A few years back, my daughter came home from a birthday party and mentioned, kind of offhand, that a friend’s older cousin had picked her up and spun her around even after she’d asked him to stop. She was four. Nothing bad happened — he wasn’t trying to hurt her, he was just being a
My son once told me the most important thing that happened to him that day while I was elbow-deep in a sink full of dishes, half-listening, saying “mm-hmm” at what I hoped were the right moments. It wasn’t until he’d wandered off that I realized I had no idea what he’d actually said. Something about
Real, tested strategies (and a few honest failures) for getting kids to listen without yelling — from a parent of two, not a script. My son Theo is seven, and there was a solid stretch last winter where I said “put your shoes on” so many times before school that I started saying it in
My daughter Maya and I do our best talking in that stretch of car ride between the pool and home — her hair still dripping, chlorine smell filling up the whole back seat, radio off because she asked me to turn it off. I’ve never figured out why the car works better than the kitchen
Last Tuesday my four-year-old spent eleven minutes trying to zip her own jacket. I know it was eleven minutes because I was standing there watching the clock on the microwave, willing myself not to reach over and do it for her. We were already going to be late for preschool. She got the zipper stuck
My youngest turned six months old on a Tuesday, and by Thursday I had a high chair, a bib shaped like a strawberry, and a container of mashed banana I’d made with entirely too much ceremony. She looked at the spoon, looked at me, and turned her head so fast I nearly got banana on
