Parenting

When the meaning of Christmas was lost for our family and what we did next to find it again. With all the hubbub of spending and buying in the lead up to Christmas, often the meaning of Christmas is lost in a whirlwind of shiny new gadgets and toys. No, this isn’t an article spinning the virtues of getting back to church. This is simpler than that. What is the meaning of Christmas for you and your family? How do you celebrate a dominant and hugely popular Christian festival when you’re not Christian? What if you lost that meaning? What would you do? This is what happened to our family and how we reinvented it to find new meaning.

Human Rights Day, which takes place annually on 10th December, highlights global human rights issues and what we can do to make a difference. The theme this year is inclusion, and the human right to participate in public life.

Kids don’t worry about keeping fit. They naturally spend their days running around and burning up any excess energy. You don’t see a toddler slumped in a chair for eight hours of the day, wondering why they feel so sluggish and tired. Our kids have a lot to teach us about the joyfulness of moving our bodies. Without the self-consciousness of adulthood, they dance freely to music, run effortlessly around the garden, and scale scary-looking heights without fear. Watching the way children move and use their bodies can help us remember what it felt like to be free and without excess baggage.

What would happen if you let your child decide to eat whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, wherever they wanted? Would they slowly (or rapidly!) descend into poor eating habits, choosing to live on chocolate, cakes and biscuits eaten gradually through the day? Would they become sick and fat? Or, would they actually be healthier and happier?

I consider myself to be a scientifically minded person. I grew up in a household with two scientifically minded parents. My father, a maths and astrophysics enthusiast and my mother a qualified nurse and senior midwife. In between watching countless episodes of sci-fi spectacular TV shows like Star Trek with my father, I would also be stargazing through his telescope, stealing his copy of Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” and pouring over my mother’s many anatomy and physiology textbooks.

Getting married can be an incredibly expensive occasion in a couple’s life. With costs soaring and many plunging themselves into serious debt to afford the perfect celebration, and many eventually separating due to the stress caused by those debts, it can be intimidating to even consider taking the step of committing to a marriage. But for those who do wish to marry, waiting due to costs or the pressure of feeling obliged to put on a traditional display, it doesn’t have to break the bank. In fact, I recently got married, beautiful dress and reception too, for under £1500.

Have you ever found yourself guiltily wishing your child could be a bit friendlier/less boisterous/more outgoing/less aggressive? Or looking at friends’ kids and thinking for a nano-second ‘if only my son/daughter behaved like that’? Most of us try our darndest not to do this, but find that every so often it’s our child who is causing an awful ruckus while every other child is calmly playing. And we berate ourselves – is it our bad parenting? – and perhaps internally berate our children.

Keen to take a break but not sure the budget will stretch to a week in the Maldives?! Family holidays can be prohibitively expensive once you’ve added up all the extras and sometimes it feels like what cash you’ve got is better spent on the essentials. But a family holiday is enhancing on many levels, giving everyone a chance to step off the treadmill and really connect with one another.

Chatting with friends recently, the conversation turned to what not to say to teenagers. Some of these friends are parents of teens; others, like me, have younger children but remember being a teenager all too well. After much discussion, we came up with a list of things that really don’t help to hear when you’re going through the tumultuous hormonal, physical and emotional upheaval of teenage-hood. Teenagers are some of the most maligned and misunderstood members of our society, in a kind of limbo-land without respect or standing in life and with no means yet of gaining it.

Unless you are particularly lucky, most of us will likely experience a complicated death at some point in our lives. As we grow, we learn too soon that death visits more than just the old and frail. We also learn that people we love often die before their time and as a direct result of the choices they have made. What follows is a long and complex emotional journey for those left behind. Not too long ago I wrote an article on alcoholism. In it, I talked a little about my mother-in-law and her own battle with alcohol addiction. Sadly, she passed away very recently.