Parenting

I’ve discovered over the years that one of the best ways to learn about someone is to ask after their influences.

It also just so happened that this year we had fewer family functions, so we’ve had a long, fairly relaxed, mostly uneventful vacation time. Until the sleepovers. The idea was a good one in theory.

I want my children to know how to weigh the cost of a goal, to consider the sacrifice that it will require, and then to do the things that are really important to them. 

I’m not sure why the first day of true snow is a disaster every year, but it is.

One of my frustrations as a parent is when children convince themselves of an untruth so throughly that they act as though it’s true.

I got every parent’s favourite call yesterday – the one from the principal where you get asked to come by the office for a little chat about your kid – that call.

“Look, Dad!” my middle son said as he came home the other day. “I got an iPad!”

Kids create disasters and they're not good at cleaning them up.

My youngest sometimes feels a little left out and his frustration and jealousy at this situation often comes out in really practical ways.

Children have difficulty listening sometimes. You may have noticed.

I grew up in a house of five boys in one of the safest cities on the planet in an era when helicopter parents (or drone parents, as I prefer to call them) would have been laughed off the playground.

“We played nicky-nicky-nine-doors. It was awesome.”

My youngest son is a real story teller. 

Sometimes in our house relatively simple issues end up escalating far further than necessary.

I'm constantly amazed at how much my kids know.

One of the things I've found helpful to my parenting (and to my life generally, in fact) is a daily time of quiet meditation.

I often see kids in public places behaving in ways that are childish or impolite or even outright inappropriate and I have made a conscious effort to intervene in those kinds of situations as calmly and politely as I can.

Parenting in a digital age comes with two big challenges: excessive use and behavioural concerns.