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Scary Mommy •

Reading 'Ramona the Brave' To My 6-Year-Old Reminded Me How Confusing Childhood Can Be

"Everyone in the room except Howie laughed. Ramona was startled, then embarrassed."As I read the line from Ramona the Brave aloud to my 6-year-old, unraveling the story of a first grader on the first day of school quickly descending from excitement to embarrassment to rage to subdued quiet, I was reminded how confusing childhood can be. How easily you can be misunderstood by your peers and your teachers. I remembered that childhood version of myself in the character of Ramona, and I saw her in m...
Business Insider •

My husband has been a teacher for 18 years. This is the beginning-of-school motto our family lives by.

My husband is about to start his 19th year of teaching, our eldest is starting 7th grade, and our youngest is starting 1st grade. In our family's collective decades of experience, the one motto we try to embrace at the beginning of each school year is that everything is variable. Most of our parent friends try to control for all the variables — school, teachers, and sometimes even friends or classmates — and we've learned that it rarely works as intended.We are not completely immune to the urge...
Texas Monthly •

Texas Parents Are Terrified for Another Triple-Digit Summer

“No more than ten minutes!” I yelled after my eleven-year-old daughter as she darted out the back door. It was late on an August evening, and the temperature in Houston continued to hover over 100 degrees, refusing to offer even a brief reprieve. Last summer was less of a breaking point and more of a languishing, as persistent triple digits kept our family of four increasingly confined to our home. The sun was so relentless that I often drew the curtains by noon. Right outside our door was a hug...
Business Insider •

When my 6-year-old asked to get her ears pierced, I took her to a professional piercer. It was much safer than the way I did it.

This year, we took our 6-year-old to get her ears pierced. My husband and I agreed early on ear piercings were an important part of bodily autonomy and would be the determination of our children.If our kids wanted them, we would take them to get their ears pierced. If our kids didn't want them, we wouldn't. Their age was up to them. They just had to be sure. I talked each of our daughters through the reality of the experience, doing my best to explain the pain was similar to a shot. It would hur...
Business Insider •

I've taken my kids​, 6 and 12, on dozens of camping trips. I enjoy them more than traditional vacations.

When it comes to a family vacation, there is nothing I love more than cramming our SUV with various gear, driving away from our house in the middle of the city, pitching a tent, and sleeping on the ground next to my entire family. The sleep is often mediocre, we all end up smelling a bit ripe by the time we leave, but the time away together surpasses any other travel experience.In the fall of 2020, during the height of pandemic hobby acquisition, our family of four set out on our first car campi...
Business Insider •

We told our kids Santa Claus isn't real, but they don't believe us

"I know you said Santa isn't real, but the third graders say he is," our 6-year-old daughter shared with us one evening. This confession took us by surprise.My husband and I decided early on we were not going to do Santa in our house. We had different reasons. My husband firmly believed in Santa Claus a little too long. When friends discovered his earnest letter in sixth grade, he shrugged it off as something he did for his mom's sake, quietly disavowing his childhood faith at the same time. It'...
Business Insider •

I wasn't allowed to celebrate Halloween growing up. Now, I live for costumes and trick-or-treating with my family.

When I was growing up, my religious, conservative mom didn't allow me to trick-or-treat, watch movies with witches, or dress up for school in anything even remotely ghoulish.As a kid, I cared less about the candy and more about the embarrassment of being left out of this iconic childhood tradition. I figured if I had kids, I'd course-correct by taking them trick-or-treating.I didn't expect to be a Halloween convert. The second my eyes hit the plush Carter's elephant costume in Costco when my old...
Business Insider •

I've taken surf and piano lessons thanks to my kids' interests. After failing and later succeeding, I learned how to have fun even as a beginner.

Some parents want to relive their adolescent glories through their children. For me, I'm finding an opportunity to try new pursuits. Over the past five years, I started learning hobbies alongside my kids. I'm finding myself liberated from external motivations and fears and inspired by my daughters' seemingly unending wells of enthusiasm.The summer my oldest was 6, I signed us up for a single surf lesson. Surfing was always something I found intriguing and too cool for me — something for people t...
Business Insider •

I've gone on 32 trips in 5 years with my 2 kids. I've learned to focus on the good memories instead of the perfect vacation.

I've spent a summer backpacking across southern Europe, lived and traveled in East Africa for a year, and made an exhausting trip to Costa Rica with a toddler. I consider myself a seasoned traveler and am used to traveling with my kids at my side.In fact, I've made 32 trips with them over the past five years: 11 of these trips involved flights, 20 were camping trips, and one was a local road trip. However, it was a summer transatlantic flight to meet my parents in West Yorkshire that took me dow...
SheKnows •

Why My Husband & I Will Never Tell Our Kids They're Smart

When my husband and I found out we were pregnant, we quickly agreed on two things: a name, and that we would never call our kid “smart”.


Like many people, my husband and I grew up believing intelligence is a dichotomy: you’re either smart, or you aren’t. Same for athletics, musicianship, or artistic talent. These things were innate. However, what we were learning, both personally and professionally, was that it wasn’t our intelligence or talents that were fixed — but rather our mindset arou...

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