Family Life
How Visits to Extended Family Affect Young Children
Extended family visits offer children valuable relationships and exposure to family history and connection. However, these visits also disrupt routine...
5 min read
Articles on Baby Health and Development
Expert guides, tips, and insights to help you and your family live healthier lives. From preventative care to wellness strategies, find everything you need to make informed health decisions.
Health
All About Baby's First Vaccinations: Preparation, Reactions, and Aftercare
The 8-week vaccination appointment is a significant milestone -- and for many parents, a source of considerable anxiety. The injections are a small di...
4 min read
Family Life
Vacations With Young Children: Setting Realistic Expectations
Vacations with young children look dramatically different from vacations without them. Rather than viewing this as a limitation, reframing what vacati...
5 min read
Family Life
Traveling With a Baby: Practical Preparation
The first trip with a small baby always feels bigger than it turns out to be. Most babies travel surprisingly well, mostly because their needs — fed,...
9 min read
Health
Order of Tooth Eruption in Infants and Toddlers
Knowing what to expect -- and when -- helps parents understand whether their baby's teething is following a typical pattern. Tooth eruption timing and...
3 min read
Health
Teething Pain Relief: What Actually Works and What Doesn't
The first tooth is a milestone, but the weeks before it arrives can be trying for both baby and parent. Teething discomfort is real, and the desire to...
5 min read
Health
Should You Use Teething Gels? What the Evidence Shows
Teething gels are prominently displayed in pharmacy teething sections and are frequently recommended by well-meaning family members. Many parents assu...
3 min read
Health
Teething and Fever or Diarrhoea: What the Evidence Shows
Ask most parents of a teething baby whether teething causes fever and diarrhoea, and the majority will say yes. This belief is so widespread and so co...
3 min read
Family Life
Teaching Young Children About Money
The Cambridge Money Advice Service study (Whitebread and Bingham, 2013) found that the foundations of children's money habits are largely formed by ag...
7 min read
Family Life
How to Talk About Financial Limits With Children
Every parent eventually has the moment in the supermarket aisle where a small person wants something the family budget doesn't have room for. How you...
7 min read
Sleep
Swaddling a Newborn: Benefits, Technique, and When to Stop
Swaddling went from "what your grandmother did" to "discouraged" to "rehabilitated" in roughly two decades, and the modern position is that it works w...
7 min read
Safety
When Babies Can Use Sunscreen
Sun protection in the first three years matters disproportionately. Childhood sunburn is one of the most consistent risk factors in melanoma research...
7 min read
Family Life
Storytelling and Reading Together as a Family
There aren't many parenting habits that pay back as reliably as reading aloud. The research on it is unusually consistent: kids who are read to regula...
8 min read
Daycare
Starting Daycare: A Complete Parent's Guide to Choosing, Preparing, and Adapting
Starting daycare is one of the bigger transitions of early childhood, and the parts that surprise most parents aren't the obvious ones. The first day...
9 min read
Sleep
Why Sleep May Worsen After the First Birthday
The first birthday gets sold as a turning point, and for some families it is. For plenty of others, the weeks just after 12 months are the worst sleep...
5 min read
Sleep
Why Track a Child's Sleep
Most parents have lived through stretches where individual nights feel awful but it's impossible to say whether things are getting worse, getting bett...
5 min read
Sleep
Why Newborn Sleep Is Fragmented
At 4am with a 3-week-old, "your baby's sleep is fragmented for sound biological reasons" is not the comforting line it might be in daylight. But knowi...
4 min read
Sleep
Why Bedtime Routines Matter
"Just keep the bedtime routine consistent" is one of those pieces of advice that gets repeated so often it stops sounding like real advice. But the ro...
5 min read
Sleep
Using White Noise: When It Helps, When It Doesn't, and How to Use It Safely
White noise polarises parents in a way that's not really proportional to the evidence. Some families swear by it; others write it off as a gimmick. Th...
6 min read
Sleep
Is White Noise Safe for Infants
The "is white noise safe?" question gets answered loudly on the internet — sometimes with reassuring sweep, sometimes with alarm. The truthful answer...
4 min read