As you bask in the final weeks of summer, here’s something I’m sure you’re thinking about: flu shots. They’re already here—Rite Aid just announced that seasonal flu shots are available at all 2,466 of its pharmacies.

If you’ve ever seen something unusual on your kid’s skin, you’ve likely turned to the internet for guidance as you anxiously wait for an appointment with your pediatrician. On health education sites, you’ll find images of every common dermatological condition, including eczema, hand-foot-and-mouth disease, chicken…

We are at a stage with our infant son where every unexplained expression of discontentment is met with the question: “Do you think he’s teething?” Right now, it’s likely that he is. He’s drooly and a little fussy, and whenever I let him feel the “cold” of a canned beverage straight out of the fridge, he grabs it and…

I don’t read a lot of ebooks with my kid, but I can certainly appreciate the convenience of them. They’re fantastic for travel (take this from someone who just helped my daughter lug a backpack full of giant activity books onto an airplane). They can also cost less per title than print versions and may include bonus…

You can’t read your kid’s mind. If you could, you would know that his new favorite color just became turquoise, even though you just bought him a cup that is blue, his favorite color from three hours ago. But you can make him think you can read his mind, thanks to this super fun trick posted on Reddit by u/trongs24.

If I’m trying to help my six-year-old daughter Maggie become a more organized thinker, my instruction seems to be coming too late. “There are board game pieces everywhere,” I’ll tell her, having noticed the scene hours after she’s fled it and moved onto three different activities. As someone who currently has…

One thing I don’t like about homework for young kids is the fact that after they’ve just spent a whole day sitting at a desk at school, we direct them to another desk at home. It’s inhibiting. Their bodies are wiggly and restless and begging to move.

If you haven’t picked up a controller in a while, you might see your kids’ video games as mindless fun, or as their reward for cleaning their room. But video games can be more than that. While immersed in a virtual world, children can learn how to solve complex problems—a skill they’ll need long after they run out of…

Every time we go to my friend Anna’s house, she puts a plate of fruit out for the kids. Plums, Asian pears, melons. My daughter always devours piece after piece. However, whenever I feed the child the same type of fruit at home, she’s rarely interested. What’s the difference? I’ve concluded that it’s gotta be Anna’s…

My daughter never had a problem wearing bibs—in fact, I always considered the ones with the food-catching pockets to be the breakthrough invention of the century. (A harried-parent hack that I heard from “a friend”: On mornings when you’re racing out the door, pour some Cheerios into the pocket and let your kid eat…

As the mother of a six-year-old, my phone is filled with contacts such as “Mary LeilasMom” and “Dana MaddiesDad.” It’s how I keep track of my daughter’s new friends and the personal assistants who keep their schedules (AKA their “parents”). This labeling method helps my brain connect the adult to the child, but it’s…

If you’re home with young children and have work to do, I’m sorry. This is hard. There’s no denying that. You’ll have use the “in-between” moments—usually nap times or quiet times—which are never long enough, but alas, they’re what you have available.

After many lessons, my six-year-old daughter is becoming a proficient swimmer. She can tread water, retrieve toys at the bottom of the pool, and find her way to the wall after jumping into the deep end. But there’s a skill she still needs to learn, and it’s one that I don’t think her instructors will be teaching. That…

For the uninitiated, camping with small children may seem like a dramatic dinner party story waiting to happen. There are so many unknowns. Will a wad of burnt marshmallow get stuck in your kid’s hair? Will he faceplant in the dirt on the middle-of-the-night trudge to the bathroom? Will she beg to go home for the…

You may have read about the Tibetan monks who spend hours creating impossibly intricate mandalas out of tiny grains of sand, only to mess it all up as soon as they finish as a symbol of the ephemeral nature of all things. When I learned of this, I gasped in horror. All that work. Gone.

Want to see your kid’s drawings float off the page? Have them try this science experiment from Sergei Urban, aka TheDadLab. He shares it with us from his book The Dad Lab: 50 Awesome Science Projects for Parents and Kids.

I love seeing my child paint. I fear seeing my child paint. These two feelings coexist. Whenever my six-year-old daughter is ready to go full Jackson Pollock at her art table, I’ll usually squeeze some paint into a few paper bowls. But the Parent Pack shares a way to keep things cleaner: Pour the paint into clear…

When your kid does something you’re not pleased with, it’s easy to connect the behavior to their identity.

Dressing an infant can be fun. Perhaps you have a drawer full of onesies with slogans such as: “Diaper loading. Please wait.” Hilarious. But it can be tricky at times, too. We’ve got some clever solutions to some common baby clothing challenges.

The idea of a “baby prenup” was first brought into pop consciousness by Porsha of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, and apparently, it’s now the latest (oh god) “momtroversy.” It is simply a written agreement between an expecting couple that lays out the childcare expectations for both parties before a baby is born.