Family Life

I am very aware of many of the issues that you face as a parent as I have four of my own children. The oldest has just started high school and the youngest starts kindergarten in 2012. My wife is also a teacher and must balance her time between work and home.

Like you, we face all the daily challenges of parenting. This includes things like: helping reluctant children do homework (often forgotten or neglected), looking for lost uniforms, throwing away uneaten school lunches, signing excursion notes, parent interviews, School Council meetings etc etc. Families with primary school aged children are certainly very busy places.

All of our kids are involved in junior sport. This means Saturday morning is always very busy preparing for games. During the week there are also a number of training sessions to attend. I also help umpire and coach from time to time. This activity helps our kids to stay healthy as well as provides them with social interaction.

As a family we make it a habit to sit around the table and eat dinner together. This gives us a chance to talk about the day (which is hard sometimes when you are also trying to get reluctant children to eat their vegetables without complaining about it). We find that it is important to provide our children with regular routines and patterns of life as this assists to bring stability and a level of predictability that helps get things done. We have daily designated jobs (chores) that each child is responsible for and we pay them pocket money as a reward for the jobs they do. We have rules that we regularly need to remind our children about and consequences for breaking them are given.

Holidays are always fun but also a challenge. We find that if we don't keep our kids busy on the holidays then they get bored and often argue more. We try to do a planned activity at least once every couple of days or we sometimes pay for one or two of them to attend activities like sports clinics or camps. Local community centres or sports clubs often offer very cheap sessions on the holidays. Visiting the city on the train is always a reasonably cheap but entertaining activity.

Parenting is challenge! It also has great rewards. There is nothing more important that we can do as parents then invest ourselves in helping our kids grow to be the best that they can be.