While the stress of parenting mellows, the ad hoc approach to spending often remains. Parents spend years spraying a dollar hose at camps, sports leagues, after school activities and whatever else crops up. After decades of indiscriminate spending, they’re unprepared for major life events ranging from college tuition and retirement to disability and death. Financial regrets? Like the great economist Frank Sinatra, they have a few. But that regret isn’t inevitable....

The truth is, the solution is so simple. While pedicures have long been seen as a service reserved for women, there’s no good reason to skip them as a man. It’s not just for aesthetic reasons either — your general well-being is at stake. “Your feet are your body’s foundation,” Correa said. “The smallest change can throw off your way of life and limit your independence.” Nail Fungi can spread to other areas of the foot and become athlete’s foot, causing the soles of the feet and the area in between the toes to itch, peel and crack....

With that in mind, we recently asked a variety of dads “What’s the parenting trick that helps you be a better dad?” The answers we received ranged from communication tactics and mindset-shifts to simple cleaning tricks and toy hacks. Will all of them be useful for you? Maybe not. But chances are you can glean something from this list that will help. 1. I turn my head to listen. “I followed the simple advice of Mr....

Oftentimes, you have to be up way past your bedtime in order to see meteors soaring through the night sky. This is an especially tough beat for parents who are hoping to teach their kids about the beauties of the great beyond. But one of the best things about this particular meteor shower is that it is expected to be most active in the early evening, meaning it’s a perfect activity for the family....

Many parents can likely see this picture of a dad in the dark, unable to turn on the lights of his own house, in their minds — especially ones who are extremely connected on the internet. Across the world, heat in houses went out, alarms didn’t go off, lights stayed off, and the internet was functionally inaccessible. And while the widespread reactions to the outage, which affected facets of people’s home lives that feel like a spin-off of the Disney Channel Original Movie Smart House were kind of funny — and Brown’s tweet absolutely is — the outage is also somewhat scary....

Kurt Schultz, operator of Kurt Safari, in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, told The Associated Press that in his 20 years of working around animals, he had never seen anything quite like this. A male baboon was carrying around a little lion cub in his mouth. The real-life scene mirrored The Lion King scene where Rafiki holds up Simba in front of all the other animals of the savanna. “Male baboons do a lot of grooming, but the care given to this lion cub was the same care given by a female baboon to one of her own young,” Schultz said....

1. Be Vulnerable “The best advice I offer is deceptively simple: be vulnerable. Whenever you are sad, angry, scared or lonely — share your feelings. Be specific about what you feel, why you think you feel that way. By doing so, you open a door for genuine connection. It gives your spouse an opportunity to step up, to be there for you, to get through something together. That makes for a true partnership....

Now, I’m not saying R2-D2 and C-3PO are actual parents in the sense that they have secret robot babies hidden away somewhere. Instead, their behaviors both toward each other and toward other characters are more correlative with how real parents act than any of the actual parents in Star Wars. People have been saying for years that C-3PO and R2-D2 act like a married couple, which is fairly obvious once you become a parent....

Washing dishes makes me feel like I’ve tackled a lot of problems. It helps me completely disconnect from my work. When I’m just standing over the sink and cleaning, I don’t think about all of the issues going on my life. It helps me focus on something different and relax. And it really, really makes my wife happy. She feels appreciated. It just improves the whole vibe in the house....

So, we wondered: What are some rules a couple agreed upon that, ultimately, made their marriage a lot better? That is, what compromise or understanding or shared sentiment made clear had a positive impact down the road? To find out, we spoke to a variety of moms and dads all of whom identified times when tensions were high in their marriages and came to an agreement that fixed things for the better....

To help parents track how their child is developing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics overhauled the pediatric milestone checklist in February 2022, This process included adding developmental milestones for 15-month-olds and 30-month-olds, and revamping other milestone charts to reflect things most children (75% or more) can do by a certain age. To help parents track milestones on their own, the CDC has released a free Milestone Tracker mobile app, a Digital Online Checklist, and a PDF checklist that parents can download and print....

Fortunately, it wasn’t bad news. “Lauren, we sold the house…and to some really nice lesbians,” my dad told me with pride. “One of them is a detective!” Naturally, I booked the first flight home—in part, to explain to him why telling the story that way wasn’t as progressive as he thought and, in part, to go through my childhood belongings. Not that I thought I would be nostalgic about all that crap....

In terms of the research corpus, post-coital behavior was first addressed by Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 and 1953 reports, in which he noted that sex woke some people up while putting others to sleep. There was not much follow-up on this predictable finding over the next few decades, though some studies seemed to indicate that women sometimes craved post-coital contact. Since then, cuddling, kissing, and pillow talk after sex have been linked with sexual satisfaction in both men and women, but it’s hard to separate the causation (satisfaction?...

What Is the Vygotsky Theory? The Vygotsky theory understands human growth as a socially mediated process where kids pick up their beliefs, cultural values, and problem-solving strategies through cooperative exchanges with “skilled tutors” such as parents or teachers. As kids observe and follow verbal instructions the tutor provides — also known as collaborative dialogue — the child processes the learning and emulates their tutor. How Collaborative Dialogue Eases Pressure Vygotsky viewed learning as social in nature and coined the phrase collaborative dialogue to describe the intentional conversations adults have with children....

Men should only be wearing open-toed shoes in very specific situations that demand them (the beach, for example), so choosing the right pair is 99 percent about functionality. These Birkenstock EVA Essentials are waterproof, ultralight, washable, indestructible, and actually, they also look great, somehow. Modeled on Birkenstock’s classic Arizona silhouette, the EVAs are flexible and require no breaking in. While they might not be as packable as flip flops (which are garbage), they’ll add no weight to your bag, actually stay on your feet, and you can confidently step over rough terrain in them....

Mike Thiessen, a dad from Alberta, Canada, posted two pictures to Facebook last week with the caption “When you’re sick of the kids losing the brush everyday.” The first one shows his daughter holding up her hairbrush with a look somewhere between dismayed and annoyed plastered on her face. The second picture shows the mechanism Thiessen came up with: a metal chain attached to the end of the brush and connected to an eye hook screwed into the frame around the bathroom door....

Kast is a free app that allows up to 20 people to gather in a group and speak on audio and video and up to 100 spectators to do the same. It works with Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, video game streaming like Twitch, and pretty much every other streaming app. Even better, those watching can text chat while they watch, meaning grandma and grandpa can send messages to — and receive them from — the kids while Elsa does her magical thing in Frozen 2....

In mid-December, the space agency released another image of the Carina Nebula. It’s no surprise that this area is the Hubble Space Telescope’s most-imaged object because it’s quite beautiful. And the new look does not disappoint. Can you explain what we see in this photo like we’re five years old? This isn’t our first time getting a glimpse at the Carina Nebula, which is in the southern Carina constellation, which is approximately 7,500 light-years from Earth....

That’s what we asked more than a dozen fathers spread out across the country. They all weighed in on the lessons they’re trying to teach their sons about manhood. From embracing equality, to the value of hard work, these men covered a vibrant spectrum of issues that their children will likely have to face as they grow older. They’re raising the next generation of men, and these are the most important lessons they hope to impart....

If only we’d had the Bug-A-Salt 2.0 Fly Gun. Its dad joke moniker aside, this ridiculous product is a non-toxic and, if you have decent aim, effective way to reduce the fly population in your general vicinity. Simply load it up with salt and slide the pump-action handle toward you. A scope will pop up on top of the barrel. Push the handle forward, take aim at your prey — spiders and soft-bodied insects like houseflies, mosquitos, small to medium-sized roaches, and moths within three feet are ideal — and squeeze the trigger....