Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt
Wed, 17 May 2006 02:31:00 GMT
Minti, the parent to parent advice-opedia and community website, has just launched an update with a new look and feel in addition to the addition of some new features that enhance the experience for their community.
In addition to reading up other parent’s advice, you can now request advice, post to your own blog, upload photos, subscribe to content and lots of other cool things.
For sometime now, Minti had been a great place to find advice on a wide range of parenting topics. These new features only make it better.
Posted in Parenting, Family 2.0, Family Life | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt
Tue, 16 May 2006 21:32:00 GMT
There is a whole community of blogs dedicated to and written by Stay At Home Dads (SAHDs). I ran across a link on Paul Nyhan’s Family Man blog site to RebelDad . This site, subtitled A Father Puts the Stay-At Home Dad Under the Microscope, is the labor of Brian Read, a SAHD in the Washington DC area.
Read has some interesting statistics on the number of SAHDs in the US, the UK and Japan. Although the numbers vary widely, there is no doubt that the at home fatherhood is an increasingly popular family choice. So popular, in fact that there is even an At-Home Dad Convention that is now in it’s 11th year
Read also has a blogroll of over a hundred other sites and blogs, most of which deal with Stay at Home Dads. One such site Slowlane is an incredible resource on this topic, though it seems that it hasn’t been updated in a while.
For those of you interested in getting more information on the SAHD phenomenon, RebelDad is a great starting point.
Posted in Parenting, Family Life | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt
Tue, 16 May 2006 01:41:00 GMT
Every year the Social Security administration announces the most popular American baby names of the year.
Here is this year’s top 10
Girls
Emily
Emma
Madison
Abigail
Olivia
Isabella
Hannah
Samantha
Ava
Ashley
Boys
Jacob
Michael
Joshua
Matthew
Ethan
Andrew
Daniel
Anthony
Christopher
Joseph
This is very similar to last year’s top 10, with the top seven boy’s names being exactly the same as last years.
The Social Security Administration’s web site has a lot more details. You can look up the most popular baby names by birth year back to 1980. Even the most popular baby names by decade back to the 1880’s.
And while we are on the subject of baby names, this is a very cool site, The Baby Name Wizard’s Name Voyager.
This is site uses a java applet that presents a dynamic graph of a name’s popularity since the 1880. Pink is for girls, blue is for boys, so as you type in a name, you will get graphical data for all names that start with the letters of the name you are looking for. So for example, if you start typing in Jack, you will first get all of the J names, then the names with JA, and so on.
This site is the responsibility of Laura Wattenberg, the author of The Baby Name Wizard, a practical guide to baby name styles and ideas. She also maintains the Name News Blog with the latest information.
The data in the graphs is from the United States only, but if you know of any available data from other countries, please contact Ms. Wattenberg.
Posted in Parenting, Family Life | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt
Tue, 16 May 2006 01:32:00 GMT
I’ve been remiss in posting recently, working on Famundo and doing parenting stuff. In fact, I missed Mother’s Day. (Not really, but I just didn’t post anything about Mother’s Day.) Once we launch Famundo, our members will be able to post articles and there will be a lot more activity on this blog.
Father’s Day is coming up so I have been doing a little digging into what dad related sites are around. Lo and behold, what I was able to find is a goldmine of fathering blogs.
Paul Nyhan, family reporter for the Seattle P-I, has an excellent blog called Family Man: An Unauthorized Guide to Parenting
As a reported for a major daily you can imagine the amount of news and information that comes across his desk, probably too much at times. It’s a great starting place to find out the latest in family related news.
On Nyhan’s blog there is also a very good blogroll of many Dad Blogs, Mom Blogs, and other helpful Parenting Blogs.
Bookmark this one!
Posted in Parenting, Family Life | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt
Wed, 26 Apr 2006 02:24:00 GMT
I just returned from an incredible presentation at my kid’s middle school on drug prevention education. I know it doesn’t sound like a lot fun, but the presentation was extremely informative, entertaining and, needless to say, eye-opening.
Every year in the 7th and 8th graders in our school attend a 5-day session with Jonathan Scott of
Miles to Go, and there is a parent meeting at the beginning of the session to discuss with the parents what the children are going to be taught during upcoming the week.
Scott is a very charismatic and entertaining speaker and amazingly the kids really connect with him. He is also a recovering drug addict. My son thinks he’s learned more in this class than any other class all year.
Scott focuses on comprehensive drug facts, the socio-political environment surrounding drugs (legal and illegal), and the chemistry of drugs, alcohol, tobacco and their effects on the body in a very entertaining and engaging way, so the kids don’t feel like they are being lectured to.
I’m very grateful that our school is offering this kind of material for our students.
Please contact
Miles to Go if you are interested in getting a program like this for your school.
Posted in Parenting, School, Family Life, Setting Limits | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt
Mon, 24 Apr 2006 00:40:00 GMT
Ok, here’s my first look at one of the family-oriented parenting blogs I have listed in my earlier post.
Minti is a very cool, cleanly designed, Web 2.0 site whose mission is to create “the world’s largest parent to parent advice-opedia”. It seems that they are well on their way to accomplishing just that.
It a place for parents to share and gain advice on parenting with other parents. The have a growing community of members, which at the moment seems to be in the several hundreds.
Judging from their tag cloud – most popular tags being “baby, cuddle, sleep, strabismus (I had to look that one up), teething, toddler,and trimester – most of their advice and comments to date are from parents of babies or toddlers
I hope over time there will be more advice from parents of teens and pre-teens. God knows we need all the advice we can get.
Minti is definitely worth checking out.
Posted in Parenting, Family Life | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt
Thu, 20 Apr 2006 02:46:00 GMT
It seems that until recently there has been a dearth of parenting advice on the internet, except for the mainstream parenting magazine websites or people trying to hawk books. But I’m starting to see more and more very interesting sites popping up. Although a lot of them are focused on the baby to toddler age group, they are certainly worth checking out. I’ll try to look over these sites and update this post with my impressions.
Minti
Maya’s Mom
To soon to tell on this one since it’s a parenting site in the works, but they are taking e-mail addresses from those interested in being informed about their release.
Families.com
365 First Time Parenting Tips
ParentingIdeas.org
RebelDad
ParentHacks
If you happen to know of any others, please let us know.
Posted in Parenting, Family Life, Technology | 2 comments | no trackbacks
