Parenting

A pilot scheme in South Yorkshire and Derbyshire – an area with extremely low breastfeeding numbers – will offer new mothers High Street vouchers to the value of £200 if they breastfeed for six months. Project leader Dr Clare Relton believes such remuneration is a way of ‘acknowledging the value of breastfeeding’, but her views seem […]

If your children tend to play up in the supermarket, might I suggest you take them to Aldi rather than Waitrose? This is not, as you might suspect, because of the clientele. Now that the middle-classes have descended upon four-letter-supermarkets with the alacrity of locusts, there is no escaping the snooty gaze of the Boden […]

When my twin daughters were two, I gritted my teeth and braved out the terrible twos. The books on tantrums could have been written for my eldest girl, who screamed her way through every meal time, insisted on doing everything for herself, and hurled herself to the floor at the slightest opportunity. It’s okay, I […]

Oxfordshire County Council is proposing cuts to children’s services which will see a reduction in the county’s Children’s Centres from 44 to 7. If you’re not a parent, you might be blissfully unaware of what this means: if you are, perhaps you have never needed the services offered by these threatened centres. Children’s Centres across the […]

For someone who loves people, I am surprisingly anti-social. Given the choice between staying in or going out, I’ll take the roaring fire and a good book over a crowded wine bar any day. I have never yet been on my own for so long it becomes lonely, and I can’t imagine when that time […]