Your once poised child starts playing with his food during time, refusing to eat it. Or your child starts wetting her bed, months after she’s been potty trained. Or the politeness once attributed through good manners have all but vanquished lately and given way to curtness, rudeness and eye-rolls. What in the world is going on, you may find yourself asking.

Planning an epic Halloween party can be both frightfully fun and nerve wrecking at the same time. Here are 10 must-have foolproof ways to throw a freakishly good time.

ackson Fujimori’s interest in baking first sparked when he was 8 years old. A flame kindled one summer when he enrolled in a baking class at the urging of his second grade teacher who oversaw the camp.

Parents are motivated now more than ever to enroll their kids in sports and other extra-curricular activities. The question is, how do you motivate your child? There is a fine balance between support and pressure. In order to motivate our kids the healthy way, it’s important to understand the needs of each individual child. Here are 7 ways to start.

When it comes to motivating your child, less can be more. Dangle a piece of candy, a trip to Disneyland or a shiny trophy in front of them, and any child can be motivated to do whatever you want them to in the short term. The real question, however, is how do you self-motivate a child to build the kind of character that makes them persevere in life?

Why are some kids motivated and others not? Until I had kids of my own, I chalked it up to parenting and the aptitude of their teachers. I don’t believe this anymore.

Starting a new school can be scary, and what I’m going to say next is not that it doesn’t have to be. All significant change is intimidating for a child. Remember kids crave routine. Even if change doesn’t happen directly in your child’s life but happens to your child, those external changes can have profound effects on a child’s life as well.

Summer ignites a magnetic charge between kids and water. The almost scientific exchange might very well transform kids into amphibians if we let them have their way; most kids I know would gladly split their habitat between swimming pool and home. But what if a pool isn’t easily accessible? There’s plenty of splash to be had this summer with a little planning and creativity. Here are our top 7 insanely fun activities for the summer that don’t require a swimming pool in sight.

School’s out but that doesn’t mean the learning has to stop. Taking a break from the classroom is a good opportunity to inch your child closer to the real world by hosting a sale. Your child can discover his inner entrepreneur and learn some essential money management skills in the process. Plus it could be a ton of fun for kids! Remember, kids love doing adult work.

My highly sensitive child is graduating kindergarten in a couple of days. The once hesitant learner has become an active participant in class and leader within her peers. Inherent in her growth, has been her ability to better communicate and command her emotions, which has really diffused the need for tantrums and other emotional outbursts. But lately, she’s regressed as she often does when her grandparents visit for the summer.

Before your child can talk about his problems and feelings, he needs an emotional vocabulary. Simply teaching your child how to label what he is feeling will empower him to talk about his feelings, which will lead to solutions. Here are 10 emotions your child can add to his emotional word bank.

Kindergarten is not what it used to be. Much of the exploratory playtime of yore is being replaced with rigid academic learning. And the pressure to meet new kindergarten standards is having a trickle-down effect on many preschools. Preschools all over the country are trading in their sensory tables of sand and water or dramatic play areas with writing centers and a curriculum that expects preschoolers to sit still and focus.

Knowing how to make small talk ranked as one of the most important skills in retaining and getting a job in a recent study. Not to mention that many colleges interview their candidates as well. And with many private schools vetting their candidates as early as kindergarten, good conversational skills is proving to come in handy at a much earlier age than we thought.

Memorial Day may be known by many as the holiday that kicks off summer, but it’s important to teach our kids and help them remember that Memorial Day means much more than just a fun pool-side barbecue or even sending quality time with our loved ones.

The enormous responsibility of parenting can make us too focused on reaching goals, which robs us off opportunities to enjoy the journey. We obviously want our kids to become responsible, law-abiding citizens with good jobs, a good family and a good home.

Ditch the traditional card this Mother’s Day and engage your child in a fun fill-in-the-blank activity instead.

Confidence is one of those qualities easier spotted than defined. I recently spotted confidence so unequivocally in a 16-year-old, it left me pondering what confidence really was. What made Shreyas Parab, an accomplished yet down-to-earth kid, pursue such ambitious endeavors at such a young age?

Almost everyone I know seems to have some form of allergy or another. Fortunately, most allergies are nothing more than a nuisance. Other more serious allergies, however, can be debilitating, keeping some kids from ever playing sports on a field. And some allergies still can be life threatening, like my friend’s son who has a fatal peanut allergy.

Shreyas Parab is the founder and CEO of Novel Tie, a tie company creating witty and silly ties. His ties not only help uniform-bound students, as well as the young-at-heart add flare and individuality to restrictive dress codes, but Shreyas founded Novel Tie on the notion that a funny tie could start conversations for you.

The art of staying busy requires the modern parent to book play dates, enroll kids in classes, make sure they practice their instruments, sign them up for an extracurricular sport or maybe two, leaving very little room on the weekend for kids to sleep in and relax, and almost zero idle time on the weekdays when our kids’ schedules are also competing with homework.

We’re careful about whom we give our trust to and how we dole it out. But when it comes to trust and our children, there’s a catch-22. Because trust is a lot like love: you can’t give it unless you’ve received it. It’s the job of parents to trust their children.