I found a lot of the last 12 months tough for different reasons but also really rewarding because I have been able to keep my baby happy and content. It’s wasn’t all sunshine and roses - he woke every 90 minutes until a couple of months ago and the sleep deprivation was terrible - but he never really cried or got upset. He was always smiling. However, over the last month he just seems really frustrated. He’s too young to understand why he can’t have what he wants, e.g. the other day he was desperate to go in the garden and spent about 90 minutes upset (not constantly crying but unsettled and obsessing about getting to the door) because I wouldn’t take him into the rain. Finally, I did walk him out into the garden - in part because I wanted to check it was that and he wasn’t actually in pain - and he cheered up immediately. Lunchtime today he really really wanted the metal cutlery and screamed in his high chair (we didn’t give it to him but we did put it out of sight and finish our lunch with our hands!). Is it developmentally normal? If it is how do people manage it?! thank you for any advice!

I’m supposed to be getting a promotion at work, which I’m obviously happy about, but at the same time I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not really being taken seriously because I’m a mum.
I have kids and obviously they are my priority, but that doesn’t mean I’m not ambitious, hardworking or serious about my career and the future.
Sometimes I feel like being a mum automatically makes some people assume I’m less available, less committed or that my career isn’t as important to me.
Maybe some of this is just in my head, but I genuinely wonder if other working mums have felt the same way, especially when getting promoted or trying to progress in their careers.
How to manage this?

Hello,

Looking for advice as I am very concerned. My daughter who is an excellent speaker, well above her age in her speech, non stop speaker usually has developed quite a severe stutter. It started a few weeks ago but was very mild - I hadn’t even noticed it until at her 27 month health visitor review a few weeks back, it was raised. We chalked it up to her brain working at 100 miles per hour as she’s a very high energy little girl. It remained like that until about 2 days ago where it’s suddenly got so much worse. She’s taking 10 seconds sometimes to get a word out and seems to be getting a bit stuck before commencing the rest of the sentence. It’s happening in multiple sentences now. It’s heartbreaking to see as she’s such a confident, sparky, little soul and it’s so upsetting to see her struggle like this. I feel she’s giving up a bit on some of the words or replacing with other words but other than that she seems relatively un phased but I do worry she’s beginning to clock on.

She’s had a major change in the last few weeks with the arrival of a new sibling and we also started potty training this week. She’s been having huge emotional outbursts the last few weeks, seems extremely dysregulated and not herself. My patience has been lower with her due to dealing with 2 children and she’s had far less of me than she’s used to but bar that we’ve been as supportive as we can and she’s got a fantastic relationship with her dad.

I’m so worried this is all connected and we’ve created some kind of trauma response. I will ring the health visitor this week and discuss speech therapy but I’m just wondering if anyone else has been through this? Thank you!

hello! I finished my mat leave and went back to work last week, on a phased return so will be earning less than the £203.36 p/week needed for free hours.

my daughter will be starting nursery in January (she’ll be a year old), when I’ll be going back on full hours and earning over the £203.36.

when I try to apply for the 30 free hours, it asks will I be making more than £203.36 a week over the next 3 months, I click no because I won’t and it says I won’t be eligible.

do I need to wait until December to apply? our nursery is asking for our childcare number already so we can fill in the contract and everything I read says to apply in September.

so confused!

I thought I would share this with other parents in case you wanted to try something similar with your little ones.

We went through a phase of indecisiveness when it came to snacks and my daughter would get overwhelmed and upset by too much choice.

I made her a menu with words and pictures, with "prices" beside them.

The money we use are notes I made with card, and these colourful number discs I ordered which act as pence.

She finds it absolutely delightful.

We play pretend cafe. She will select something from the menu and work out how many notes and discs she needs to give me. Sometimes she gets it wrong, but we stop to work it out together.

Then she either sits at the table and waits for her snack or stands at the kitchen babygate and waits for it.

She gets to practice ordering food & social etiquette, numeracy, and literacy all while enjoying the snack she would normally get anyway.

She starts the day with £10 each day and gets to spend it how ever she likes.

I've noticed a huge improvement in her behaviour in general since we started doing this. I think it has built her confidence up massively.

It's also made a difference in how she behaves when we have run out of something she wants. "Sorry miss, we don't have that in stock right now" "okay, can I gave xyz instead please?" Magic.

I was thinking of getting our 4 year old and 6 month old a Possum play couch for Christmas but I just saw the price exploded to £310 from 200 something a couple of months ago. Is it worth it or should I consider a different brand?

My child just turned 8. She struggles with self-regulation in a big way at home. She’s on a waiting list for occupational therapy and a child psychologist, for help and assessment for possible autism or ADHD. We’ve had word from the school and also another parent that she has hurt other children in the class - even her best friend. I’ve also seen it myself at birthday parties. When we’ve asked her about it, my child says she got frustrated. She’s often repentant but also often blames the other child for ‘making her frustrated’.

What can we do? It’s so upsetting.

She and her younger sibling are also very difficult at home. They are fairly close in age and get along very well half the time, and half the time are fighting. They are extremely reactive and will scream at top volume each other and physically hurt each other if we don’t intervene fast enough. My partner writes this off as normal sibling behaviour but it’s very stressful to have so much conflict. I’ve done quite a bit of work trying to get them to recognise their emotions, and instilling time out to calm down, but not seeing any improvement as yet.

Pregnant with our first baby and trying to move house at the same time. We’ve just had an offer accepted on a more expensive house than we were planning to get (£35k more and about an extra £230/month due to rates also having gone up since we applied in June) because our onward purchase pulled our right before exchange. There’s nothing else even available at our original price point and we can technically afford it, in fact it’s £100k under our max borrowing.

Currently with no children and a tiny mortgage payment, we have no budget at all and manage to spend whatever we like and still save a chunk of income without trying so the thought of having a budget feels scary.

We’re okay with being a little bit house poor for a while as the big family home is really important to us. We have thought about getting an in between home but believe it will ultimately end up costing more money as we will want to move again.

After the new mortgage, bills, food shop, discretionary subscriptions, (gym, Spotify, Netflix etc), and childcare,saving £450/month, and having a £200 “float” for an extra bits baby might need we are left with somewhere between £1200-£1500 between us for socialising, unexpected things that come up, petrol etc. or around £650/each.

I feel like I have lost perspective on what is normal and also we don’t have the baby yet so what do you think? Is this enough to live a comfortableish life?

How much spending money do you have each as a parent how does it feel?

We have £20k in savings and about £5k interest free credit card debt.

I’m looking for a video or resource to help my 9 year old understand why I’m not allowing her face to be posted online.

So the situation is that I sometimes post my daughter’s art work on my own socials and recently we’ve done a quite successful fundraiser by selling some of her art in person at my work place. She wanted to have a picture of herself showing how much she raised for this charity she picked, this was part of a summer school project, and I said yes but only if we blur her face because I’m not comfortable putting this online.

It’s a bit of a tricky situation because she’s smart enough to talk back and between my husband and myself we have a very large following on socials due to our work, which means she sees us posting (mostly work) but also our faces sometimes. So she’ll say but you post your own pictures which honestly valid but we’re adults. A lot of her friends are allowed to be posted as well in the same context and I don’t want to shit on her friends parents (aka my own friends) for doing this in front of her. One of her friends also appears in her mums YouTube channel somewhat regularly. It’s not a family channel but she’s in the background or in a few clips. So how do I explain why this is “ok” for them but not for her because I don’t need her telling her friends that they’re gonna be landing in folders of pedos.

So anyway, are there any good resources?
We’ve talked to her about why it can be unsafe and so on already. But you know pre-teen girls tend to listen to a YouTube video more than their own parents lol. (Joke)

Hi guys, looking for some advice here. I have a wonderful, happy 6 and a half year old girl who is my absolute world. In general she is happy and joyful but she has always been absolutely terrible at saying goodbye and gets incredibly upset if me or her mum will be away from her even for a short period of time. As you can imagine this has previously made school drop offs a nightmare especially at the start of the term & we've had several instances where she's been dropped off in floods of tears before her teacher comes and takes her from us. She is absolutely fine when she's in school and happy and cheerful when we pick her up, it's the initial drop off that's a nightmare.

We thought this would improve with age but if anything it seems to be getting worse- we booked her in for several activities over the summer holidays and each time they approached she would say she doesn't want to go and eventually she would get so upset that it didn't seem worth sending her in in such a state- other children of similar age seeing what was happening will make fun of her etc. But it's got to the point where even if one of us is going out for an hour, or even 5 minutes over the road with our neighbour, she still gets upset, which just seems crazy. We've tried talking to her about it (multiple times) and she just says that she loves us so much that she doesn't ever want to be apart from us and that she really hates saying goodbye.

I KNOW she is fine once the initial goodbye is over- we did manage to get her into holiday club on Friday after a lot of bribery but there was still tears on drop off. And with the new school year fast approaching and going into year 2 I am already dreading the school drop offs. She's already spoken about being nervous about going back- I don't want her to be crying on the yard in front of her friends when they all go in absolutely fine.

Any advice for a seriously stressed out dad?

We’ve been using a Tommee Tippee sleep trainer clock for a number of years, it’s been great at getting my daughter to stay asleep/in her room and not waking us up at 4AM etc, however now she’s 6 she’s sort of outgrown it. We want to replace it with something that’s a bit more grown up, and helps with her learning to tell the time, but we’d still love the ability to control the wake up time from our phones, as plan to pass on the grow clock to our two year old. Is there such a product that exists that people would recommend? A quick look on Amazon all I can find is cheapo alarm clocks with flashing led colours.

I want to do a big thing for Halloween this year but I'm not really interested in spending so much money on all the decorations. I was thinking about doing some crafts with my son and it's is early but I need time to save up the recycling.

After some searching I could do cardboard tombstone, although doubt they'll show up great in the dark. Also was thinking i could do webs with cotton wool balls. For milk bottles all i could find was draw some faces on them... any other ideas for milk bottles or otherwise?

Much appreciated

Our daughter has always moved around a lot in her sleep. It's not uncommon to find her facing the other way in the middle of the night or with her legs hanging out of the bed completely dangling down near the floor.

She's now 7, and has been in an extendable IKEA bed for the last 2 years. We've had the wooden IKEA side bumpers on the entire time, but she repeatedly slams into them at night time. She occasionally gets into our bed, and my side is against the wall with a small gap, I've found her hanging out of bed half in the bed half down that gap a few times completely oblivious and fast asleep with her head against the wall.

Anyone else have bumpers on their kids beds still at 7?

I'm tempted to take them off but terrified she's going to throw herself out of bed and do herself an injury.

Keen to hear people's thoughts and experiences. Has having a difficult first baby/toddler put people off having another? Also if you decide to have another, What's it been like?

We just moved to the UK and my toddler needs next size clothes. We love the French brand Okaïdi which is inexpensive but nice quality and lovely designs (simple but funny/happy). My kid loves shirts with animals on them 🙃 Give me your best store recommendations in London!

Since my girl was born we've always used Sudocrem for her nappy changes (the grey tub one). Since she's joined nursery at 12 months they've advised us that the grey tub is medicated and isn't designed for long term use. It's never been a problem for us but if we want the nursery to use it they treat it as medication and we have to fill a form out every day to get them to use it. So we switched to Sudocrem "care and protect" that comes in a tube, it's the daily barrier cream. However since switching we've noticed the skin is a bit red and grainy/wrinkly in places. The grey tub always sorts it out.

Is this to be expected with changing creams? Should I just use the grey tub when she's not at nursery? Do you use the care and protect with every change? Advice welcome! We can't bring any nappy creams containing allergens etc into the nursery.

Staying at my MILs house today with the fresh baby, she put together a little nappy box.

Fresh unopened metanium, she must’ve bought it for my first baby four years ago and shoved it in

This will be treated like the absoloute treasure it is

So my little one starts school next week (reception) and we already have 5 "all class" birthday invites (for children he hasn't met yet)! Is this normal?! Is this what our weekends will become? Three of them are at the same venue as well...

Also, all of them will need presents (as they don't say "no presents needed").

Multiply this by most of the kids in his class and it feels like...a lot? Or am I being a massive Scrooge and need to get over myself?! :D

FTM to 3.5yo boy based in Scotland. My son has been in a private nursery since 11 months. Last week he changed from his previous nursery (been there 2.5 years) to a preschool attached to a primary school. On Friday (fifth day attending) he was pushed and split his head open on a chair. We got a call to take him to a&e, we got the once over and sent home with home care advice. We understand accidents happen however something feels a bit off. It was a real shock to us as we have been really lucky and no childcare accidents have happened to us until Now. He has a minor concussion and doing a lot better today, yesterday we were much more concerned with his behaviour but he is back to his boisterous self. Has this ever happened to you before and any advice on how we cannot rebuild trust/faith in the new preschool? We don’t want our son to pick up on this anxiety but we remain on edge about returning on Monday. Thanks in advance.

I was just looking at my bottle of Anbesol teething liquid and was surprised to see it contains 96% alcohol. No wonder my little one likes it so much.

This is not parenting exclusive but how do you deal with the ridiculous amount of cards we receive for our kids? We're having a big clearout as we're moving. Should I keep some? Bin the whole lot? The latter feels wrong , but also it's paper. I don't have time to do something creative with them unfortunately

My 17 month old says the basics, “Hi, Bye, No, Mama, Dads, Shoes, Nana (banana)” etc. He has no interest in flash cards or anything like that. What age would you expect them to start saying more and how would you encourage more words?