If you’re like most parents, you’re determined to start the school year in such a way that your children get into a good routine for the year. Here’s a slightly different way to approach homework:

Read more on Avoiding Homework Battles (Part 1)…

“Most families tend to rush through dinner, especially the kids.  They can’t wait to get back to their computers and cell phones and iPods.  But they’ll stick around if the conversation is interesting.  And the biggest determinant is YOU.  If you see yourself and your life as a crashing bore, your kids will see the same thing.  But if you see your life as an endless succession of miraculous and fascinating events, your kids will be transformed by it.”  — Shmuley Boteach

Read more on Ten Strategies for Getting Children to Talk…

We were sticklers for table manners at our house. Our children (now adults) still tease me about our rule that you had to ask permission before stirring your ice cream and chocolate sauce into a malt in your bowl. However, summertime is a different story. We all  play with food in a sense, with more finger food and fruit decorations and pie-eating contests. Here’s a few things we sanctioned.

Read more on Play With Your Food!…

 Summer often means soccer tournaments, baseball playoffs, and dance competitions. How does your child fare? Some thrive on competing to win while others melt. Saying, “Just relax and go for it” isn’t always helpful.

Read more on The Ups and Downs of Competition…

Children love treasure hunts, and scavenger hunts, and treasure maps, and clues, and…the trick is to devise something that they’ll love without too much prep. This one works whether you’re in a park or camping or at the beach or at many other summer stops.

Read more on Treasure Hunts for Anyone!…

Hopefully you’re carving out some time with your children for unstructured fun. Here are a couple of no-cost, no-prep activities kids love.

Pooh Sticks. There’s a wonderful scene in one of Milne’s stories where Pooh and Piglet simply drop sticks off a bridge over a little creek and dash to the other side to see whose appears first. Once my children had tried this, I don’t think we passed over a little bridge with out playing Pooh Sticks for several years! Find a park with a stream and a few twigs and play away. No bridge? Set a start and finish point and see what happens!

Read more on Pooh Sticks and Other No-Cost Summer Hits…

Summer is THE time for nurturing scientists—or at least a love of science strong enough that your child will be able to intelligently weigh in on issues such as global warming, deforestation, healthy food production, or other issues.

Read more on Nurture that Scientist!…

When did you last play? As Linda Stone pointed out in her blog A More Resilient Species (http://boingboing.net/2013/01/15/a-more-resilient-species.html) , self-directed play (experiential, voluntary and guided by one’s curiosity) is essential for developing resilience, independence and resourcefulness, let alone creativity. She quotes scholar Brian Sutton-Smith, “The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression.”

Read more on Why Play?…

Just a couple of months before our daughters started kindergarten, Kim and I were sipping tea while the children painted with watercolors in the kitchen. Suddenly they appeared, their hands covered with colored soap suds. “The paint spilled and it got foamy,” they declared.

Read more on A Sanity Circle…

There’s an old song about those “Lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer…” One of our children loved the lazy, hazy part—he enjoyed less scheduling and more opportunity to let the days unfold, depending on which friends called and what the weather called for and what interesting discoveries he made in the woods behind our house.

Read more on Schedule and Spontaneity…