Ask any parent what they want from the summer holidays and you’ll hear a familiar mix: keep the children busy, keep them active, and ideally send them home a little more confident than they arrived. A good activity camp can do all three. The trick is knowing how to choose one, and how to make the most of it once the place is booked.
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Ask most children why the sky is blue or where puddles disappear to, and you’ll get a flurry of questions back. That instinct to ask, to prod, to test an idea against reality, is the raw material of scientific thinking. The research is fairly consistent on this point: curiosity is not something we install in children so much as something we either protect or let fade. The home, long before any classroom, is where that protecting begins.
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Ask most parents whether children learn from their mistakes, and they will nod straight away. Ask those same parents to watch their child fail at something without stepping in, and the nodding stops. This is the quiet contradiction at the heart of raising capable young people: we believe in the value of mistakes, right up until the moment one is about to happen.
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It is a quarter past six on a Tuesday. The dinner is nearly ready, the dog wants feeding, and somewhere upstairs a maths worksheet lies abandoned on a bedroom floor. A parent calls up the stairs for the third time. A child insists, with total conviction, that there is no homework this week. Anyone who has lived through this scene knows how quickly a short task can swallow an entire evening and sour the mood of a whole house.
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Watch a four-year-old pore over a picture book and then a fourteen-year-old lost in a novel, and you are looking at two very different kinds of reading. The thread that connects them is pleasure, but the way that pleasure shows up shifts at every stage. Knowing what to expect helps parents meet a child where they are rather than where a reading scheme says they should be.
Read More →Ask a room of parents about children and technology, and the conversation often lands in the same place: screens are the problem, and less is always better. It is a tidy story, but it does not quite hold up. The children who go on to use technology well are rarely the ones who used it least. They are the ones who learned to use it on purpose.
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Ask a child to sit still and they will wriggle. Ask them to pretend to be a tree, a cat or a mountain, and something changes. Yoga works with that instinct rather than against it, which is why it fits children so well. It turns stillness into a game and breathing into a skill.
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Ask most parents what they want from school and you’ll hear the obvious answers first: good results, a love of reading, confidence in maths. Then, almost as an afterthought, comes the thing that often matters most in daily life. They want their child to get along with other people.
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It is a Sunday afternoon and the house has gone quiet. A fifteen-year-old is sprawled across the sofa, phone face-down for once, staring at the ceiling. “I’m so bored,” comes the familiar groan. Half an hour later, that same teenager is halfway through building something odd out of cardboard, or sketching in the margins of an old notebook, or teaching themselves a bassline on a battered guitar. The boredom did not last. It turned into something.
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What to Wear to Easter Sunday – Easter Sunday is the perfect occasion for family gatherings, and whether you’re heading to a formal lunch or a more casual get-together, dressing for the occasion can add a touch of charm to the day. With Spring in full bloom, it’s the ideal time to embrace fresh, vibrant colours, light fabrics, and elegant styles. From coordinating family outfits to seasonal trends, we’ve put together some stylish yet comfortable outfit ideas for every family member to wear to Easter Sunday lunch.