Summer is upon us and it is time for fun in the sun and sand. When we want to cool off, most of us head for the pool or the beach. The water is warm and inviting and we love to swim the day away.
What normal infant sleep actually looks like through the first year, which disruptions matter, and the older advice on breathing monitors that is dangerously wrong.
Milestones describe ranges rather than deadlines, and the useful part of a milestone list is the short set of specific signs that warrant a conversation with a health visitor rather than a wait for the next review.
Past infancy this stops being a safety question and becomes a household one. What the evidence really shows, the one rule that does not relax, and how to make room sharing and moving out work.
Specialist UK advice points away from waiting for signs of readiness and away from reward charts, and towards the thing most accounts leave out altogether: constipation, which affects one child in three and stops the whole process until it is treated.
Why a child having a night terror is asleep rather than awake, how to tell one from a nightmare, the method that stops them, and why no medicine is needed.
The day clothes start to matter is the day identity starts to matter. What's happening developmentally, which battles are worth having, and what school uniform rules now say.
What separates a consequence from a punishment is not severity but whether it is related, proportionate, brief and known in advance. The two measures parents reach for when consequences feel insufficient have both been studied, and both come out badly.
What tracks children's outcomes is the quality of a father's relationship with them rather than his presence in the house — and the father-absence research supporting the familiar claim is weaker than the claim. Includes paternal perinatal depression, which is barely screened for.
Stranger danger has been deliberately retired by the organisations working on child abduction, because it aims at the wrong people, leaves a lost child unable to ask for help, and relies on a test no child can apply. What replaced it is a rule about going somewhere, and it applies to everyone.
Active listening is holding back the reflex reply and saying back what was heard in different words. The responses that close a conversation include four done out of kindness: advice, reassurance, questions and praise.