There’s a problem in the city. A dump truck has dropped her bin full of bowling balls all over the street without realizing it—the balls that were supposed to be delivered to the bowling alley. Stinky, a garbage truck, and Dirty, a backhoe loader, see it happen and decide they will get the balls to the destination…
When you tire of shooting doomsday preppers in Far Cry 5, instead of reselling the game for a mere fraction of what you paid or letting it collect dust in your garage for the next 26 years, why not make a bored kid’s day by donating it to your local library? In Reddit’s Gaming community, digital_russ shared how he did…
Parenting, I am learning, is like being the belayer to a roped rock climber—you’ve got to know when to hold on tight and when to give some slack. (No, I’m not a rock climber myself, but I once took an intro class using a Groupon.) You want to make sure your kids are safe and not making bonehead decisions, but you…
Kids are born innovators. Any parent who’s caught their child building pyramids out of restaurant creamer cups knows this. KiwiCo helps them channel their creativity with monthly subscription boxes of STEAM-focused activities—with these hands-on kits, little makers might build an arcade claw, design their own pinball…
Picture books can be magical for readers of all ages, even adults. But when it comes to reading aloud to young kids, I’ve learned not to ignore chapter books and novels. It may seem daunting to open up a hundred-plus-page tome when your audience has an attention span the length of a Peppa Pig episode, but the…
Much has been written about the importance of the family meal. There’s something about setting aside time every day, away from the distractions of work to-dos and house chores and Instagram notifications, to connect over food with your clan. Kids who grow up with the ritual will be fundamentally different from those…
When buying school supplies for your kid—perhaps during one of the tax-free weekends happening around the country—know that not all wooden pencils are created equal. Some break constantly. Others have erasers that smudge whatever they touch. The worst ones are basically sticks of agony that deserve to be left deep in…
When you become a parent, you are initiated into the weird world of modern baby products. There is something out there to “solve” every issue (and trust me, moms and dads navigating the messy terrain of new parenthood encounter a lot of issues). But how do you separate the truly world-changing innovations from the…
If you’re an Amazon Prime member, you may be able to buy groceries at Whole Foods without actually having to wander the aisles of Whole Foods, which we all know to be a dangerous excursion (“How did I spend 32 dollars on cheese dip?”). Today, Amazon announced the launch of grocery pickup, which has rolled out in…
Frickin’ Fortnite. Your kids won’t stop playing it, and you’re fed up. What do you do? You could join one of the many parent support groups, or make a musical parody to vent your frustrations, or try locking the game consoles in the car and hiding the key (yes, this is really happening).
Here’s a wild statistic: 43 percent of highly qualified women leave the workforce after having children. For many in this camp, it’s not because they’ve lost their drive, or they’re incapable of juggling sippy cups and sales calls, or that they suddenly feel destined to spend every waking moment gazing at their babies…
Jason Kottke knows how to find stuff that’ll make you stop, look and think. When you visit his blog kottke.org, you feel like you’ve entered a rare hideaway on the internet—it’s a place to explore curiosities around the web that haven’t been shared 23 times on your Facebook feed. (Recent posts include the history and…
You know those viral videos where it looks like you’re spying on a text conversation? They vary in satisfaction, but they’re hard to turn away from. That’s sort of the concept behind Amazon Rapids, the chat-style storytelling app for kids ages 5-12. Young readers follow along as stories unfold through text bubbles.…
Accidentally leaving a child in a hot car is a tragic mistake that anyone could make. Blame our faulty brains, among other things. (And if you haven’t read Gene Weingarten’s 2009 Washington Post story on hot car deaths, make a point to do so—it’s masterful.) As parents, the sooner we realize we’re not insusceptible,…
Before my daughter learned to speak, she learned to sign, and the first sign she mastered was “more.” More meant more—as in, “Give me more milk before I scream-cry in 5-4-3-2-1 ...”—but for her, it also meant “again.” Sing that song again. Push the toy cash register button again. Make that funny sound with your…
Parents who share a Netflix account with their families know the distinct pain. After putting your kids to bed, you sit down to watch a sexy new drama (or for me, The Great British Baking Show), and up pops on your TV screen: “Because you watched Lalaloopsy: Festival of Sugary Sweets, here’s Luna Petunia, My Little…
The beach seems like a fun place to take a toddler—in theory. But then you get there, and there are giant waves and stuff. Your kid yearns to frolic in the water, but you can’t let her. And so she sits there, staring longingly from the shore like Baby Moana, munching on gobs of sand.
On the parenting podcast What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood, co-host Amy Wilson told a childhood story about how she loved to poop in a diaper “until a pretty ripe old age.” She knew she shouldn’t do it, and her mom and dad knew she knew, but their efforts to get her to stop weren’t working. And so…
No sound transports me back to haze of new parenthood quite like the rhythmic hum of a breast pump. What at first looked to me like a modern torture device quickly became an essential tool in allowing my daughter to be breastfed—it increased my milk supply, relieved pressure, and let me build up a freezer stash for…
In her new memoir Now My Heart Is Full, Laura June writes about how becoming a parent has helped her make peace with the memory of her own mother, her mother’s alcoholism and their difficult relationship. Here, she talks about life with her daughter Zelda, from her belief that babies sometimes need to be left alone…
