The official website of parenting author Ann Douglas
Family Health Articles by Ann Douglas
Fitness and nutrition
Image: VEER/Nailia Schwarz
- Eating Dinner as a Family: How to transition into eating dinner as a family when your kids want to eat early and your work schedules don't allow you to make dinner until mid-evening.
- Family Fitness: Resolve to Get Your Kids Moving: Who says fitness has to be boring -- or super-serious? Throw around a Frisbee (yes, even in January!) Play a game of tag. As long as you're moving your bodies vigorously enough to get your hearts beating faster, you're doing your body good.
- Parents' approach to children's nutrition could affect weight, fruit, and vegetable consumption later in life, study shows: How you handle the Great Veggie Standoff (and other fruit- and veggie-related skirmishes over the years) could determine how much your 6-year-old weighs by the time he heads off to college and how often he chooses to consume fruits and vegetables during his college years.
Mental health and wellness
- Teen Brain Benefits from Mindfulness Training: Teenagers who practice mindfulness — a technique that involves focusing on what is happening in the moment and being aware of and accepting of emotions — benefit from increased self-control, healthier relationships, and improved overall well-being.
- Mom's Stress Guide: Why moms of school-aged kids feel overloaded.
- Mom's Stress Guide: Tweens and Teens: You may feel like you're back in the new mom trenches, except it's a much lonelier experience this time around.
- Handling Bullying: "My child is being bullied at school. What should I do?"
- Raising a Daughter: Mean Girls and Perfectionism: Dealing with mean girls and girls who are perfectionists.
Work-life
- Being Pregnant on the Job: We’ve finally come through that crazy time when pregnant working women were expected to soldier on Murphy Brown–like for the entire nine months of pregnancy, regardless of how tired or queasy they might be feeling.
- Being Pregnant on the Job: You've come a long way baby, at least when it comes to being pregnant on the job.
- How to Tell Your Boss You're Pregnant: How and when to make the mother of all announcements at work.
- Working During Pregnancy: Follow these tips to get the most from your job while caring for your body's changing needs.
- How to Plan for the Post-Baby Money Crunch: What can you do to sidestep the financial pitfalls of maternity leave?
- Do Dads Feel More Work-Life Stress Than Moms?: Forget supermom stress. Now it’s dads who are scrambling to find ways to minimize work-life conflict.
- A Recipe for Sanity: What every mother who works outside of the home needs is a fairy godmother -- someone who will arrive on the scene, wave her magic wand, and make all the work and family related-chaos disappear.
- The Daycare Blues: While there's no miracle cure for the daycare blues that many children experience when starting a new childcare arrangement, there is plenty you can do to make the transition as stress-free as possible for your child. Here are a few tips.
- Sick Kids and Daycare: When are kids infectious? When can they return to school or daycare? Some basic guidelines for some common childhood illnesses.
- The Childcare Swap Moves Online, But Will It Work?: “Parents are really struggling to find something that is seriously lacking in our society: quality, accessible, affordable child care," says Paulette Senior, CEO of YWCA Canada.
- February is RRSP Money Guilt Season for Parents: It’s February, which means it’s money guilt season again – the time of year when the financial industry reminds us that we should be contributing to our RRSPs and our children’s RESPs and, now, our tax-free savings accounts (TFSAs), too.
- Work-Life Balance: Questions and answers about work-life balance from visitors to WomensHealthMatters.ca.