We are a team of parents with a lot of experience raising children who want to help other young mothers and fathers to make their lives a little easier and provide ready-made collections of various products and other tips that should facilitate the already stressful experience of young parents.
We hope our blog will become for you a place in which you want to come back, as well as share it with other parents.
Lisa Thorne
Lisa, who hails from Denver, Colorado is the mother of twin boys who have now passed successfully through College. Originally from Vermont, she trained as a teacher and moved to Denver for work, before meeting her future husband, another teacher. She says the birth of the twins was wonderful but hard work for many of the early years. She continued teaching part-time while raising her sons and now teaches full time again.
She feels having twins is a different experience from raising an only child – or siblings of differing ages. With that insight – and her Teaching experience – she now volunteers to help single-parent families.
Difon James
Growing up in Fort Lauderdale, Difon was the youngest of a large and happy family. She trained in Accountancy and moved to the Dallas area, where she and her husband managed to juggle their single child – a daughter who is adopted – with staying in work. Difon says that a combination of working from home, a sympathetic employer and a fully hands-on husband meant she could juggle all the commitments on her time although she admits there were real challenges. Her Daughter excelled at sports and ballet and Difon jokes about evenings weekends being a constant series of trips in her ‘mum mobile’.
Amy Macdonald
Amy’s parents emigrated to the US from Scotland when she was 5 and she feels this was a defining moment in her life. She talks about the excitement of a new country but also the challenges of integration.
As a child, she was diagnosed with mild dyslexia which she successfully overcame and Amy is a trained relationship counsellor, specialising in CBT, and is the proud mum of three kids, now in their late teens. Living in Vermont, her family are very much outdoor types and she is a firm believer in “the family who plays together stays together”. She loves hiking, camping and generally getting away from the stresses of modern living.
About our Team
Parenting is one of the most rewarding experiences you will have but it is also one of the toughest.
Years ago, many families had grandparents, uncles, aunts and siblings nearby who were happy to provide everything from practical help, useful advice and even free babysitting services. It also used to be said ‘it takes the whole village to raise a child”.
For most of us today, those days of the ‘extended family’ are long gone. We move around for our work, families drift apart and families break up. Today, typically at best you have just two parents to care for children – the ‘nuclear family’ and in some cases only one parent. This is the first time, in tens of thousands of years, children have been brought up this way. So, it’s no surprise that parents and kids can feel the strain. Most of us Parents are under huge time pressure too and our kids have new pressures of their own, the pressures of school and exams, the pressures that can come from peer groups and the pressures and risks lurking in social media and the internet.
It’s no wonder we all feel this pressure coming from many directions from time to time. However, there is plenty of good news too. Social Media and the internet can be a source of helpful advice and support – provided it comes from the right people. Technology has also revolutionised so much of family life and there is a range of gadgets, gizmos and even games that are constructive, helpful and even liberating – providing you choose the right ones.
That’s part of the mission of our team. We are experienced parents who have been there, done that and bought the T-shirt. Equally, we know that each family is different and each child is unique, so we don’t believe any child rearing technique – or technology – is a ‘one size fits all’ solution.
Between the three of us, we have a wide and diverse mixture of practical hands on experience – and a little wisdom – and also some solid theoretical formal training to call on too. Our experience covers three completely different family setups and our training covers teaching, counselling, family finances, foster care and adoption.
We are experienced mothers who want to share our experiences and insights with new parents. We step into the role that Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles used to fill but sadly don’t always do today. We stay up to date with the latest research on attachment, behaviour and family relationships as well as technology, services and products. As a busy parent, you often don’t have the time to dig deeply into a new topic or a current set of questions – the good news is that we will do that for you and produce balanced, fair and up to date information which will help you make up your own mind.
If you just take technology, the speed of change is breathtaking, It’s a marvel how fast technology moves but society doesn’t always keep up. If we just take social media and smartphones, together these have revolutionised family dynamics in less than a single generation. Sociologists, Psychologists and Child Development experts are all struggling to keep up.
Then think about AI, Siri, Cortana, etc. – we haven’t even scratched the surface of how these three technologies could change our lives as individuals but also as families.
Then you have all the child-care gadgets on the market today. Chosen and used correctly, these can be hugely beneficial to us as parents. However, there is a growing and real unease about technology being used as a substitute for good parenting, rather than as a supplement.
Our children are now ‘digital natives’. Many have no experience and little comprehension of life before the Internet or before Smartphones. They swim in the sea of social media without even considering it once didn’t exist. They have an exciting future ahead of them and it is our responsibility to prepare them for it as best we can.
That, in a nutshell, is our mission. We are here to help and we are committed to give you the insights and understanding that will take you and your family on this amazing journey.