Last year, Tate went to a (very affordable, wonderfully diverse) private school for kindergarten. I honestly never thought we’d ever do private school. The year before, living overseas, we worked through a simple homeschool curriculum for preschool. If you asked me before we moved, I’d have told you we’d never, ever homeschool. This year, we’re [...]

The hot topic on the Internet this week has been “kid-free” zones in certain places — essentially banning children from certain events and arenas. The buzz really got going when a Whole Foods Market in Missouri announced a new event: two hours of free babysitting while you go shopping, every Friday in August. Parents can drop [...]

By hospitality contributor Sandy Coughlin of The Reluctant Entertainer. Summer entertaining is a beautiful time to get together with friends who have kids because you can be together in the outdoors and the kids can run and play. I think back to the last house we lived in and the fun we had with our [...]

Last year, I asked you all how you felt about “free-range” parenting. Your thoughts generated a fun discussion in the comments. There are new Simple Mom readers now, so I thought I’d bring this conversation up from the archives to see if more of you would like to join in (or perhaps you joined a [...]

The following is a guest post from Katie Fox, the former editor of Simple Organic, and was first published on June 25, 2010. I loved it so much, I thought I’d play it again! On a typical afternoon these days, you might come over to my house and discover a scene very much like the [...]

Written by Megan Tietz of Sorta Crunchy. Recently, I learned from some wise like-minded parents about how to use the HALT method to both proactively guide our children, as well as finding a way to diagnose what is happening when things fall apart. See, a key element in the successful practice of positive parenting is [...]