Family

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Amy Briscoe Opinion We really need to talk about ‘eldest daughter syndrome’

I’m the strong one, I’m not nervous, I’m as tough as the crust of the Earth is. I move mountains, I move churches; and I glow, ’cause I know what my worth is.” The lyrics to “Surface Pressure” from the film Encanto blast out in the kitchen as I cook a meal with my eldest daughter.

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Oliver Keens Opinion Being an only child felt like a blessing – until I realised it wasn’t

In the days after my dad died, I noticed a woman around my age in my parent’s building on the Isle of Dogs in London (it’s the bit on the map of The Thames that looks like a testicle). She’d be wheeling her frail, elderly father into the lift; I’d be consoling my grief-stricken mother up the stairs. One afternoon, having each attended to the people who, decades before, attended to us, I saw her on the stairwell. “Only child, right?” I said. We sat, talking about the strange new realities of our lives. I definitely wanted to cry. I don’t remember if I actually did. But we hugged, then parted. I never saw her again.

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How to help our teenagers tackle negative body image

Last week marked Eating Disorders Awareness Week led by Bodywhys, the national eating disorder support organisation. The Bodywhys team focused the week on boys and men, since it is often assumed that only girls and women suffer from issues about body image. Of course, the truth is that boys and girls have such issues and the prevalence of eating disorders is growing for both groups, especially since the pandemic.

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Bill Linnane Opinion I’ve given up swearing for Lent and it’s quickly proven to be a bad idea

Us men are complex creatures. I know we like to portray ourselves as easily pleased simpletons, but the truth is that we are unknowable labyrinths.

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A dietitian’s eight-step plan to addressing fussy eating in your toddler

Many areas of raising a young child are challenging. The good news is, nearly every parent goes through it. You are not alone. For example, you’d be hard pushed to find a parent who is well-rested. Also, it’s rare enough for a child to eat absolutely everything and most children go through a fussy eating stage.

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Parents should ditch the expectations — it’s OK for our kids to be ‘average’ and happy

Average is OK. In fact, average is good. The reality is that roughly 80pc of the world population is “average”, so why has the idea of average shifted from the norm to meaning “not good enough”? As parents, if we are totally honest, many of us struggle with the idea that our children are “just” average in school, in sport or in music. We should be happy with average, but somewhere along the line a shift occurred and there is now pressure on parents and on our children to be above average in everything that they do.

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‘My father passed away, then my brother died six weeks later – now I’m left trying to process it all’

I believe there’s a difference between passing away and dying.

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Bill Linnane Opinion Heavy metal used to be every parent’s worst nightmare — now it’s the internet

There were many benefits of being a heavy metal lover in the late 1980s and early 90s — we had mullets and wore skinny jeans before they were cool, and we also did important research into the long-term effects of concussion by stage diving head first on to dirty club floors.

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Parental burnout: what to do if you feel that parenting has become a chore with no joy anymore

Parental burnout is a thing. Psychologists have begun to study it with greater intensity in the last few years.

My Pet: ‘Mungo is a great buddy. Whenever I pull into the yard after work, he is always waiting for me’

I wouldn’t have called myself a cat person — that is, until I met Mungo. Even then, he came into my life for purely practical reasons. I was living at home with my mother and about to move into the granny flat . Unfortunately, I already had some housemates — mice. I decided the best line of defence was offence and the search began.

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Egg freezing: ‘It has to be viewed as an insurance policy that may not pay out. You cannot rely on those frozen eggs’

The waiting room of a fertility clinic was the last place Laura Smith expected to find herself sitting in her early 20s. “I remember looking round and everyone around me was a lot older than me,” she recalls. “I felt like I was in the wrong place; that I was too young to be there.”

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‘We’ve spent €200,000 trying to start a family. Irish restrictions on surrogacy make it difficult for gay men’

I remember the first time my partner and I spoke about having children. We had only been together a couple of years and I asked had he ever thought about getting married or starting a family.

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‘It’s exhausting, and I’d love to just wash my hands of her’ — what happens when siblings fall out

"He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and knocked me to the floor.”

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Bill Linnane Opinion The term ‘fridget’ was around back when I was in school, but kids are still using it as an insult today

There just aren’t enough opportunities to talk about your exes once you get married.

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Is it ever healthy for a parent and child to be best friends?

Raising a future monarch is probably a job not done lightly, but Kate Middleton and Prince William have decided on a much lighter approach to raising family than many of his royal forbears had.

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Talking to teenagers about alcohol: ‘We must communicate openly and practise what we preach about drinking’

Alcohol use by teenagers in Ireland has decreased over the last number of years. Survey data, reported by the Health Research Board (HRB) last year, shows that the age at which teenagers first drink alcohol has gone up and more teenagers are abstaining from alcohol. These are really welcome trends.

My Pet: ‘We can’t imagine our lives without our loyal, happy girls’

Féile and Willow came to us in the middle of Covid lockdowns. Féile arrived in July 2020, from Roscrea SPCA, at five years old. Willow came in May 2021, from Limerick Animal Welfare, at just 15 weeks.

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One and done: why is there still stigma around being an only child?

The doctor looked on at my son playing on the floor of the consultation room while I gathered our things to leave. “Wouldn’t it be a terrible shame if he was raised alone?” she asked wistfully.

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Seven ways to boost your baby’s life chances from the day they are born

1. Read to your child

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The impact of smart speakers on children: ‘They see them as human’

Back in 2020 the Central Statistics Office found that one in five Irish homes had a “virtual assistant” in the form of a smart speaker like Amazon Echo or Google Home. That figure rises to over one in four households with families. Estimates at the same time expected the figure to rise to 50pc by 2022.

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Bill Linnane Opinion My wife and I barely socialise together anymore — so for Valentine’s Day this year I whisked her away for a whole 18 hours

I am not the most romantic person. I would like to think I am, but it was confirmed to me that I am severely lacking in this department a few years back, when I wrote a column claiming that putting the bins out qualifies as a romantic act.

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‘They love the joy it brings’: Should parents give their children Valentine’s cards?

Valentine’s Day was like a popularity contest in my primary school. In the classroom, we had designated plastic trays to store our books and pencil cases, but on 14 February this tray would become Cupid’s postbox. Children would deliver anonymous cards to each other in the hope of securing a playground romance. It could be brutal, though. On Valentine’s Day morning, those with a secret admirer may score a shoddy hand-drawn card adorned in love hearts. Others may open their drawer to nothing.

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Love at first sight: ‘I thought the idea was pure fantasy, until it happened to me’

Early 2015, miserable and on the cusp of a drinking problem, this consummate people-pleasing party girl had enough of herself and the consequences of her poor decision-making.

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‘It’s bloody awful and amazing all in one’: What I wish I’d known about the first six weeks after having a baby

When we think of women’s emotional wellbeing in the first few weeks postpartum we think of a rush of love and relief when the baby is born, or a hormonal drop that brings the baby blues, and we might even consider postpartum depression. But what’s left unsaid is everything in between.

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‘My children tell lies all the time, what’s the best way to react or encourage them to tell the truth?’

People lie all the time, so it’s not surprising that children lie too. Behavioural and observational research has shown, consistently, that children start telling lies in their early pre-school years and that the lies increase in sophistication and frequency through childhood. One study found that rates of lie-telling peak in late childhood or early adolescence (with three to four lies a day being told) and then decrease over the course of adulthood to average at one to two lies per day.

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Bill Linnane Opinion ‘Video games are not the enemy — it’s my time to bond with the kids in our house’

Suddenly everyone loves video games. All it took was HBO adapting The Last Of Us, one of the most critically-acclaimed games of the last decade, assembling an all-star cast and one of the hottest directors in TV, and spending a purported $100m on the 10-part series, and all of a sudden video games are the next big thing.

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Margareta Magnusson: ‘Old people have to try to find something other than the future to be happy about’

Almost a decade ago, during a visit to see her children , Margareta Magnusson had a near-death experience.

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Throwing away the parenting ‘rule book’ will make you a better, happier parent – this is how to do it

When I first started working with parents, Gina Ford was all the rage. The new parents I worked with were aiming for the Contented Little Baby straight out of her book. As those little babies grew, parents followed the advice of Supernanny Jo Frost.

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Bill Linnane Opinion It turns out I’m not just exhausted from family life — there’s a real medical reason for my forgetfulness

One of the greatest misconceptions you can have before becoming a parent is that it will make you wise.

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Dr David Coleman: The academic gain from young kids doing homework is really quite small, so is there any point in it?

Homework for primary school pupils has been in the national spotlight since President Higgins seemed to suggest, last week, that children should spend less time on homework to free them up for creative and imaginative pursuits.