I'm not exactly the most tech-savvy parent, so when I was offered a Nintendo Labo Vehicle Kit to check out, I was at first like, "Wait, what's a Labo?" Luckily, my son, Ryan, who had just received a much-coveted Nintendo Switch for his 8th birthday, was like, "It's where you build really cool stuff and then you can play it on TV!"

Giving your kid swimming lessons is a smart move, but you can't just relax the moment he passes all his safety tests. It's one thing for a child to be a proficient swimmer in a pool (and even then, he's not drown-proof), but open water is a whole different beast. A new report from Safe Kids Worldwide gives some alarming findings, which you should take note of if your family will be hanging out near a lake, river or ocean this summer.

For the first time, the American Academy of Pediatrics has issued guidance on safe tattoos, piercings, and scarification for young people. They aren't saying not to get tattoos — kids still have to ask Mum or Dad about that in most places, anyway. But they have some advice if you're thinking about it.

I won't sugarcoat this. Trying to work while taking care of a baby is usually a mess. You're exhausted. You can't formulate coherent thoughts. You feel guilty all the time because you're thinking about your baby while you work, and your work while you parent. You rely on that Almighty Nap, but it's unpredictable, and even when it happens, there are a hundred house chores waiting to be done.

You feel like you have two different bosses in two different worlds - and one of them keeps begging for milk.

The thing about kids is that their little feet keep growing into slightly bigger feet that constantly need new shoes.

Most of the students at one North Carolina private school in the US didn’t get the chickenpox vaccine. Now that school is the epicentre of the largest chickenpox outbreak in 20 years.

If you're like me, fascinated by home improvement and tools, you really want your kids to be as interested as you are and benefit from the many life lessons working with tools can impart. Or maybe you're nothing like me & you don't care much about tools or carpentry beyond just thinking that making a treehouse would be wicked cool. No matter your orientation to home improvement, you want your kids to learn how to use tools. But what tools should you get for them? Which ones are safe?

The conventional guideline for sharing the news of a pregnancy is that you should wait until the ceremonial 12 or 13-week mark, the endpoint of the most anxiety-ridden first trimester when most pregnancy losses are diagnosed. What the rule is really saying is: Don't get too excited. But what if you do have a miscarriage? You're left alone to navigate your tragedy, one that you did nothing to cause, one that so many others have experienced, too.

Children's car seats are complicated. Their mechanisms can get clogged by a errant chip; they're hard to fit in the back seat; they don't work well with loose clothing. And after six to ten years, they expire.

When I was a kid, I remember grown-ups joking that any deep hole (that I was digging in a sandbox, perhaps) would go "straight down to China." They were wrong, of course, and today you can answer the same question online with Antipodes Map.

Well, parents, it's almost the end of another school year. Here's a fun thing to do before your kids get home on their final day: Have a "finish line" at your doorway for them to run through. This could be in the form of streamers and balloons, a "Welcome to Summer" banner, or an army of family members with squirt guns.

On a recent trip home to see my parents, we got off the highway, where the kids were pretty much OK. But then, they started to turn green and my husband turned around in his seat to hold a bag in front of the kid behind the passenger seat. A few minutes later, both kids began an extravagant dueling barf session that covered them, their car seats, and a good portion of the car.

The Poisons Information Centre is always there for you if you’ve swallowed, inhaled, or been exposed to something you shouldn’t. If your symptoms are serious, you should skip straight to 000 instead. But what if you aren’t sure whether you (or your child) have been exposed to a meaningful amount of poison? The centre has a web tool to help you decide if you need to call.

How do you take a long-distance flight with three kids without losing your sanity (or your savings account)? That’s what we’re looking at this week.

You’ve done it. You’ve made it through all the Halloween festivities — the school parties and parades, the costume going on and off and back on again, the trick-or-treating, the chocolate-consumption negotiations — without any major mishaps.

You might know Chris Ballew as the frontman of '90s alt-rock band The Presidents of the United States of America. But if you’re under, say, eight, you’re probably most familiar with him as Caspar Babypants, a “kindie-rock” icon who makes family-friendly music about topics such as a bubble that doesn’t follow the crowd, a tick that finds residence in a free couch, and a blackberry pie that falls from the sky. An experienced dad of two, he shared with us how he parents.

Unless you're one of those lucky few parents whose young kids live to sleep, you're probably in the same boat as the rest of us — staggering through your days in a fog of fatigue, yet dreading sunset when the clock starts ticking closer and closer towards bedtime. Even if your kids don't have trouble falling asleep, their challenge might be staying asleep. You've come to expect you'll be greeted by a little shadowy face multiple times in the night.

A third of today's teenagers don't read books for pleasure, reports a survey from the American Psychological Association. That's nearly triple the number reported in the 1970s. And yet teens are reading — perhaps more than ever before. Glued to screens, they're voraciously consuming words in the form of texts, photo captions, hashtags, notifications and news snippets splashed on social media.

My five-year-old daughter has declared that ketchup is “spicy.” She prefers foods in shades of beige. Her ideal dinner rotation would be something like chicken nuggets and peas, cheese pizza and peas, plain udon noodles and peas, tater tots and peas, and ice cream and peas.

As a mum who was once a food writer, one who heads straight to the spice section at local markets while travelling, one who delights in bold flavours and daydreams about them long after finishing a meal, I can’t help but wonder: Where did I go wrong?