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I paid a visit to a friend just last weekend, which turned into a counselling session in many ways. Having my children nearing the end of the teenage years, she is just starting the school years. With a daughter of 10 and son of just seven, her school childrearing days are really just getting under way. She wanted to ask my advice on her daughter’s new friend. When she told me why, it brought me...

When my daughter was younger, she had a particularly interesting way of getting her father to satisfy her sweet tooth. Demands for icecream were often followed with the threat of divorce if he didn't comply. And no, she wasn't one of those adorable little girls who assumed she was also married to Daddy; she knew her role in the family. Mummy was married to Daddy, but if Daddy didn't...

Ok, so this is about the third or fourth attempt to write my update, because life has changed quite a bit since the last one. I am delighted to say that the babies are home! Here's what happened... So, the week leading into their seventh week was productive for the bottle feeding. Elliot progressed to two bottles in a row quite quickly, then three in a row by Tuesday, and by Wednesday it was...

We all have funny and, more often than not, embarrassing home movies hiding someowhere in the house that we pull out every Christmas or family get-togethers. But as viral videos become more and more prominent in our society, it seems these so-called home movies are being put up online for the whole world to see. And they no longer become embarrassing family memories but rather viral hits, and the...

Reality TV matriarch and world-famous momager, Kris Jenner, came out this week and said she was “really upset” by her daughter’s decision to get lip fillers before the age of 18. The idea of your child going under the surgeon’s knife at any age would distress any mother, but here’s the thing, Kris was in a position to stop it. While the Kardashian / Jenner family set-up is far from...

Remember the last time you made a tongue-in-cheek remark about your children and found yourself berated by thousands of angry parents chastising you for not recognising your good fortune? Yeah, me neither. That, however, is exactly what happened to Victoria Beckham earlier this week when she made an off-the-cuff remark about her daughter Harper’s apparent disinterest in fashion. During a...

My 13-year-old daughter went on her first official date last Saturday evening. Despite her father’s outright horror and my initial reluctance, we finally relented and allowed Rebecca to meet a boy from her class outside of the school grounds. Under the watchful eye of her older brother who was dispatched to keep an eye on his younger sister from a nearby booth, Rebecca met with her young suitor...

By the time you read this, I'll have done it. I'll be a fully-fledged member of the school gates brigade. I'm hoping I'll now be able to relate to the frustration and delight of every mum and dad I’ve encountered recently, regaling us with tales from the school wars and secretly putting the fear of God into those of us still in the throes of the toddler years. But it's time...

One of the big things about going back to school after the summer holidays is rediscovering all the characters you had forgotten for the previous couple of months. Like head lice. I was reminded of those perennial fixtures of the childhood scalp during a discussion of the subject on Marian Finucane’s radio show, which revealed many obscure facts about head lice that I had been quite happy not...

I remember hearing the argument that the summer holidays are too long for children because they forget half of what they’ve learned and then struggle to return to the routine of school life. Well, what about the parents? What about my struggles? During that sweet two-month period of no school I forgot everything I’d ever learnt about how to survive the education of my children and so, here...