Parenting

The saying Spare the rod and spoil the child is deeply rooted in some cultures as saving discipline. Where does this idea come from and is it true that using the rod is next to godliness?

When I became a parent, someone told me that I would learn to be a child. However, I was determined to be more of an adult than ever and not repeat attitudes that I considered wrong, including those of my parents.

How do we create fun and memorable experiences on road trips, where “Are we there yet?” isn’t whined out loud every few seconds?

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting a young woman who was good at everything. Although she was only in her early twenties, she was an expert in the kitchen, passionate about cleaning, attentive to the needs of children, had a green thumb, was skilled at raising animals and was able to give an articulate speech in her field of...

Gentle parenting—how did this seemingly wholesome phrase come to elicit such strong negative reactions as contempt, sarcasm, and condescension?

You wouldn’t think so, but whether or not children do chores is one predictor of their future happiness and success. 

I was standing in the supermarket queue, pushing my daughter in her pushchair, when a man well past his prime wearing camouflage trousers gave her a long look. Then he turned to me, as if continuing a conversation about parenting we'd started long ago, and said, "You know, this little girl is going to heal a lot of things in you."

Regular reading of the Bible in childhood is a strong predictor of spiritual health in adulthood. If instilling a love for the Bible is a crucial factor in religious education, parents need to develop methods to reinforce a habit that keeps children on the desired spiritual trajectory.

This article is the third and last in the "Parenting School" series. The first two parts were published in the May and June 2020 issues of Semnele Timpului, the Romanian version of the ST Network.

The relationship between a parent and their child is one of the most significant in their lives, with its primary role being education.

The refrain: “I’m booored…” is “the worst song on the parenting soundtrack,” says journalist Kat Patrick humorously. Chanted in the most inconvenient moments, this complaint often triggers the parent’s guilt or concern. But there’s nothing wrong with letting your child get bored sometimes.

Raising a child is not easy at all. Raising someone else’s child is even harder. But raising six children who are not your own, giving up your life, sounds crazy to most of us.

I’m a walking contradiction when it comes to technology. I spend far too much time on the internet—some productive, such as paying bills, researching for my work and reading the news, but mostly wasted time on one-too-many funny cat videos—but I’m still using a Nokia E71 mobile phone bought in 2009. (Don’t laugh! It did win Mobile Choice’s phone of the year in...

Lucy is an 8-year-old girl who has a range of interests broader than that of an ordinary adult. She is enrolled in an international school, where classes are taught in French by native speakers. Her classmates are children of expats from different cultures, which amuses her nanny, who, when picking her up from school, says that she "took her from the children's UN."

Even after the World Health Organization replaced the term social distancing with physical distancing, people are still feeling the effects of social distancing.