Parenting
Ways to balance digital media with real life
As a digital education correspondent, I am around screens a lot. I am also a mum and know the challenges of balancing screen time in our family lives. I wrote The Art of Screen Time to help me and my readers get past the anxiety about children and screens. Here’s a summary of what I learned writing it: enjoy screens; not too much; mostly together. You will be more effective as a parent and have more fun as a family if you drop the guilt and embrace the good that screens have to offer, while balancing media with other priorities. When in doubt, try to use media as a means of connecting. On average, school-aged children today are spending more waking hours per week with electronic media than on any other single activity. That includes school. Adults, meanwhile, are spending most waking hours engaged with electronic media. Excessive exposure to...
Ways to balance digital media with real life
As a digital education correspondent, I am around screens a lot. I am also a mum and know the challenges of balancing screen time in our family lives. I wrote...
Q: I have recently had my second baby and my el...
A: I’ve been asked to help with sibling relationships many times. It’s an important topic, and one that elicits all sorts of emotions in families. We so look forward to gifting a sibling to our firstborn child – it feels like a good and natural next step in building a family – but just like parenthood itself, the new dynamic we’re creating is an unknown quantity, full of possibilities that can be both positive and negative. Perhaps the human instinct for reproduction – which allows women to mostly put away memories of the pain of childbirth in order to repeat the experience – also prevents us from remembering how difficult our own sibling relationships are or may have been in the early days. Do we gloss over thoughts of sibling rivalry, the jealousy and challenges, to make sure our species survives? Or maybe we just think our children will eventually...
Q: I have recently had my second baby and my eldest child is finding the disruption to their life...
A: I’ve been asked to help with sibling relationships many times. It’s an important topic, and one that elicits all sorts of emotions in families. We so look forward to...
The Story Behind the Cover – Early Spring 2024
For the first 6 months after my third baby, Faye, was born, I could muster absolutely no creative motivation. Or at least, no motivation to make art. I would land on the idea of making something for a split second and then immediately feel deflated. I might have worried, but having been through these early days of baby a couple times already, I had the sense it would return. And sure enough, right around 7 months, I started to feel the glow return to my fingers. Usually, I work quite small. Little snippets, fastidiously pieced together, a complex challenge in a small space. But the creative energy that returned needed something different, something more expansive and fresh, that reflected this bright new life we were nurturing and learning to find space for. I bought a huge sheet of oak ply and had it cut into large rectangles and began to...
The Story Behind the Cover – Early Spring 2024
For the first 6 months after my third baby, Faye, was born, I could muster absolutely no creative motivation. Or at least, no motivation to make art. I would land...
Lou Harvey-Zahra offers simple ideas for nurtur...
Have you ever pondered that the word ‘valuable’ stems from the word ‘value’? It is worth considering the key family values that are the foundation of our homes, because what we focus on truly does grow. Our family values are valuable for us: they help us to live happy, healthy and connected lives. My children are now 20 and 23 and, looking back at our key family values from toddlerhood to now, there have been three simple things: to be safe, to be healthy and to be kind (to each other and to belongings). Rather than teaching kindness as right and wrong or reinforcing morals, we can model kindness and encourage it through simple everyday family activities in which it will naturally arise. I am really excited to share 10 family values in my new book, The Connected Family Handbook: Nurturing Warmth, Wonder and Kindness in Children. As well as...
Lou Harvey-Zahra offers simple ideas for nurturing kindness
Have you ever pondered that the word ‘valuable’ stems from the word ‘value’? It is worth considering the key family values that are the foundation of our homes, because what...
How to create a consent-based environment aroun...
Sophie Christophy answers your questions. How can I create a consent-based environment around food and eating, when I want to also ensure that my children eat a healthy balanced diet? I worry that facilitating the children’s wants and preferences is going to mean that they won’t necessarily eat the things that they need to be healthy, and that they are too young to make informed independent choices about their diet and what their body needs. When it comes to food, there are a number of ways in which you can work towards a consent-based way of being together as a family, and away from the traditional patriarchal/dominator type of dynamic. One significant way is to give children agency over the process of eating itself. Eating is an intimate act – we are putting food into our bodies, after all. With that in mind, for children to experience bodily autonomy in...
How to create a consent-based environment around food
Sophie Christophy answers your questions. How can I create a consent-based environment around food and eating, when I want to also ensure that my children eat a healthy balanced diet?...
How to find a balance with weaponry in play
Parenting a young child who wants to play with toy guns has been an unexpected challenge for me. My preference is to completely ban all toy weaponry. My partner, who enjoys combat-based stories and games, thinks that is unrealistic. So we walk a tightrope of compromise. When my son was around 3 years old, he asked what a tank was. He had seen a photo of one at a friend’s house and had played with mini army figures. At that time we had no toy weapons in the house, and he didn’t watch films or cartoons that included battles. It saddens me to have to acknowledge that many people feel the need to carry weapons, whether for personal safety or for ideological reasons. So it sometimes feels as if my desire to help, even in the tiniest ways, to create a more peaceful world jars with my son’s interest in...
How to find a balance with weaponry in play
Parenting a young child who wants to play with toy guns has been an unexpected challenge for me. My preference is to completely ban all toy weaponry. My partner, who...
Celebrating twenty years of JUNO!
JUNO’s founding editors and early contributors reflect on two decades of JUNO and natural parenting Patricia Patterson-Vanegas and Emma Jennings on the birth of JUNO and where they are now The world is very different now to when JUNO was conceived and birthed. However, the editorial we wrote in our launch issue twenty years ago is as relevant today as it was then. We parents can use a reassuring voice to help us create our path and value our intuition, while knowing that we are not alone. We also need, probably more than ever, the space to be able to bounce ideas without being judged or cancelled. JUNO was Emma’s idea. I remember her telling me that she wanted to create a magazine that she herself would love to read, with the values that were important to her. She wanted people to share their stories and she had a vision...
Celebrating twenty years of JUNO!
JUNO’s founding editors and early contributors reflect on two decades of JUNO and natural parenting Patricia Patterson-Vanegas and Emma Jennings on the birth of JUNO and where they are now...
One family’s story of autism and the journey to...
It was September 2018. Llewelyn was 2 years 9 months and his journey into part-time education was about to begin. Like every parent, my husband and I were filled with excitement – so many adventures awaited him. But, deep down, I was anxious. I remember the other children as we stood in line waiting for the nursery doors to open. Some were playing happily together in the playhouse – shouting, laughing and singing nursery rhymes – each one acutely aware of the others. How I longed for Llew to join them. There was nothing glaringly wrong when Llew was born, but on numerous occasions, my gut told me something was ‘off’. To this day, I cannot pinpoint what it was, but I felt it. As the weeks went by, it was not long before his differences became apparent to his teachers. He was the child who was always running out of...
One family’s story of autism and the journey to diagnosis
It was September 2018. Llewelyn was 2 years 9 months and his journey into part-time education was about to begin. Like every parent, my husband and I were filled with...
Encouraging our children to be wonderful wild b...
As a picture book author-illustrator, I am always subconsciously looking for another story or image. I try to look for something that speaks to me, ideally something that grabs me and ignites enough interest and passion to convert it into words and art. Usually, it hits when I least expect it, as with the story of my latest picture book, Wild Beings. I watched our young son playing with a bunch of friends in our garden, and it dawned on me how they were all more akin to wild animals than civilised, domesticated humans. Jumping in puddles, climbing rocks, swinging from trees is what lights these young humans up. Messy hair, muddy feet, squeals of joy and screams of excitement are commonplace. You might have one of these wildlings at home. I know some who are positively feral. The way most children would rather run and jump than walk. The...
Encouraging our children to be wonderful wild beings
As a picture book author-illustrator, I am always subconsciously looking for another story or image. I try to look for something that speaks to me, ideally something that grabs me...
A grandmother of three reflects on the formativ...
I believe that the first five years of life are crucially formative, a foundation on which the personality of the child is built. As adults, we have daunting responsibility. If we are so busy with our adult lives that we are unable to become as children ourselves in order to respond with directness and clarity to the steady gazes that are so willing to trust and encounter us, we miss out on the beauty and joy of those early years. This dance of call and response is, to me, crucial for healthy development. When our needs and interests clash (as they most certainly will) with the needs and interests of our children, there can be much disharmony and angst. Even in the most difficult of circumstances, a light touch of awareness and humour can allow us to see the ‘knee-jerk’ and unnecessary knots that we tie ourselves up in. Children...
A grandmother of three reflects on the formative years
I believe that the first five years of life are crucially formative, a foundation on which the personality of the child is built. As adults, we have daunting responsibility. If...
