Alas, children are not born housebroken. In order for them to make that all-important connection between urgency and the desire to seek out a potty and sit, your kids will need a little help from their growing brains and, of course, their diaper-weary parents. “This is the ‘urgency’ sensation that both children and adults feel,” Sarina Pasricha, a gastroenterologist, told Fatherly. “Young children are learning how to recognize this, unlike adults who have already been conditioned....

When my wife was expecting our youngest son, she developed high blood pressure and was forced into bedrest for the duration of her pregnancy. This made life much busier —I had a full-time job, and we already had a 2-year-old at home. I had to step in and account for a lot of the simple, daily routine. There was so much juggling of schedules that it became easy for our other son to get lost in the shuffle....

READ MORE: The Fatherly Guide to Parental and Paternity Leave “In most cases, the cost is minimal as paternity leaves tend to be quite brief,” says Ruth Milkman, professor of sociology at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies. “Generally, when fathers are on leave, coworkers pick up the slack just as they would for workers who are absent due to illness or vacation – so there are actually fairly low costs to the employer....

If you excitedly opened yours only to be too embarrassed to share it because it’s full of kid songs, you’re probably a parent—and you’ve made a common mistake. Here’s what you need to know about how to separate your kids’ music from your music on Spotify. Is Your Spotify Wrapped Full of Kid Songs? Spotify Wrapped is really fun to share with family and friends. The music app presents your history of music in fun, social-looking slides, each with a fun fact tailored to you....

Corporal punishment is not an effective means of child discipline. Research shows that most children who are slapped or spanked misbehave again within minutes.Avoiding corporal punishment is good, but research on the topic isn’t well known and there is no single and simple alternative approach available.Positive Discipline advocates recommend using a “time-in” approach that calls for calming, quietly connecting, and talking to the child immediately after a transgression. To date, there have been no studies testing the effectiveness of this method....

Neal Smither, owner of Crime Scene Cleaners Inc. in Oakland, California is just like you. He’s on call 24 hours a day to clean up a gag-reflex-triggering mess. Unlike you, he gets paid for it. And if this mean streets sweeper can scrub out a drug deal gone bad, you can manage some spit-up on the couch. “I can get almost everything out,” says Smither, who found his calling when he saw “The Wolf” clean up what was left of Marvin in Pulp Fiction....

Whether your mother-in-law is an overbearing “good idea fairy” or a blessing to parenthood, it’s important to maintain a healthy relationship with her, especially for husbands. One 26-year longitudinal study of 373 married couples found that men who felt close to their in-laws at the time of marriage were 20 percent less likely to get divorced in the next 16 years than the overall group. But according to Dr. Suzanne Burger, a certified Gottman Method couples therapist and clinical psychologist of over 25 years, “about one-third of couples experience moderate to severe conflict with one or both of their in-laws, and that generally gets compounded when people become parents....

Chances are, you used to have no problem expressing your feelings. You’d leave written notes on windshields and in jacket pockets. You’d send an afternoon text. Maybe you’d write well-meaning yet awful poems that created tears. These feelings haven’t gone away. They’re just not prioritized. Assumed instead of actionized. The problem isn’t unique, the reason far from shocking. “In part, life took over,” says Lindsay Jernigan, licensed clinical psychologist in Burlington, Vermont....

Such phrases, Harvey argues, stunt kids’ understanding of racial inequality and decrease the likelihood they’ll recognize or combat racism. She added that, in our current political climate, white parents who tip-toe around discussions of race run the risk of raising children with retrograde views. Fatherly spoke to Harvey, who is also the author of Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation. She was eager to have a conversation about racial inequality with children and help provide parents with a skillset for having more meaningful discussions....

The problem is that you remain stuck while pretending that you don’t care about what happened, when, in truth, you really do. That’s what resentment is. “It’s something that’s unfinished,” says Silvia Dutchevici, licensed clinical social worker and president of Critical Therapy Center in New York City. The compounding part is that you want the offending person to make amends, except he or she doesn’t care and has moved on....

Why Do Balls Dangle? First, it’s important to under the reason your dangly bits hang low in the first place: namely, temperature regulation. Although body temperature should hover around 98.6°F most of the time, the ideal temperature for semen production is a couple of degrees below that, around 97°F. The testicles can actively hang farther away from the body when it gets hot, and when it gets cooler, they can shrink up closer to the body and garner some of that heat....

Sadly, children have been exposed to the political shitshow, and talk of impeachment or removal from office will likely freak them out. After all, kids — and we’re primarily talking grade school and younger here — have a notion of the presidency as a position of power but lack the command of civics to understand what’s going on. For this, parents need tools. To talk about this historically unprecedented second impeachment to a kid, you also need to talk about both civics and current events — many of which are traumatic to kids right now....

A sustainable freestyle stroke is built on a foundation of comfort in the water and basic swimming skills, namely, floating and treading water. It’s important that the child is familiar, if not proficient, with both. That said, if a child can kick their feet and is willing to let go of mom, dad, or the wall, they’re ready to at least try. If they’re a strong floater, all the better ⏤ shooting across the water’s surface should be a relatively simple next step....

Gratitude is a powerful antidote to the selfish messaging of American culture. It’s powerful because it’s viral and uplifting. Thankfulness is a prosocial emotion that can cement bonds in a community. But teaching a kid gratitude can feel like swimming against the stream. And the harsh truth about teaching those lessons is that, unless gratitude has a strong foundation in the parent, it likely won’t flourish in a kid. Parents who give have thankful kids....

As a Montessori student, teacher, and now parent, one constant mantra I must ask myself is — does this encourage independence, or am I getting in the way unnecessarily? It can be so easy to do for the child. Because we’re in a hurry, because they make a mess when they do it themselves, etc. But whenever and however we can, it’s beneficial to the child to let them do what they can do by themselves (no matter how slow-as-molasses they may be in doing it)....

There are a few ways I identify myself. Interestingly enough, they all revolve around my professions. I think of myself as a writer. I call myself a comedian. Both of these ventures are new enough that I still think of myself in terms of what I’m not: I often refer to myself as a former teacher. What I don’t think of myself as is a stay at home dad. READ MORE: The Fatherly Guide to Stay-At-Home Parenting Which is interesting, because that’s how most of the people I see on a daily basis immediately identify me....

Oof, yeah, as someone who frequently feels like an outsider in mom groups, I totally sympathize with your plight here. I try to tell myself the other moms are just intimidated by my overwhelming coolness and MILFitude, but yeah, that reasoning only goes so far. I imagine this applies doubly to you because you’re a dad: unfortunately, many people have internalized some pretty toxic stereotypes about stay-at-home dads, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case here....

It was the Monday night before the dance, and Lola had just broken up with her latest boyfriend. She immediately called my son, Tanner, whose iPhone is always set to speakerphone mode. “I really wanted to be with you all along,” she pleaded, “but Parker asked me out first.” Plausible enough, I thought. “I’ve been giving you signals for a long time,” she insisted. “And you haven’t even noticed me....

This is a new development. In the past, I would have been at least a beer or two in by the time we hit bedtime. I would have been carrying around a coozie-covered khaki can like a security blanket. I would have been slightly numbed, super drowsy, and yet still impatient. I didn’t feel like an alcoholic, functional or otherwise. I didn’t need to drink. I wanted to. I felt it made outings with the family more fun....