3 HRS AGO - Coco Khan’s mother shares her thoughts on millennialsBeing a parent, and a Muslim Asian in London, I have many thoughts about the younger generation. When I think of the millennials, I think of my daughter, Coco. She is a true example of her speedy generation, living in a society that no longer considers patience as a virtue. She values self-sufficiency and independence more than the old-fashioned ideas of obedience and respect for her elders. She finds no logic in respecting someone who is arrogant and unkind, just because he or she is 20 years her senior. She thinks this is illogical and, maybe, “typically Asian”.I was brought up in a different world. Elders were obeyed without question. By the time my children became teenagers, I’d figured out that to get respect, I would have to prove to them that I know what I’m talking about. That’s why I enrolled in college. (I embarrassed my son by going to the same one as him.) Related: You are never too old to disappoint your parents | Coco Collapse

1 DAY AGO - Looking for a Tooting home for you and your children? It’s always best to check how safe it is for them – Marsh & Parsons Tooting share their safety tips in their latest blog. Tooting is fast gaining a reputation as a fabulous place to raise your children. With the 200-acre Tooting Commons, Tooting Bec Lido (the UK’s biggest outdoor freshwater pool), and a thriving community, it’s no wonder that it’s becoming a more popular place than ever for families to put..... Collapse

3 DAYS AGO - A review of a family holiday to Richardson's Hemsby Beach Holiday Park in Norfolk, including the Platinum 2 Lodge Spa accomodation and onsite facilities. Collapse

5 DAYS AGO - A little dust-up between cousins at nappy-change time is a reminder of the real virtues of familyIt wasn’t a particularly hard smack. His fists are small, doughy things; fat and soft with dimples for knuckles, sunken into the flesh like the buttons of a sofa cushion. But it was a low blow, against his own cousin, and while she was having her nappy changed, no less. Even the most unreasonable prize fighter would never hit an opponent while they were lying down and, though I’ve never checked, I imagine that rule would count doubly if they were having their arse cleaned.We had taken the boy to stay with his cousins, Ardal and Nora, last week. My son is the baby of the entire family, so all his cousins fawn over him, despite being only negligibly older themselves. At just under two, Nora is the second youngest, an incorrigibly sweet-natured girl with a blazing smile and a mop of tight blonde curls, yet she acts like she’s never seen something so delightfully childish as my son in her Collapse

7 DAYS AGO - Adjusting your behaviour to each new wrinkle in the science is a mug’s gameIs too much screen time bad for your kids? Don’t look to this column for an answer. The truth is, nobody knows. The unceasing pendulum of lifestyle advice is currently swinging through a “debunking” phase, with numerous articles insisting it’s all been a big panic over nothing. But that’s partly because a report published earlier this year, by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said there wasn’t enough evidence to give firm guidelines to parents. As the paediatricians explained, though, the key problem is that sufficient high-quality research has yet to be conducted – a conclusion that somehow got turned into this headline, on the parenting website Motherly: “How harmful is screen time for kids? Not as bad as we may think”. The article was sponsored by the US mobile company Verizon – though science has yet to inform us if this was a matter of causation or merely correlation.Of course, there are Collapse