This is like a part-time job. If you don’t have the charger for something and it takes batteries hooray. Eventually you need rechargeables and a charger because batteries are EXPENSIVE. If I were smart I’d buy the cords for this stuff 😂 For example Vsmile, Yamaha Keyboard, Innotab, and the press read books and toys. SO MANY BATTERIES, SO MANY CHARGERS, AND SO MUCH CHARGING 😭😭😭😭😭 and tears if I take too long lmao.

Any activity/learning suggestions for toddlers to cut screen time and keep them busy ?

My 11 yr old daughter has been giving me and my wife grief for the past 3 years lying about very dangerous things.
Some of these lies include:

1. telling us her uncle (who babysits) was starving her
   
2. telling her uncle/other family that I was abusive
   
3. telling people that I’m lying about having a disability
   
4. desperately trying to make us believe her even when caught on camera or presented with physical evidence
   
5. lying about running away
   
6. claiming she’s going to k!ll herself (we did take this very seriously and called crisis. she got mad at us because she was “just looking for attention”)
   
7. telling me one thing and immediately telling my wife a different story just to confuse us
   
8. stolen and subsequent destroyed multiple items from my wife and I and acted shocked when we find it
   
9. stolen money ($200+) and acted like she had no idea where it went

These lies have started to evolve overtime and get worse in nature. She also lies about nearly everything. Did you brush your hair? “Yes” as I stare at her bed head. Did you do your homework? “Yes” even if there is no homework. It’s getting extremely overwhelming and scary. She’s been in therapy and we’ve been talking with crisis management for months but it’s only getting worse. I don’t know what to do! I’m scared CPS is going to come knocking at our door any day. Or that she might actually try something dangerous for the attention.

And for some context, she’s an only child. She gets loads of attention! I take her everywhere, she has many friends, and we spoil her to death. We treat her problems very seriously, even if they seem small. She’s never been shy about issues she’s had and comes to us regularly for support. I just don’t know what to do.

I have two daughters; a 12 year old and an almost 10 year old.

I don’t know how else to describe it but I still worry that other parents question if I’m responsible enough.

I have a WFH job that pays enough. I boring and responsible, for the most part. I don’t have any speeding tickets or anything like that.

We’ve had a few sleepovers here but I mostly avoid them bc of my anxiety. Same with play dates; prefer them not here.

There isn’t anything wrong with our living situation, I could be tidier, but I still fear having people over and fear initiating play dates.

I always let the other parents do pick up and drop offs because I feel like they wouldn’t be comfortable with me doing pick up and drop offs with their kids.

Is there something wrong with me? What type of anxiety is this??

what are some fun gift ideas for a 5-year-old who loves drawing and making things? i’m trying to find something a little different from another coloring book, crayons, or a basic art set. they enjoy getting creative, so something where they can actually make or build their own little project would be nice.

i came across KiwiCo’s Pixel Art Lightbox while looking at creative activity kits, and the mix of art and making something that lights up caught my attention. are projects like that usually manageable for a 5-year-old, or do they tend to need quite a bit of adult help? i’d love to find something they can enjoy making and then keep using or displaying afterward.

Would like everyone and anyone's opinion/advice. I have a 4 year old son who is loved by mother (myself, 42F) and father (39M). There have been arguments, and we don't get together too well. I have taken my son and we have been living with my mother (grandmother, 76F). I love my son more than anything and I'm doing my best to raise him right. I take him to preschool and he doesn't need for anything. I take him to see his dad multiple times a week, plan and pay for outings and meals out. He claims I am doing wrong, that I am keeping his son from him. I'm not perfect, but the final straw for me was when he called me a bitch, told me I was evil, called me out on my weight (yes, I am obese and need to lose weight). I think it's bad to stay in an environment where I felt unsafe and constantly belittled. I was raised by my mom and stepfather in a loving, calm home. A child can still love both parents even if they don't live together, in my opinion. Am I being a bad mom?

Hi yall, I’m curious and want to know opinions. Dog talking buttons, the recordable buttons dog use to communicate with their owners. Is it a wild concept to use them with infants or would that interfere with learning and entice them NOT to speak? I have a 10 month old and we do all the things, she is slowing grasping some basic sign language. We are on track with “milestones, she is not hearing impaired. This is an open forum for discussion and I would love to hear if anyone has tried it or opinions from speech pathologists. It would just be so cool for my baby to crawl/walk to her button that says “new diaper” because we’ve all experienced the multiple diaper change in a few minutes lol.

Last week I woke up to my daughter curled up on the couch coughing her guts up into a paper bag. I immediately ask her what's wrong and she tells me she thinks she has food poisoning. For the next half hour, she's vomiting on and off and I try to support her the best I can despite me wondering what she possibly could have eaten to be in this dire of a state. Later, she falls asleep on the couch and I go into her room to grab her a blanket and notice one of the drawers under her bed is open. I go to close it and notice a small metal bottle inside. I pull it out and immediately recognize it as a gift of sake one of my friends had given me when I lived in Japan over 30 years ago! The bottle is completely empty and I start putting two and two together. After a few, my daughter finally comes to and I confront her with the bottle. At first she tries playing dumb and saying she needed an empty bottle for an art project so she just emptied it out. But after a bit she finally confesses and said that she just wanted to have a drink and feel something. Then she bursts into tears and says that after the drank the entire thing (despite it being obviously repulsive from the foul taste of it being expired) she went outside and ran around in a park then started vomiting onto herself and blacked-out in the middle of the park at night.
She told me she woke up around 3 am with a migraine and dragged herself home before falling asleep in bed with a head full of knotted, puke-sticky hair and wet clothes. I'm incredibly reliev v that she's still alive and happy that she had enough faith in me to contess all that. In this moment, I'm trying to think up a punishment because she needs to learn that this kind of stuff isn't okay. Still it's a lot for me to process and I'm wondering if I really know my teen as well as I thought I did. What else could she be doing? Is this really her first time drinking? I have no clue how to go about this...

Just paid for my child’s school photo w Artona.. and I never pay for touch ups bc I do it myself for digital photos. For the first time ever when I tried to clear fly away hairs, it goes BEHIND THE FLY AWAY HAIRS and they will not remove! Has this happened to anyone else?? Almost as if there is some protection on the photo that won’t allow me to do it bc I didn’t go and pay Artona?

Am I overthinking this, or is this something I should be concerned about as a mother?
My daughter is three years old, and she recently started playing with our six-year-old neighbour boy. Today, something happened that has left me really upset and disturbed, and I honestly don’t know how to process it.
I was just five minutes away when I noticed the boy taking my daughter behind the dining table. The moment I went over to check, he ran back to his house. When I asked my daughter what happened, I discovered that she had a toy gun tucked inside her pants. She told me that he had been poking her with the gun. She was wearing only her night pants, not a diaper.
I can’t stop thinking about what I saw and what my daughter told me. I understand that children can be curious and may not fully understand their actions, but the fact that he took her somewhere hidden from view and ran away when I approached has really unsettled me.
I don’t want to jump to conclusions or assume the worst, but I also don’t want to dismiss something that could be serious. I’m feeling a mix of anger, worry, and guilt for not being there to supervise them.
Fellow parents, especially those who have experienced something similar, how would you handle this? Am I overthinking a situation involving children’s play, or are these warning signs that I should take seriously? How should I talk to my three-year-old about what happened and make sure she is safe without frightening or confusing her?
I would genuinely appreciate some advice and perspective. I’m a very disturbed mom right now, and I just want to do the right thing for my daughter.

My daughter, 8, has had an ongoing issue with a girl at school. They started out as friends, however the girl became extremely clingy and my daughter no longer wanted to be friends. She tried many times to tell the girl to leave her alone, please stop following her, and that she did not want to play with her. She continued to follow my daughter and threaten to tell on her, if she didn't give in and play with her. She also grabs and touches my daughter a lot, and she really does not like that. This went on for a while.

It is now the following year and she is still bothering my daughter. I really feel this girl has a fixation with my daughter, and will not leave her alone without a lot of intervention from adults at school. I reached out to last year's teacher (at the time), her teacher this year, and then the principal recently. So far, I've just gotten an email response from the principal that was basically, "thank you for telling me." I should also note, I also had a conversation with the mom who assured me she would talk to her daughter. So, two teachers, her mom, and my daughter telling this girl to leave my daughter alone.. has not stopped her..

Our family has had so much stress because of this situation. My daughter had come home crying several times last year. She is never happy to go to school now.. which prior to meeting this girl, she was always happy and liked school.

My question is, what would you expect the school to do in this situation?

I feel really let down by the response from the principal.

The last 4 years of potty training have been so exhausting. So I thought I would share some of the things that helped.

Some history: started potty training when my son was 2 and it was a disaster from the beginning. It seemed like he had no sensation of urgency and no matter what I did, he would have countless accidents everyday. Every time I went to the pediatrician we would be told that we would have to wait till he was older to do any type of testing or referrals out.

When he was five he ended up having a silent fecal impaction that was about a month-long before we realized something was really wrong. He didn't have any pain or show any major symptoms, just chronic leakage. Eventually we got all the referrals. We did an x-ray, ultrasound, MRI to clear spina bifida, and then eventually a barium enema. And lo and behold he had a tortuous colon and dilation.

Right now we're doing Miralax and ex-lax everyday and doing pelvic floor physical therapy. Things that have helped are:

*Manual massage after meals (incredible results and greatly reduced time in colon)

*Biofeedback with pt (found he was clenching instead of pushing)

* Getting a peanut ball for the living room (to passively stretch pelvic floor and help with hip alignment)

*Trampoline workouts with the rebounder (helps motility)

*Hamstring stretching (pnf was the easiest method)

*Potty watch that allows you to set alarm times so scheduled sits are at the same time every day (best thing ever for 504 plan with kinder)

Even if you can only afford to go to one or two sessions with a pediatric pelvic floor therapist, I strongly recommend it. They can help identify muscle dysfunction like clenching instead of pushing. They can help identify muscle weakness or tightness. And they can give you a home program to work with. We absolutely love it. The day we got the diagnosis I was so relieved I wasn't crazy and it wasn't all in my head. So if you're going through potty training hell just know you're not the only one, and there is hope.

I have 2 sons (4years and 5 months). They are amazing little boys and I love them more than anything in the world. Neither of them have been easy babies. My husband and I constantly joke about them being “expert-level” or “boss-level” babies. My oldest was extremely colicky, crying 90% of his awake time as an infant. His pediatrician dismissed me as a nervous first time mom and didn’t do anything about it when I repeatedly asked for help. After months of my baby screaming in pain, several elimination diets for me (breastfeeding momma), and a second opinion, he was diagnosed with reflux and allergic colitis. After we got him in some new meds he was a much happier baby. Now he is a kind, considerate, well-rounded little boy.

Throughout all of this struggle to get him help, I was able to be home with him. I worked part time in the evenings so I could stay home during the day. My husband would come home in the afternoons and I would go to work. I was nervous about how a daycare setting would deal with his crying. I loved him endlessly and his constant crying was a challenge for me, how would someone who didn’t have that bond with him handle his crying? Eventually, we worked through his challenges and I returned to full time teaching and he started daycare at 11 months old. At that point he had adjusted well and was a much happier baby.

Fast forward to now. My youngest is 5 months old. He has struggled to sleep since he was born. He would only sleep if he was being held for the first few weeks of his life. We’ve struggled with him waking every hour or so at night, short naps, false starts at bedtime, and early wakings. He takes long contact naps, but only lasts about 30 minutes in his crib most of the time. We’re going down a similar track of seeing some food intolerance issues and reflux, but we have a much better pediatrician this time around so we’re working to get him more comfortable. This means that I’m back on elimination diets as of this week, the same week that he is starting daycare. I had 600 oz of milk in my freezer that are now useless because they contain the allergens we are cutting out. We’re still not sleeping, and he only just started taking a bottle without screaming as of last week. This week is a buffer week in case something came up, but I need to return to teaching my own class next week. Needless to say, this has been a stressful transition all around. Between how much he’s needed me, how much my toddler is needing me, trying to prepare to go back to work, exclusively breastfeeding, and not sleeping more than 2 interrupted hours of sleep per night for the last 5 months, I’m feeling like I’m drowning. My husband is helpful and involved, but most of the childcare falls on me.

Today is my infant’s third day at daycare and yesterday was only a half day because he had a morning appointment. Every day at pickup I am told how time-consuming he is. Today, I was told by his classroom’s lead teacher that he woke up when she tried to transfer him to his crib, he refused his last bottle of the day, and he cried when one of the teachers put him down and walked away from him on the mat. Yesterday at pickup, I was closing the door after getting him in his car seat, and one of the support staff looked at another child in the room and said, “I know. He took up a lot of time and energy today, didn’t he?” One of his teachers said that he fell asleep in his crib the other day, but then the other kids were banging on the bars of his bed so he woke up. She didn’t have the time to try to get him back to sleep, so he just didn’t nap.

I feel so defeated and like I did something wrong. Maybe I should have done more to prepare him for school, but I feel like I’ve been doing my best every day to give him what he needs and help him develop a schedule and routines. This feels like my worst nightmare. Like they already don’t like him and are visibly exasperated by him. I don’t know how I’m going to start work next week knowing that he’s “too much” for them. It feels like he isn’t ready for daycare, and neither am I, but I don’t have a choice. I’m paying over $4000/month for both of my kids to go to this daycare and I don’t feel good about it at all. I just don’t know what other choice I have. We can’t afford for me to stay home with him any longer. If you’ve lasted this long, thanks for reading my vent. I’m sure everything will be okay in the long run, but it’s hard to see the sun through the weeds at the moment.

How do working parents manage to help their kids with homework? I (Mom) only directly pick my kids (7&9) up from school once a week, on these days it's easy to fit in homework. Every other day my husband or a grandparent picks up the children and I get home later. None of them will do the kids homework with them. By the time I get home, we eat and it's basically bedtime and the kids are tired so it's a huge struggle or just not possible to do homework at that point. How do working parents do this? If I sent them to daycare instead they wouldn't do homework with them either.

Twice a week my husband works late, and by 7 PM I have used up every playful part of my personality. My 3-year-old has not.

He keeps asking me to come play. I can answer him, notice what he is doing, and be nearby. What I cannot do is spend another hour on the floor making voices for toys. For a while that meant the TV went on because I thought those were the only two settings.

I started sitting in the chair beside a low magnetic board while he moves the pieces around and tells me what he is making. I hand him a piece sometimes or ask what happened next, but I am not running the game.

Some nights we still watch TV. I just needed a version of playing together that works when I have about five percent left.

He is six. We have done bedtime stories every night since he was a baby. He loves books, asks for them, knows the stories by heart. He cannot decode a three letter word on his own. I always assumed reading together was how kids learned to read. Apparently not. So what does teaching a kid to read look like?

My kindergartener loves onesie pj's but he is now a size 6 and I cannot find any online in his size that are 100% cotton. Where can I get some? What do you recommend? He's been asking for weeks

Hello,

What are the best parenting books you have read?

Thank you!

For the past two months my now 21 month old has been waking up in the middle of the night and staying up for hours. He wakes up hysterically crying. I try to wait it out but if he sits up while crying I find myself going to get him quicker because I can’t take the cry. (I also have a 13 week old so mama is tirrrrred). The wake up times vary between 12:30-3am. I try to rock him but if he falls asleep he wakes up immediately and starts crying when I go to put him back down. I started bringing him into our bed and he will just stay awake. He will cuddle me, poke my husband, chat, laugh.

When he first started doing this he would be up for exactly 2 hours before he went back down. Now it can be 2+ hours or we don’t go back to sleep. If that’s the case, time has gotten to the point my husband has to get up for work & the little one loses his mind because he knows dadas leaving and I’m stuck trying to calm him down.

He’s asleep between 8-8:30, wakes up between 6-7 & naps between 11:30-12 for an 1.5-2 hours.

It also seems like he’s been soooo whiny and miserable more, even on days/nights his sleep schedule is the same.

Anyone have any similar experience?!

SOS: from one tired mama

My elementary-aged child has had an ongoing conflict with another child at school. The school has been aware of previous issues between them and has already taken steps to reduce their interactions.

Recently, the other child made a disturbing comment to my child involving death. My child reported it to a staff member. There had also been a previous incident involving similarly concerning comments.

I contacted the school administration rather than the other child's parent. The school spoke with both children afterward. The other parent is upset that I didn't contact them first and apparently feels their child is being unfairly targeted by other children.

I know the other parent casually but we're not friends, so contacting them directly didn't feel comfortable to me (her relative is also a teacher at the school, who I know well and is somewhat aware of past child conflict). I also felt that because this happened at school and there was a history, the school was the appropriate place to address it. Now I'm second-guessing myself. My child is worried that speaking up will affect their other friendships because the children have overlapping friend groups. My anxiety is now taking over.

If you were the parent in this situation, would you have contacted the other parent first, or gone to the school? And what would you do now to keep the situation from becoming a bigger social issue for the kids and yourself?

If you were the teacher or admin, how would you feel about the way this was handled and would you have preferred parents talk directly to each other first?

**Intentionally keeping things vague for anonymity…**

I moved from one place after a man ran through the toddler park with a knife screaming and I had to grab my toddler out of his path. Now I’m in a new apartment with a courtyard my two young kids love to play in and the neighbor throws rocks at them from over the fence so we can’t play there anymore. This happened more than once. They were so confused about why someone was throwing rocks at them. We had to go inside and I told them for now on we can go to other places but not the courtyard .I’m so depressed I’ve been crying all night. We just moved a year ago and liked it here. Cops said unless I have her on video can’t do anything. I’m asking my landlord for ring footage but doubt anything will happen. I’m hiding in the bedroom crying because I feel so bad for my kids. My husband says we’ll move but how many times? My son cried when he overhead it saying he doesn’t want to move, he likes here.

It doesn’t always demand an abusive or neglectful environment for a child to grow up with compromised social intelligence and unresolved guilt. 

Sometimes, all it takes is one major unresolved conflict between you and your spouse.

Whenever you're having shouting matches with your partner, your child is likely awake, listening to what’s going on upstairs.

In their mind, they go: “Why is mom and dad fighting? Are they mad because of me? Did I do something bad?”

Because of this, they begin feeling bad about themselves. Children are extremely egocentric creatures. They are extremely self-centered in a sense that they think every social interaction, especially among parents, is about them.

They have yet to develop the broader sense that ongoing issues are mostly caused because of incidents unrelated to them.

As these fights go unresolved and their guilt accumulates, they begin developing poor coping strategies such as bullying, sex, alcohol, or substance abuse.

While all children living with fighting parents don’t all end up the same way, it generally impacts their mental health in some shape or form. Know that relationship conflicts are typically resolved with compromises and active listening, not a “winner or loser” mindset. 

What is your biggest parenting concern? Write down on the comments below.

My 2.5 year old started leaving her room now without crying overnight or in the early morning. She usually crawls into bed with us, but I recently have woken up to her playing with her toys in the living room. It's fairly baby proofed, but I don't like her wandering alone out there, particularly in the middle of the night. I guess I'm just wondering how I should manage this. What do you do to keep your toddler safe?

- I have a newborn and don't want to wake the newborn up with a door alarm.

- Locking her in her room at night feels... bad I guess? I also love that she comes and climbs into bed with us, and it would be annoying to have her stuck in her room.

- The layout of the hall makes it difficult to put up a baby gate. Also my toddler is obsessed with climbing and I think she could climb right over at this point.

Are there other options or do I just pick one of the above and deal with it? I would love to hear everyone's experiences and recommendations!

My baby started cooing at around 7 weeks, he was really making vowel sounds and there was a clear back and forth interaction. Around 10 weeks he pretty much stopped. He's 12 weeks now and I can barely get a sound out of him and when he does “talk” it is towards a plant that he seems to enjoy very much. He is also gradually smiling less. I will go to the pedriatician but I was wondering if anyone has similar experience.