How the Internet made me a better mother

Unlike some full-time working mothers, I’ve never fantasized about staying home with my kids. And yet here I am: close to a full-time working mother in terms of how I spend my hours, but nothing like a full-time working mother in terms of how I spend my days. The most surprising part: I’ve never been happier.

A family Minecraft policy

Minecraft has become a global phenomenon because kids love playing it, and parents and educators praise the way it fuels creativity and learning. But we’ve held off on introducing it to our household because we’re concerned about the compulsive behaviour...

Homeschooling as a working mom: the pie chart

It’s week two of the school year — or it would be, if we weren’t in the middle of an increasingly frustrating (though well-justified) teachers’ strike. We’re experiencing the school outage a little differently at our house, because this...

Making room for messiness

For the past two weeks we’ve been in the middle of our semi-annual domestic meltdown. Meltdown features include: emergency school visits necessitating precipitous departures from work implementation of new household rules precipitating epically draining tantrums...

What you can learn by NOT throwing your child out of a window

A few years ago I found myself comparing vacation plans with a colleague — a single guy about a decade older than me. His upcoming vacation? A month-long backpacking trip to Hawaii, totally off the grid. When I marvelled at his bravery, he offered this wisdom: “Every...

The family that hacks together….

Saturday morning at our house: the kids are programming our new Lego Mindstorms robot. I’m installing Xcode on the Mac home media server…step one in the long road to controlling our Mini with our Kinect.

Don’t be scared to Facebook your kids: A response to Amy Webb

Amy Webb has written an important but frustrating post on Facebook privacy and kids on the Slate website. Writing about a friend who extensively Facebooks photos and stories about her daughter “Kate”, Webb worries that Kate’s parents have compromised...

How BrainPop prepared my son for time travel

Last night’s bedtime story was “JCat and the Time Machine for Cats”. Like all JCat stories, this one featured JCat traveling to Cupertino with Tim Cook in order to invent something. Happily, I was ready for the request to have a story featuring a...

Stop sibling conflict with a tech-inspired solution

Are you tired of listening to your kids argue? Does it seem like a single ill-timed comment can ignite a cascade of escalating attacks and complaints? Are you sick of playing referee? This weekend we came up with an innovative strategy for stopping the sibling...