Research shows that regular family dinners have tremendous benefits for children and teens. Eating dinner together as a family can increase self-esteem, academic performance, and reduce the likelihood of adolescent depression. They create a secure, positive, warm environment for the child. Regular family dinners – which the research defines as eating dinner together at least five times a week – also have the potential to prevent risky behavior, such as drug

There’s a phenomenon that regularly occurs in parenting that we need to discuss. It’s called default parent syndrome. You probably know what we’re talking about: when one parent becomes the default parent and one parent becomes the back-up parent. Parenting magazines, websites, and the mainstream news media have picked up on this. They highlight one unfortunate by-product of the default/back-up parenting dynamic, which is that the parent who falls into

This year, National Teenager Day falls on the first day of Spring: Saturday, March 21st. That means you get to celebrate two amazing things at once: the magic of Spring, and the joy of teenagers. That’s right, we said the joy of teenagers. We mean it. If there’s a teenager in your life, March 21st is the day to honor them, celebrate them, and tell them how much you appreciate

When people think of a single parent, most envision a single mom. A young, single mom. They’re not wrong: there are more young, single moms than any other type of single parent in the U.S. But not all single parents are moms. And they’re not all young. Single parents can dads, grandmas, grandpas, aunts, uncles, or foster parents of either gender. There’s only one criterion a person needs to meet