Howdy, and hey, parents! I hope you're having a good post-holidays week with your kids. I'm sure there's lots of playing with toys and hanging around going on, which sounds splendid. Luckily for y'all, the difficult part of the holidays is over! Now, all you have to do is put up with your kids for the next week or so before they head back to school. Piece of cake , right? Even if your holidays didn't go exactly how you planned, they could always go worse. You could be that mom who filmed her to…

It's that time of the year…the kids are out of school, and they are going hog wild . I do not envy parents who stay home with their kids three days before Christmas. Their little bodies can barely hold so much anticipation, which leads to a lot of frantic energy coming your way. This time of year can be highly stressful, and there are very few things that can calm down kids who are so excited about Santa Claus. At the same time, there is something so special about having a couple of weeks to sp…

It's finally time for teachers to take a load off. It seems like this semester has been rough for everyone, and every teacher who taught this fall needs a well-deserved break to catch up on their sleep. So many people give teachers crap about having a summer and a winter break . They think that because their office job is all year long, they must work harder than anyone who gets a considerable period of time off. What those people don't know is that teachers have to spend a lot of their breaks…

To be a parent or to not be a parent. That is the question that so many twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings grapple with, and it's a lot harder to answer than you'd think. Of course, some people don't have a choice in whether they become parents. Babies sometimes just happen to people, and that's that. But for those with the privilege of family planning, it's all about the timing. Some people want to have kids as soon as possible, and some have to scramble toward the finish line, with the s…

As far as I can remember, I was a pretty easy kid to parent. All I wanted to do was to do good by the adults in my life, which, shockingly, doesn't make me the most rebellious kid. There are always exceptions to the “easy child” rule, and mine was during Christmastime of my 4th-grade year. I was hearing some rumblings at school about the realness of certain Christmas icons. I felt so angry at these rumors that I went to my dad several times and said, “everyone at school says Santa isn't real, b…

If you don't have a list on your phone with potential baby names for your future children, what are you even doing? At press time, I am kind of ambivalent about whether I want to have kids, but so help me God, if I come upon a child, I have the perfect name waiting in the woodwork. Having baby names with no intention of having children is kind of like wanting to get married because you want to throw a party. It's all of the fun with none of the hassle. Anyone who has actually raised a child kno…

Happy Thanksgiving, parents! Today might not be the most leisurely parenting day of the year, but I believe you all will get through it. You're about to enter prime “threatening your kids with Santa” season, and I support you all the way. Nothing will whip a kid into shape better than their fear of the naughty list.

They're poets

Being a parent during the days following Halloween is an insane exercise in self-control. A bag or multiple bags of assorted candy is sitting dormant in your house at this very second. Surely, nobody would notice if you took one fun-sized Snickers bar , right? There's no way stealing some Dots would make you one of the worst parents in the world pertaining to the aftermath of Halloween. Parents out there make their kids give away all of their candy to the local dentist's office! There are paren…

One of the most interesting concepts I've learned about from being on the parenting side of social media is a little phenomenon called "mom shaming." Mom shaming occurs when someone criticizes a mom for how she chooses to raise her family. When I look at “mom shaming," I see it as a cyclical problem. We have moms posting

I've seen many wild takes from parents online, but none wilder than young moms bragging about having kids in their late teens and early twenties. I can't count the number of times I've seen someone say, "when you're 40, you'll be dropping your kids off at pre-school; When I'm 40, I'll be at the club partying." I feel like 22-year-old moms make that statement to rationalize why they can no longer party. These posts fail to recognize that parenting is a lifelong duty that you're never done with.…

Watching parents spill details about their kids on social media can make you feel a lot better about your family life. I saw a TikTok this morning where a mom openly admitted she took her able-bodied child on a family vacations without her disabled son. Like, how are you not embarrassed? Why are you openly admitting this horrible thing you did on social media without shame? Parents can share the most alarming things to complete, and if you question it at all, you get accused of “mom shaming.” L…

Back to school season is finally upon us! That means parents get the whole day to lay around and do nothing before their kids come home, right? If only. School is one of the main reasons people don't see parenting as a full time job. Nobody except parents know how much time it takes to drop kids off at school, go grocery shopping, clean the house, manage their kids affairs, pay the bills, pick kids up from school, drive them to their activities, make dinner, pick them up from their activities a…

Parents' expression on social media has only grown in the past ten years. I remember when millennials started having kids and documented their entire parenting journeys via Facebook. The landscape of parenting social media has vastly expanded, with some of the most popular accounts being “gentle parenting” accounts. This content's conceit is to teach parents how to parent their kids without traumatizing them. They post videos of their kids doing something naughty and then show parents how they…

Ouch

Face, meet palm