Modern parenting can feel like it requires superpowers. We have the very important job of helping our kids thrive in a rapidly changing world while also working full time, running a household, and keeping ourselves in working order. It’s easy to feel like we’re failing on multiple fronts.

In our professional lives, we learn from our colleagues and solve problems in teams. But our parenting work happens behind the scenes at home, where we struggle in isolation without a lot of support. Parenting resources can leave us feeling even more overwhelmed with all the things we should be doing better and quietly begging the world “please help me solve this problem”.

What Works for Parents is a new project to collect and share tips, tricks, products, and services that solve problems for parents of school age kids and teens. Because parents need superpowers.

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Participate

Help us understand your biggest challenges by taking a quick eight question survey.

Do you have a parenting problem you’d like to solve, or a great solution you’d like to share? Email me!

elaine at whatworksforparents.com

Stuff that Works

Last updated on Sep 13, 2020 4 min read

Food for Thought: Kids and Gaming

tl;dr: Understanding how gaming might be addressing unmet needs for kids helped me wrestle with how to parent a gaming generation. The Pandemic Gaming Acceleration Coronavirus ended the screen-time debate. Screens won. This pandemic-era New York Times headline definitely extends to video games at my house. Games suddenly became my 3rd grader’s primary activity when school and afterschool were abruptly cancelled. When the closure seemed temporary, this seemed like a nice opportunity to indulge (remember that time when we got to play Minecraft for two weeks straight?
Last updated on Sep 13, 2020 2 min read

Interactive Learning from Home Solution: Outschool

tl;dr: The Outschool platform has been a great solution for compelling and highly interactive mini-courses for my kids. Suddenly my 8 year old has had a lot of extra time on his hands and nowhere to go. What’s a working parent to do to? Meet Outschool - our best discovery of the pandemic so far! Outschool is a site where teachers offer live mini-courses for kids online on a vast array of topics.
Last updated on Jul 12, 2020 4 min read

Allowance and Kids Money Solution: Greenlight

tl;dr: The Greenlight card and app has been a great solution for auto-managing my kids’ allowance and spending. $5/month for up to 5 kids. The Solution Greenlight offers accounts for kids that are associated with a debit card and an app. The app allows parents to set up automatic transfers to kids’ accounts, and allows kids to see and manage their own money in different buckets. They also have a bunch of other useful features.