Articles About Parenting School-Aged Kids, Tweens, and Teens by Ann Douglas

• Let Them Be Bored
  A healthy amount of boredom is good for kids.
• Personality Clash
  How to bring out the best in your child, even if you and your child have opposite personality styles. (See article at bottom of page.)
• Work-Life Balance
  Questions and answers about work-life balance from visitors to WomensHealthMatters.ca.
• Family Fitness: Resolve to Get Your Kids Moving
  Who says fitness has to be boring -- or super-serious? Throw around a Frisbee (yes, even in January!) Play a game of tag. As long as you're moving your bodies vigorously enough to get your hearts beating faster, you're exercising.
• Use Your Super Powers: For Mothers and Daughters Who Want to Change the World
  Online slide presentation. Based on a workshop Ann delivers for mothers and daughters.
• Eating Dinner as a Family
  How to transition into eating dinner as a family when your kids want to eat early and your work schedules don't allow you to make dinner until mid-evening.
• If Mama Ain't Happy....
  If the holiday martyr suit doesn't fit, don't wear it....
• Mom's Stress Guide
  Why moms of school-aged kids feel overloaded, and how to remedy this stressful situation.
• Mom's Stress Guide: Tweens and Teens
  In many ways, you feel like you're back in the new mommy trenches, except it's a much lonelier experience this time around.
• Sibling Squabbles
  How to handle the conflict between your kids.
• Avoiding Jealousy at Kids' Birthday Parties
  Being a guest at someone else's birthday party can seem like an exercise in torture for a very young child. But buying that child gifts in order to ease the pain of not being the birthday boy is likely to create more problems that it will solve.
• Solving a Sticky Birthday Situation
  Should your child invite a classmate to his birthday party if that classmate's family belongs to a faith that doesn't observe birthday parties?
• 5 Fabulous Birthday Parties for Kids
  Fun and easy birthday party ideas.
• Birthday Bailout
  10 simple ideas for party-stressed parents.
• Kids Are Natural Scientists
  You can encourage your child's sense of wonder as he moves from age to stage by providing him with ongoing opportunities for discovery.
• Handling Bullying
  "My child is being bullied at school. What should I do?"
• Raising a Daughter: Mean Girls and Perfectionism
  Dealing with mean girls and girls who are perfectionists.
• Hand Me Down Blues
  What do you do with a relative who keeps passing along items you neither want nor need?
• Kids and Stage Fright
  How to help your child to cope with his or her anxiety about that first performance in a school play.
• Kids and Nail-Biting
  Nail-biting may be stress-related, a habit that has emerged from thumb-sucking in early childhood, a habit copied from other children, or a way of dealing with nails that are too long or have rough edges.
• Parents Shift Focus From Disability to Possibility
  With help from other parents of children with special needs, moms and dads can turn the surprise and grief of a difficult diagnosis into hope.
• A Recipe for Sanity
  What every mother who works outside of the home needs is a fairy godmother -- someone who will arrive on the scene, wave her magic wand, and make all the work and family related-chaos disappear.
• A Motherlode of Advice
  From Pablum to the Pill, from maternity wear to Mr. Dressup, Ann Douglas chronicles a century in Canuck parenting.
• Ten Ways to Say 'I Love You' to Your Child on Valentine's Day
  Some creative ways of saying 'I love you' to your child.
• Avoiding the B-Word: 16 Summer Boredom Solutions
  Less boredom means means less whining, less fighting with siblings, and fewer discipline problems for you.
• Back to School Parenting Advice
  Dealing with clutter, bullies, and reluctant readers.
• Bullied at School
  Back-to-school season means the return of bullying for two many kids. Ann Douglas answers the questions about bullying from two concerned parents.
• Halloween Essentials for Mad Scientist Types
  So you're looking for ways to help the kids run off some of the pre-Halloween adrenaline and the post-Halloween sugar. Look no further. These activity sites deliver the goods year-round and they go totally over-the-top at Halloween.
• The Secret to Reducing Holiday Stress
  Guess what? There's an alternative to stressing ourselves out. We can take control of our holiday expectations before they spiral out of control.
• Squelching the Holiday Gimmees
  "My child wants everything advertised on TV at this time of year. How can I tame this case of the gimmees?"
• 3 Multi-Generational Holiday Parties
  Unique and festive get-togethers for the whole family.
• The Flare Necessities
  Your essential guide to household fire safety.
• Taking the Plunge
  Ready to hit the water with your little prince or princess of tides? Here's everything you need to know to get safely in the swim of things.
• The Mini
  Who says a vacation isn’t a vacation unless it’s at least a week?