My rational, progressive, social-justice-warrior instincts are in overdrive as I think about the next step for my Year 5 twins...and in conflict with the on the ground practicalities.
If you’re a parent of a tween you’re likely familiar with phone watches - a new-ish breed of devices that allow you to track your child and communicate with them by phone and message. We initially bought these at the start of the school year so that our year 5-ers would be able to go to and come home from school and around the neighbourhood unaccompanied. They really are magnificent little devices, and I immediately wished we’d started our older son on one, rather than a phone and all the...
As parents, we are used to being the ones to provide feedback and guidance to our children. We assess their performance in school, sports, and other activities, and offer advice on how they can improve. But have you ever thought about the idea of having your child do a performance review of you, their parent?
Childcare costs are eye-watering...and based on a deeply flawed premise baked into the economic system: that individuals and businesses are somehow different and separate. It's patently clear that they're not: individuals run businesses. And families and households are the foundation of the whole economy.
An attempt to enumerate the many, many responsibilities required to run a household and raise children - to make visible the invisible work that can knock us off our feet.
Scale is one of those annoyingly overused business words which has been beaten into my brain due to my tech-adjacent professional past. In tech, everything is about scale - i.e. offering services to as many customers as possible with the least effort (and highest profits) possible.
Right now, parenting doesn’t scale much at all. We’ve all heard the adage about children - ‘they don’t come with a manual.’ We’re all kind of left to figure it out ourselves, with the help of friends and family who
Schools, help parents help you! If you follow this basic template, you'll make it so much easier for parents to engage and cooperate when you need them to! The ideal parent-friendly newsletter does the following, in this order: 1. Tells you what you need to do, by when 2. Important dates, ideally in the form of a digital calendar you can sync with your phone 3. Everything else A concise, effective summary of the need-to-know - what we need to do and where we need to be, when - followed by all...
Lifemin is for any parent who could benefit from help keeping organised, but there is a special place in my heart for the women who are defying the odds in the male-dominated corporate world, and the men who are defying stereotypes by stepping up on the home front to give their partners the space to thrive professionally.
What % of weekends do you actually enjoy?
I don’t know whether this is like or unlike other families but in our house, unstructured time leads to boredom and fighting. Recent plan-free weekends have reminded me that my kids, despite being tweens, still need active management and stimulation. Aka the tween version of the playground, or the human version of the hamster wheel.