This Week in Parenting News: Smashing iPads, No More Yelling and the End of Summer Fatigue

Parents parent. There’s no sense fighting about it as long as no one is getting hurt, right? There are different techniques, from house to house, coast to coast and continent to continent. Remember: there is no right way to do this. No one who is a parent has it all together. Everyone just loves their babies. And everyone could use more help.

Here are three times parents parented. Win or lose, it’s how they played the game of life.

A Mother Smashed Her Kids’ iPads to Prove a Point

Every parenting technique is different, which means rules about screen time differ, too. Some parents might limit time to an hour or so a day, or even promote device-free time. For a mother named Kirstie Allsopp, her technique wasn’t unlike many — she set tablet hours.

Except she noticed a pattern with her children, who were using their iPads outside of their regulated hours. Her response to this? She revealed on a daytime talk show that she smashed the tablets in front of her children to send a message. It’s a move that many have criticized, but the mother stands behind.

WEIGH IN: How would you have handled this situation?

Toronto dad says yelling “may be the most widespread parental stupidity around today”

Have you yelled at your kids today? According to Stephen Marche, a Toronto-based writer for the New York Times, “It doesn’t make you look authoritative. It makes you look out of control to your kids. It makes you look weak. And you’re yelling, let’s be honest, because you are weak. Yelling, even more than spanking, is the response of a person who doesn’t know what else to do.”

This isn’t just his opinion of parenting at large, but a reaction to his own impulse to yell. So he took to discussing the Kazdin Method with the creator Alan Kazdin, who promotes praise over yelling. Is it the solution? He’s just one of many parents looking for a better way to parent than to repeat behaviours in themselves they don’t like.

WEIGH IN: How do you feel about yelling? Are you a family who yells?

Jennifer Garner New Role: Parenting Memes

In Jennifer Garner’s new movie Peppermint, she plays a mother seeking revenge against those who took her family from her. Which isn’t exactly light fare. But she isn’t always working on such dark themes — sometimes she’s working on hilarious memes. To mark the end of summer, she reflected on all the plans she had at the beginning of the season, and the physical toll it took on her as a mother.

Photo © Jennifer Garner/Instagram

A sentiment that's probably pretty relatable to most parents...

WEIGH IN: How many activities did you cross off your summer fun checklist?