I’m always thrilled at the ingenuity people show in coming up with cheap alternatives to commercial products. Wise Bread’s instructions for making your own moon sand are a great example: a little fine sand, a little cornstarch, a little water, and Presto! Moon sand. I’ll be trying this.
If your kids haven’t played with moon sand […]

The Simple Dollar is the only finance-related website I read on any sort of regular basis, mostly because of posts like this one: A Talk With My Niece. The author, Trent, is thinking about things he wants to say to a 15-year old niece of his, someone he sees struggling to put together a future […]

The Cranking Widgets Blog offers some good advice about communicating with small children: How to Talk to a Toddler. I would add one more thing,though: Don’t talk baby talk. Little children talk baby talk becuase they’re babies and they’re still learning how to make the right sounds for their native language and put them […]

Readers of StepDadding might be interested in a post I wrote for lifehack.org as a kind of remedy for the rampant consumerism of “Black Friday”: Teaching Kids Charity and Clarity with Pre-Christmas Cleaning. The idea is one I got from my brother and sister-in-law (and they got it from who-knows-where) — go through your kids’ […]

Lisa Hendey of Productivity @ Home suggests several ways to encourage thankfulness in children. At the top of the list is “pray together”, and we’re not a praying family at all, but the rest of the tips are good, especialy the fourth, “Remember to thank your children”:
Next time your child brings home a test that […]

Parent Hacks describes a situation perilously close to what we deal with here:
Both my kids are notoriously tight-lipped about what happens at school. The general answer to “what did you do?” is nothing, and “what was your favorite activity today?” is I don’t remember.
A few weeks ago, I turned to my step-daughter at the […]

Apropos of my post about kids and art, Daddy Types describes an art outing gone sour at the National Gallery. The first part of the post is an excellent example of how to share art with your children. For example:
Taking the kid to see art, contemporary or otherwise, just seems like the most […]

“Always leave on a good note”. This is the advice Lisa Hendry of Productivity @ Home gives in her article Building Confidence in Children.The idea is to always let children finish a project, activity, or whatever with a success, however small — a homework problem done correctly, a goal scored, etc. That way they’ll remember […]

One of my lifehack.org co-writers, Chris Brogan, wrote yesterday about Blogging for Kids. We don’t do this at my house — the kids haven’t expressed any interest in blogging, and I’m not going to press the issue — though the two “tweens” have MySpace profiles (customized by mom, marked “private”, with friend adds vetted […]

Cultivate Greatness has a powerful, long piece on current research into the role parental praise plays in encouraging children to succeed. As it happens, it’s not all about building up self-esteem by telling your children how smart they are. Instead, researchers find that kids do best when parents commend their hard work — and […]