Series: Handy Family Tips

Most parents dread taking their kids on long drives. Without some cool road trip games and activities, many children grow restless and fall into the “Are we there yet?” routine, which makes everybody go nuts.

We started having a taste of this ourselves when our eldest, Eden, was four and a half years old. We moved to Arlington, TX, where we spent most weekends touring Texas on long road trips with another family that had a boy a bit younger than Eden. We spent many hours in the car, but we did not seem to have a problem entertaining the kids.

When we lived in Thailand, entertainment in the car was a hot topic. At the time, traffic in Thailand was so bad we could spend up to 3 hours just going to the supermarket or to see friends. Our son, Tsoof, was a baby and we spent many car rides touring up and down Thailand. Typically, it was also hot and humid.

Through the years, we have traveled with our kids through the USA, China, New Zealand (twice), Korea, France and Australia. We traveled up the center of Australia and down the east coast when our youngest, Noff, was one year old, Tsoof was 7 and Eden was 13. The trip took us 6 weeks and we spent many hours in the car. People thought we were crazy. Taking 3 kids in one car on such a long road trip seemed to them like a suicide mission. But it worked well for us.

It all depends on how you spend the time in the car. So what did we do?

Read Handy Family Tips: Road Trip Games »

Vegetables are good for our health, but they are not very popular. I think this is because the advertising departments of junk, sugary and chocolaty food companies are much better than the advertising departments of vegetable companies. It is very simple. If we had the same publicity for vegetables that we do for junk food, it would be easy to get kids to eat vegetables and they would do it happily.

Even more than advertising, the best way to get kids to eat vegetables is to love eating vegetables yourself and to buy lots of them for your home. If this is what kids have on hand, this is what they will eat. Obviously, this is not as easy to do as we might think. Otherwise, everyone would do it and every kid in the world would eat vegetables at every meal.

The A-Z Vegetable Challenge

One of the tricks I offer to my clients to get kids to eat vegetables and overcome eating problems is the A-Z Vegetable Challenge. Starting with the letter A, the family chooses a vegetable beginning with that letter to focus on for the week, to learn about, research, cook with and eat.

Read Handy Family Tips: How to Get Kids to Eat Vegetables »

If you have teens in the house, I’m sure you will relate to this. If you have a teenage boy, he’s probably started shaving their facial hair. If you have a teenage girl, she’s probably started shaving her legs.

Recently, my youngest daughter started shaving her legs. She is very proud and happy with her smooth legs, admiring and sharing the results with the whole family.

This reminded me of myself, at her age. Except that I was not allowed to shave. So I did it in secret, which meant I could not use my dad’s shaving cream or he would find out. I always used the a bar of soap instead. It made my legs so dry, I had to put moisturizing cream on my legs every time. At least it wasn’t as bad as shaving with nothing at all and leaving my legs itchy and with the occasional cut.

Recently, I saw some things being posted about using hair conditioner as a substitute for shaving cream. It sounded like a good option and I decided to check it out. I discovered that it is even better than shaving cream! Even my son tried it on his facial hair and said it was fabulous.

Read Handy Family Tips: What to Do When There is No Shaving Cream? »

If your kids are anything like mine, you probably want to know how to control your kids’ mobile phone use. This post covers one important aspect of this: making sure your kids get a good night’s sleep.

Parenting today is not the same as it was 20 years ago. Today, parents face different challenges with new technology, kids having easy access to information and easy communication with the world that is hard to monitor and control.

Many of my clients (too many, in fact) that have a big problem with their kids using mobiles all the time. The Internet is full of cartoons with parents sending their kids text messages to ask them to come down for dinner. The addiction to mobiles is touching every part of life. You can see kids sitting next to each other, each with his/her mobile. At dinnertime, they play with their mobile phone, they take it with them to the toilet and use it in the car.

Mobile phones are almost like watches. At some stage, our kids might carry them to the shower as well. In fact, there are already waterproof devices out there.

Parents say they have no control over their kids’ behavior and attitude to phones. Their kids end up taking their mobile phones with them to bed and use them in the wee hours of the morning.

Read How to Control Your Kids’ Mobile Phone Use at Night »