Video: It’s Autism Awareness Month, and to honour it, Sesame Street is showing us how to better support kids on the spectrum. They’ve released a few new short videos featuring Julia, the show’s first character with autism.

The worst thing about letting my daughter watch a few shows is having to turn off those shows.

Does your kid ask for the same thing at every meal? Does she refuse to eat if her fruit is touching her chicken nugget? These scenarios are familiar to parents of picky eaters, and to be honest, to almost all toddler parents.

It’s stressful to worry that your child is not getting good nutrition or that outsiders judge her daily diet of macaroni and cheese.

I have a vivid memory of taking my daughter to get her blood drawn when she was two. As she sat on my lap in a lab chair, she was so happy. She waved to the technician, who smiled and waved back. And then he took her tiny arm, stuck a needle in it, and she screamed bloody murder. Never again was she as delighted to enter a medical facility.

If you have a little kid, you probably have some kind of food battle raging in your home. They don’t want to sit in one spot long enough to eat a meal, they don’t want to eat that, or they don’t want to eat anything.

It was 1997, and I had just settled into my new place a few days prior. Classes hadn’t even started yet. I was having a problem with registration because I was missing some critical piece of information. I called my mum. “Mum, can you call and find out what I need to do to fix my registration?”

Mike Adamick has a message for his fellow dads: Sexism exists, and if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. In his forthcoming bookRaising Empowered Daughters: A Dad-to-Dad Guide, he zooms in on how the seemingly innocent myths, tropes and sayings that fathers often pass on to their kids can coalesce into something much more damaging. The good news? You don’t have to let these things slide. Adamick, who is raising a 13-year-old daughter, shared with us how he parents.

When my son was in preschool, I saw an idea floating around my parenting circles: Choose a sentimental book and, starting in kindergarten, have his teacher write him a note on a page in the book. Do this every year through high school. On graduation day, give him the book.

When Sonia Smith-Kang moved to California in the 1980s, it was at “the height of The Valley Girl,” she says. All around her, she saw blue eyes and feathered blonde hair.

Parents of multiple children have long admitted that as each additional child comes along, the parenting standards get lower.

A decade ago, at a time when mummy blogs were rising in popularity and we all should have felt united under the umbrella of survival, the phenomenon of the Mummy Wars flared up. These so-called wars, which centered around how one chose to parent, pitted stay-at-home mums against working mums, breastfeeding mums against formula-feeders, baby-wearing mums against stroller-lovers, and co-sleeping parents against crib-users.

“Don’t forget!” is one of those things I say to my daughter with gusto in my voice but fear in my soul.

A woman would have to work a full fifteen months to earn what a man in an equivalent role makes in a year. That's because the wage gap is estimated to be 80 cents to the dollar. However, a recent study suggests that the pay gap could be even wider.

Think for a moment about how it feels when your boss gives you a compliment about your work on a project. Now think how it feels when you overhear your boss singing your praises to another manager.

Every now and then, I feel it happen. I feel myself getting sucked into an argument with my eight-year-old son over the simplest of things. The type of outerwear needed on a particular day, maybe, or where a certain toy should be stored. And because he and I are a lot alike (let’s call us tenacious), we both have a tendency to dig our heels in.

Lucy Knisley has made a career out of sketching her life. Her latest graphic novel Kid Gloves details her difficult transition into motherhood—from fertility problems to miscarriages to a near-death experience during childbirth. It’s both intimate and highly informative, illustrating the science and history of reproductive health. (I learned that women wore corsets during pregnancy up until the 1910s, which doctors finally starting realising that’s not such a great idea.)

Knisley also just released a picture book called You Are New, which celebrates the joy of being a baby. She lives with her partner John, her kid that she refers to as “Palindrome”, and a cat named Linney. Here’s how she parents.

It is important to teach your kids the anatomically correct names of their body parts as early as possible. Your son has a penis, not a “wee-wee”. Your daughter has a vulva, not “ladybits”.

Rhiannon tells me that the kid she nannies used to collect disposable latex gloves. This started when he was around two. Any time he’d see latex gloves — at the doctor’s office, at nursery school, in a random first aid kid mounted to the wall — he’d ask if he could have them. He preferred the “blue glubs” but the “kinda yellow glubs” were also acceptable. He’d wear them around and then stash them in his pockets, in drawers and in his play kitchen.

“It was so gross, honestly,” Rhiannon says of the sweaty, sticky things. “He’s 9 years old now and I will still occasionally find a disgusting, decomposing rubber glove in a weird place — recently, in the old Fisher-Price cash register that he won’t let us get rid of.”

Since the karate craze of the 1970s, countless armies of kids have punched, kicked, and yelled “hi YAH!” at suburban dojos and community centre martial arts classes across the country. Martial arts training fosters discipline, encourages physical fitness and gets your kid out of your hair for a couple of hours a week.

But as a parent, you may wonder: Does this kind of training actually help kids fight back, should they need to?