Tag Archives: parenting advice

My 9-year-old daughter usually gets dressed for school about 10 minutes before we have to leave the house. Sometimes she leaves herself even less time to get ready. Luckily, getting dressed requires little effort on her part. My daughter has a few favorites she’ll wear once or twice a week, including her “Art is my favorite sport” and “Waiting on …

  First, the good news: Mental illness in children and adolescents is often treatable and preventable. Unfortunately, the mental health of our country’s youth is in crisis, according to a recently released advisory from U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. The advisory states that this youth mental health crisis occurred long before the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. In Murthy’s introduction, he shares, …

Winter has never been my favorite season. Growing up in the Midwest, I regularly encountered temperatures below freezing and was cautioned more times than I can count about the dangers of black ice. You’d think I’d have developed greater fortitude for slogging through these cooler months of the year, but moving to a warmer region only seems to have lowered …

An Athlete’s Mental Health is Also Important When it comes to youth and sports, intensity seems to be growing at an alarming rate. Rampant peer pressure, coach and parental pressure and self-imposed pressure, coupled with hectic schedules and little down time for rest and reflection, can create an environment of high stress. As such, the mental health needs of young …

We’ve all been there. Your 3-year-old has a meltdown in the middle of the grocery checkout line or you become beyond exasperated when your eldest clobbers your youngest for no apparent reason. Feelings. They push us to our limits. They’re big and seem to come out of nowhere at times. We realize we have difficulty managing our own emotions, so …

You’re Not Screwing Up Your Kids: A Single Mother Weighs In on Endless Parenting The shift started last week—the third week our children were home from school, in our care and minus the daily markings of their lives: swim team or lacrosse practice, playgroups or church groups. It was us, them, our computers, our Netflix accounts and an unsteady stream …

Your phone beeps and it’s 7 a.m. Sit up, stretch, and mentally prepare yourself for the jam-packed day ahead of you. Reach for your book and skim over the reading that you fell asleep on last night. Text your friends and tell them you booked the Airbnb for senior week. E-mail your boss to let her know that you will …

Or, why we have girlfriends, fortune cookies and more By: Monica Leigh It’s that time of year, when we all look back over the past year and look forward to the new one. This often comes with the ritual of making New Year’s resolutions. Years ago, around the time of having my first child, I decided to stop making myself …

Needle and Thread Mountains of paper piles sit crookedly on my kitchen table. Paper cutters, awls, bone folders and rulers are strewn about. Pages must be printed, covers cut to size and then paper folded and punched with holes. It takes weeks to make several dozen books this way. Every single time this process starts, I ask myself if it …

When talking with friends and family, or even when scrolling through social media, I’ve been seeing the terms “bullying” and “mean girl/boy” used a lot more recently. Bullying happens when somebody with more power, or believed to have more power, repeatedly tries to cause harm or exclude someone. It’s aggressive and also reoccurring, according to the website StopBullying.gov, a site …