#parenting

#parenting

My daughter has been hearing my husband and me discuss this administration for over a year, and she overhears when I listen to NPR in the car. She started asking questions, mostly about what certain words meant, and what we were talking about. We tried to be as neutral as we could, which was extremely difficult. We talk about what certain legal changes could cause, or how policies affect families in our community.

Our daughter grew up with a bad best friend, "Trisha." Trisha was the type to constantly be skipping school, smoking behind the bathroom, and generally making trouble for everyone around. She would constantly be dragging our daughter along to the point that it had serious legal complications. Our daughter stole my late grandfather's empty pistol and gave it to Trisha so she could "scare" her drug-dealing boyfriend into giving her money. No one was injured, but the cops were involved.

As it turns out, Evan and Zachary have been making obscene phone calls to random strangers and even businesses on burner phones that Grant has been providing! When I confronted him about it, he said it was "harmless fun" and excused it by saying that he used to make crank calls when he was their age and that it "keeps them occupied."

My husband and I always had a pretty good sex life, but three kids in six years really left us exhausted. Happy! But so tired and so out of touch with each other. Friends would tell us to schedule date nights, but babysitters and the logistics of it made it seem overwhelming. We figured we were just in a weird stage and would get through it.

My wife, "Lourdes" and I have a 2-year-old daughter, "Mackenzie." Mackenzie was a difficult baby (long crying spells, difficult to soothe, hypersensitive to sound, fussy about solid food, etc.), and my wife has a low threshold for frustration. So most of Mackenzie's care fell to me since Lourdes said she "couldn't deal with it." The result has been that our daughter is closer to me than she is to her mother. Well, Lourdes said something disturbing regarding our daughter recently.

My son is 7, and he loves soccer. Since he was 3, he's played on local rec teams that have weekly practice and Saturday games at a nearby park. These are not really competitive leagues, more for kids to have fun. This league is really good about not pushing the kids too hard. Last year, three different coaches approached us after games to encourage us to have our son try out for a travel soccer team.

Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones are getting ready for Lent - and it's going to be a joint effort. "Do you like to give things up?" Jenna asked Sheinelle on the Feb. 19 episode of TODAY with Jenna & Sheinelle, while discussing how LeBron James said he gave up wine and chocolate chip cookies to get back in shape when he recently appeared on the "Mind the Game" podcast.

We got together when we were teenagers after meeting at a family event when we were still in school. He was my first everything.

I actually don't want to have kids.

I love reading romance novels whole-heartedly. Knowing the general beats of what is going to happen, and that there will definitely be a happily ever after, is comforting to me. I love reading about yearning and love and sex, too. The books I read are not "closed-door romances"-they're pretty smutty with racy sex scenes. The particular book she was reading does start out very "casual" and before it turns more serious, though all with consenting adults.

My mother dropped a bombshell on me and I don't know how to move on from it, but I feel like I need to, fast-I am expecting my first child in a few months and don't want this hanging over us. She informed me that she and my father have never felt like they are a priority in anyone else's life, including mine, and so they have decided to be their own priority.

But what you have the right to do is not always the action that will lead to the most happiness for you. In fact, if you insist upon escalating before exploring a gentler approach, you will often make things worse. So your wife isn't entirely full of it. Tense relationships with neighbors really do make a lot of people miserable, and it makes sense that she'd want to avoid pissing off people who live within shouting distance and are apparently pretty combative.

I really wish I could give you THE answer. Regrettably, thousands of years of human knowledge on this point has served up only this: It's a dang crapshoot. You have created two unique humans and sent them spinning off like tops into a very complex world. They may fight like cats and dogs as kids and become thick as thieves as adults, or they may be little buddies as kids and maintain (at best) a cool civility when forced to interact at weddings and funerals.

On a recent trip, my daughter and I were tossing her stuffed animal around the hotel room. The toy spun around near the ceiling and came to rest on the corner of the TV, high above our heads. My daughter pointed and tried to explain where the animal landed, on the, the, the ... she didn't have the word for "TV." Yep, we had to tell our 4-year-old what that big, black rectangle was called.

I'm listening to the latest Stephen Spencer song when suddenly I burst into tears. Was it the falsetto vocals? The swirling harmonies? No, it was the lyrics: What did Apple-the-Stoola say? He said I love you' twenty-sixty times. Spencer, you see, has a unique lyrical collaborator: his three-year-old daughter. Over the last four months, he has been posting short songs online based on her stream-of-consciousness stories.

I'm not going to tell you that you can't squish or flush a bug if you can't handle trapping and releasing it (although, full disclosure, I am a trap/release outdoors gal for all except mosquitos and cockroaches), but I'm not sure that persuading your 4-year-old to be cool with killing any living creature (even when it's because it "scares the shit out of" their mother) is your best path forward as a parent.

Twenty years ago, a woman sat opposite me on a train and quoted the first line of the book I was reading to me. We talked and talked about books, architecture, family, relationships and haven't stopped since. I assumed I'd never see her again, but she gave me her number and after texting furiously for a week she invited me to stay with her, and our instant intellectual connection became an intense physical one.

"Morning! We're not. I don't think we were invited to this one ..." I wrote back, unoffended by the lack of invitation. But then, another, more unsettling thought crossed my mind: "Or I missed the invite, which is also very possible," I added. Sure enough, when I typed "Henry" into my inbox search a few moments later, two things came up: an invitation to the party and a reminder to RSVP. I'd missed both.

I have a 14-year-old son, "Tim." About a month ago, I caught Tim on making lewd and disgusting posts in an online forum. Both as punishment and for his own online safety, I cut all internet connection from the house except for my own personal computer. If he needs to go online, he goes through me, under my supervision. He complained, of course.

Kids may say the darndest things, but parents post about them in the funniest ways.

I'd suggest counseling first before looking into possible avenues of having another child at this point in life. Learning and experiencing that your children are growing up as you planned and knowing that active parenting doesn't end at age 18, but continues for many years as your children seek your knowledge and wisdom, helps take the edge off feeling abandoned or no longer needed by your kids. -Robin

The first time I used the Snoo, it freaked me out. My wife and I placed our baby into the high-tech bassinet on her fifth day on this earth, praying the machine would help her sleep, and thus aid us in fighting back the hallucinations brought on by new-parent sleep deprivation. We wrapped her in the approved organic cotton swaddle, clipped her into the sleek oval bed and pressed the glowing button on the side.

My wife, Mabel, leaves a permanent pile of clothes in our bedroom on a chair. I call it the Monster. It feels as if there are thousands of T-shirts, trousers and sweatshirts always stacked there. I hate it. I don't know how she finds anything. Also, it's a pain: the chair is between the bed and my side of the wardrobe, and sometimes the pile is so huge that it stops me from accessing my own clothes.

It sounds like you're trying to avoid potentially awkward or difficult conversations with friends and family. And sometimes that path works out just fine! But as you're learning with your sister, avoidance doesn't work every time. Granted, your niece could simply grow out of her bullying behavior. But it could also become a pattern when your kids are together. Which is a bummer for them, makes the time you all spend with your sister's family a lot more fraught,

On the air, Yesi Ortiz is a warm, flirty host for a popular L.A. hip hop station. Off the air, she's a single mother of six adopted kids. Managing both roles, plus romance, is a challenge. This episode originally aired in 2015. Death, Sex & Money is now produced by Slate! To support us and our colleagues, please sign up for our membership program, Slate Plus! Members get ad-free podcasts, bonus content on lots of Slate shows, and full access to all the articles

Kids and clean cars don't mix. Between snack crumbs, stray toys, and sticky fingerprints, your backseat can feel like a disaster zone. No matter how often you tidy up, the mess always returns. So how to keep the car clean? But a messy car doesn't have to be your reality! With simple systems and quick clean-up habits, you can keep things under control. The key is working with the chaos instead of against it -because kids will always make a mess.

Teens can retreat into themselves when they find themselves confronted by difficult emotional circumstances. At times it is important and constructive to leave them to themselves as they adjust to these challenges. Parents often find it emotionally troubling to watch as their child has difficulty and want to fix things. It is important for the development of independence that a child be left to learn how to work things out.

Body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs), like hair pulling, skin picking, and nail biting, can take up a lot of space in a family's life. Not just in bathrooms and bedrooms, but in conversations, emotions, and worries about the future. Parents want to help, kids want relief, and everyone is exhausted by the cycle of noticing, reminding, trying harder, and feeling discouraged.

My first assignment at the 2016 Summer Olympics was to deliver a package. My second was to find a food mart that sold bottled water. I wasn't working the event, though. My "job" was being the parent of an Olympic athlete. My daughter, Gwen Jorgensen, was set to compete in the women's triathlon, and our family had flown from Wisconsin to Rio de Janeiro to support her.

You can't do it all. And early on as a parent, I found that out by burning out completely while trying to be the perfect mother. One of the first things I abandoned to reestablish my sanity? Not trying to cook three from-scratch meals for my family every day while also trying to parent, work, and clean. Let's face it: if you're in the parenting business, you better have a few incredibly easy go-to meals up your sleeve

Kids have been telling their parents they're bored for as long as there have been parents. Nothing new there. But lately, it seems different. Many 21st-century kids, especially bright or neurodivergent kids, report being bored a lot. They're bored at school. They're bored on short car trips. They're bored when they're home and stuck inside without a friend. They're bored outside if there's nobody nearby to play with.