, but thankless, masters who have no shortage of needs and wants. And they’re mean when they don’t get their way- we miss a cue or step out of line, and we are faced with screaming, crying, perfect storms of circumstances and emotions that bring our lives to a screeching halt until we can fix the problem. And as studious as we are, we cannot always predict what will set them off.
Read MoreI’m not here to tell you how to vote, but I am here to tell you how to vote with kids. The boxes you check in the voting booth are not my business, but if you are a parent of littles and you currently aren’t planning to vote because of the special kind of chaos it takes to somehow miraculously get you to the polls with some sliver of understanding of the issues, this is for you.
It is very easy to skip out on casting your vote when you have little kids. And I am absolutely not here to shame you if you simply don’t want to participate this year. People without kids (or those who haven’t had small children for many years) cannot comprehend the effort it takes to go to the grocery store with children, much less what a parent has to do to participate in the election process.
But if you want to vote and you’re running into a few road blocks unique to being a parent, here are the most common complicating factors you might be facing, and a few options for how to overcome those issues.
Read MoreAs our children grow older and build more meaningful relationships, we will start to encounter their friends in more significant ways, often without their parents’ supervision. Friends will come to our house to hang out, we will take small groups on outings for birthdays, and eventually our kids and their friends will be driving themselves, sometimes ending up in homes without any expressed permission from their parents. As our orbit starts to include more and more unaccompanied minors, parents must be intentional about making sure no child is left behind. If all parents will start to assume that we are partially responsible for the well being and safety of all children in our lives, I believe the world we be a better place.
Read MoreOne of the biggest lessons I have learned through parenting is how important team work is between the two adults trying their best to survive each day without losing their minds. When you have one or more humans living in your home who are incapable of making most or all of their own decisions, it becomes a daily grind to make a million small choices.
Read MoreThe discipline of writing down my thoughts and memories for my kids has become one parenting routine that I will do everything I can not to give up on. I have previously made commitments to spend a certain number of minutes a day with my kids without interruption, or made grand plans to create a meaningful one on one outing regularly with each child. I have told myself I will always do such-and-such with my kids, or that I would never do this thing that my parents did. There is a long list of commitments I have made as a parent that I have let slip away, but writing a brief note to each of them once a month is something I have yet to abandon or forget, and I will do everything I can to keep it that way.
Read MoreEvery person who ends up becoming a parent consciously or subconsciously walks into parenting with pre-conceived plans of what they will and won’t do as parents. Before welcoming children into their lives, they make plans and quietly set up non-negotiable standards and practices for when they have kids one day. But they don’t know how hard it is to implement those standards until they actually have the kids. But that doesn’t keep them from silently creating their list during their pre-kids life.
Read MoreDuring the recent weather chaos in Houston I found myself staring out the window, completely unsure about what to do. I grew up in an area of Texas that faced the threat of tornadoes regularly, but had never actually seen winds as strong as the ones I was watching blow past my house.
Read MoreThere are some parents who live for the chaos. They love being needed, and it seems like they rarely face any sort of breaking point or exhaustion. For the rest of us, we definitely have good days and fun moments, but the greatest parenting gift you can give us is the opportunity to not be a parent for a day.
Read MoreDark thoughts while parenting, especially in the first year, are not as strange as you might think. The problem is, no one ever talks about these thoughts. So parents feel terrible, alone, and borderline psychotic. I am here to tell you that those dark thoughts are common. They present themselves in a variety of ways, but inclinations and thoughts that we would normally never face can surface during the early months of parenting. And it’s ok.
Read MoreIn those first days and weeks, many new parents are so quickly and fully in over their heads, they often feel like they are the only ones who don’t know what they are doing. All of their friends and relatives who are parents seem to have made it through the early days unscathed, so asking someone to help when you feel overwhelmed can be embarrassing. Here is the secret though: every single parent on the face of the planet who has ever lived has a million little moments where they think, “I have no freaking clue what to do with this little human right now and I am losing my mind.”
Read MoreMy algorithm recently sent me some incredible videos of people running the Boston Marathon, and I loved seeing the inspirational stories of guides leading blind runners, senior citizen participants finding their spouses in the crowd, and finishers crossing hours after everyone receiving cheers for achieving something great, regardless of how long it took. It reminded me of a creator on social media who once answered the question, “why bother having kids?” with the most profound metaphor I have ever heard.
Read MoreI am in a season of parenting that does not feel very fun. At 6 and 8 years of age, my children have fully entered their “torture your sibling” era. They each find an immense amount of pleasure in making the other miserable. Unfortunately, they are both incredible at this game.
Read MoreIt’s comforting to know that even seemingly perfect parents with all the resources in the world struggle with some of the same basic things that I do. How do you communicate big, tragic news to children when every bone in your body is working daily to shield them from pain and struggles? We all know that there will come a day when we can no longer protect them from the troubles of this world, and it is not wise to keep them insulated from reality for too long, but that does not make it easier to tell them a family member has died, or that you are facing an uncertain future in regard to your health.
Read MoreI was just under two years old when my dad took me with him to meet the woman he was cheating on my mom with. Since I was unable to speak, I was the perfect alibi for him because, like any reasonable woman, my mom assumed that her husband surely could not be up to no good with a toddler in tow. Less than a year later, my parents were divorced, and I have no first hand memories of them ever being in the same room together and it not being incredibly uncomfortable.
Read MoreFor many years, I struggled to think of anyone other than myself. Actually, it wasn’t so much that I didn’t think about people, I just didn’t bother to reach out to anyone if I did think about them. When some friend I hadn’t spoken to in years randomly popped into my brain, I brushed the thought aside. If I saw something in the news that could have impacted someone I cared about, I rarely thought to check in and see how they were doing. Something that still shames me to this day is how I handled the death of a dear friend’s father just a couple of years out of college.
Read MoreBeyoncé just did what could only be described as a complete 180 degree departure from what her fans know and love her for. Yet her followers from across the world not only tolerate her change, they are embracing and celebrating this new direction.
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