There are many ways for parents to keep the love alive.

Becoming a parent is a wonderful experience for two people, but it can create a lapse in your romance. Finding ways to rekindle the flame after the arrival of your children can be complicated, but with some planning and patience, you can find romance with your spouse all over again. You might find your love bond is stronger in a whole different way.

1. Dinner and a Movie

   • A classic date of dinner and a movie can rekindle your romance as parents. Arrange for a babysitter on a Saturday or Sunday, take in a matinee and have an early dinner. You’ll get to spend quality, romantic time with your significant other and get home in time to put your baby to bed. Keep things fair by allowing one spouse to choose the movie while the other gets to pick the dinner spot. Talk about yourselves and other life events, but avoid talking about the children if possible. The point of the date is to spend time with each other, remembering why you fell in love.

   Weekend Getaway

   • Plan a weekend away to a favorite or new spot if you can arrange for a babysitter and feel comfortable enough to leave your children overnight. A spa getaway can be relaxing for both spouses, helping you to reconnect with each other. A trip to a nearby city for shopping and dinner can be enjoyable too. Keep the focus on each other and take advantage of the free time to rekindle intimacy with your spouse.

   “Stay-cation”

   • Ask the grandparents or a close friend to keep your children overnight and have a “stay-cation.” Spend the day or weekend at home, lounging in your pajamas and catching up on movies or television. Sleep in, make love and spend time in your hometown like you did before you had children. Enjoy the free time in your own home, but focus on spending time with your spouse. Do not use the time to clean, catch up on bills or other mundane, household tasks. Save that for another time.

   Renew Your Wedding Vows

   • Renewing your lifelong commitment to each other after you have children can be a nice romantic gesture. Arrange to have a priest or minister renew your marriage vows, either in your own home or at a church. You can have a small reception-type gathering at your home or a local restaurant. Recreate the sentiments from your wedding, such as a toast or cutting a wedding cake. The point is to focus on your love and how it has evolved and grown stronger since you’ve become parents.

Ron Huxley Recommends: Valentines Day doesn’t have to be expensive. Make the mood creative with a just a few simple touches. Tips for Men: Plan now!

The Foster Parenting Toolbox covers topics from newborns to teens and everything in between for not only foster parents, but also those who work with foster parents: case workers, social workers, judges, CASA’s, GAL’s and others. Three Kinship Center professionals are among the contributors.

Edited by Kim Phagan-Hansel, the editor of Fostering Families Today Magazine, the book features more than 100 contributors who have helped weave a stunning tapestry of advice specifically for foster parents and the professionals and case workers who are on their team. This 464-page book is an extension of the trainings offered by individual states. It’s a top of the nightstand resource that offers today’s foster parents access to a wealth of useful information from professionals in the field and successful foster parents in the trenches. This is a book you won’t read all at once, but come back to again and again.

Ron Huxley Reports: I was honored by being asked to author one of the chapters for this newly published book on “Kinship Caregivers.” Check the book out at http://www.emkpress.com/fosterparenting.html

You have probably been out to a restaurant and have seen kids behaving in a decidedly unmannered way. You know the ones–elbows on the table, whining about the food, kicking the chair, getting up and running around, picking fights with siblings, yelling and crying. No one wants to be around kids like that. But, if children are never taught any better, they will never do any better. Teaching manners doesn’t have to be a punishment. You can use games to make teaching manners fun.

Table Manners

Make one night formal night. This is similar to the tea party game children play. You can do this once a week or once a month to reinforce good manners. Pull out all the stops. Everyone plays dress-up like for a tea party. You set the table formally, even if some members are still using plastic dinnerware. Serve a special meal, preferably one that your children like. Use this night to show the kids how people behave at dinner, such as how to hold their forks, how to put their napkin on their lap and how to ask for food on the table. Every time your children display good manners, they get a point. If they make it to five points, they win a prize.

Greeting People Game

Shyness is the most common reason for awkward behavior when children are confronted with adults, according to the Family Education website. Turn the idea of meeting someone new into a “find-the-hidden-picture” type of game that helps teach them how to overcome their shyness. One way to start a conversation with an adult is for the child to ask questions, as long as the questions are not too personal. Make a pretend scenario. Pretend that you are a stranger and your child is entering the room. Sit at the kitchen table. Have a tennis racket on the floor, a gift with birthday wrapping paper on the table and a picture of a dog next to you. Three obvious questions your child could ask you (the stranger) would be if you play tennis, if you are going to a birthday party and if that is your dog. The game is to see how observant your child is. He wins a small prize for each appropriate question he comes up with.

Good Sportsmanship

When children and parents display bad sportsmanship, nobody wins. Once your child understands good sportsmanship, he will realize that the real winners are the players and spectators who behave with dignity, according to the Kids Health website. Make a game by showing your children videotapes of players behaving with sportsmanship and shaking hands after a game. Show another one that has players and coaches fighting, such as a hockey game or a video of a child’s event where a fight breaks out. Give each child two different noisemakers, and tell them to sound one when they see good manners and the other for bad. Stop the tape when you hear the noisemaker and have the child explain why he used the noisemaker. Each child gets a point for each right answer. The winner gets a prize.

Manners Board Game

Make a board game about manners. Get a piece of cardboard and draw squares going around each side. In each square, write something that would be good manners or bad manners, such as “says thank you” or “burps at the table.” Roll the dice, and when you land on a bad manner, you have to go back one space. When you land on a good manner, you can go forward two spaces.

Polite Polly Says

This game is a variation of “Simon Says,” and it reinforces good manners. Your child should do what is polite and should not do what is impolite. You are Polite Polly, and when you say, “Polite Polly says to say please and thank you,” the child should say, “please and thank you,” if she thinks that is polite. If she does say it, she is correct and gets a point. If she doesn’t, she does not get a point. The opposite happens if you say something impolite, such as, “Polite Polly says to stick out your tongue.” If the child sticks out her tongue, she would not get a point, because that is impolite. If she does not stick out her tongue, she would get a point. After five points, the child gets a prize.

Ron Huxley’s Hope: Manners seem to be a lost art in our society. I can’t claim to have been the best teacher to my children but we did try to cover the basics. Overall, I am happy with the results. My hope, for parents, is that they can use the power of play to teach good manners to their children.

> Get more ideas to build the family of your dreams as a member of our Parents “Inner Circle” today!

Shortly after my son was born 11 years ago, a friend of mine – the father of three much older kids – asked me how I was doing. At that point, I think we’d moved safely into that phase where I was no longer feeding my son every three seconds, he’d begun smiling at us, and my husband and I had more or less adjusted to this massive change in our lives.

“It’s such a great age,” I commented.

“They all are,” he replied.

It’s true, they are all great ages and I’m continually mystified by how exciting and interesting each phase of parenting is (even when I’m going through them for the second time with my daughter.)

But it’s also an ongoing challenge to parent and one always feels a bit behind the eight ball as you try desperately to figure out how best to react (or, indeed, whether to react at all) to our children’s behavior and emerging personalities.

To that end, this week I thought I’d share some new (but really) old parenting strategies that seem to prove their value again and again:

1. Incentives are better than punishments. When your kids misbehave – and particularly when they do the same annoying thing repeatedly – there’s a temptation to take something away from them: no television for a week, no play dates, no dessert. But rewards for good behavior are also much more effective than punishments for bad behavior, especially for younger children. In my own case, my daughter takes an inordinate amount of time to get dressed in the morning, producing frequent (and repetitive) conflicts. While my first instinct was to take away her computer time, I opted this week to try something new: if she can get dressed, brush hair and brush teeth each morning (and the reverse each evening) in under 10 minutes, I’ll give her 50 pence a day. At the end of two weeks, if she does this consistently, she can buy a present for herself. (Bear in mind that she doesn’t have allowance right now.) I explained to her that we wouldn’t carry on buying gifts on a regular basis, but I’m hoping that by heaping praise on her in the next two weeks while we do this trial period, she’ll internalize the positive reinforcement and want to get dressed/undressed quickly, rather than only working for the extrinsic reward. So far, so good.

2. Hitting doesn’t work. If you think that doesn’t bear repeating, think again. Here in the UK where I live, a Labor politician – who was, I kid you not, the former Education minister – recently declared that if working class parents had more freedom to hit their children, we wouldn’t have had the riots that broke out here last summer. No sh$!. In a poll taken not so long ago, nearly one half of British parents surveyed said that they thought that teachers should be allowed to hit children to keep them in line. This, despite mounds of evidence showing that while spanking is very effective in the short run for altering a child’s behavior, in the long run it is completely counter-productive.

3. Understand where your kids are at, developmentally. Like many parents, I was absolutely fascinated by a recent article by Alison Gopnik in the Wall Street Journal about the teenage mind. The upshot of the article is that teenagers are hitting puberty – and all the attendant hormonal, risk-taking changes in attitude this phase of life produces – much earlier than ever before, while becoming “adults” (in the sense of assuming responsibility for their own lives) ever later. The result is that their emotional development is out of sync with their ability to exert judgment and self-control in a way that it wasn’t even 20 years ago. Once I read this, I thought, Eureka! So that’s why my 11-year-old loves listening to rap music but can’t be bothered to cut with a knife and fork properly.

4. Don’t micro-manage. I attended my son’s parent-teacher meetings earlier this week and was told by several of his teachers, independently, that they felt that while he had come into the school year a bit jumpy and unsettled, over the course of the year he had really calmed down. As a fellow manic, I can’t really criticize him too much on this score – the apple, as they say, doesn’t fall far from the tree. But I couldn’t help but wonder if my own New Year’s resolution to chill out and try to control him less wasn’t helping, in part, to chill him out in other parts of his life. Coincidence? Maybe. But I’m going to press on with this resolution – despite temptations to “fall off the wagon” – and see if I keep observing positive change.

5. Keep reading books by Faber and Mazlish. Believe it or not, I do think that you can over-train yourself in the art of parenting. Some of it has to be instinctual – and based, crucially, on your particular child’s nature – or you’ll drive yourself insane. But I will put in a plug for two books by parenting experts Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish that I will stand by: How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk, as well as their companion volume, Siblings Without Rivalry. I remember parenting blogger Lisa Belkin saying that for many years, she and her husband kept dog-eared copies of these books by their respective bedsides. Ditto.

What tried and true parenting strategies work for you?

Follow Delia Lloyd on Twitter:

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Ron Huxley’s Applause: I love it when someone gets the basics of parenting correct. You would be surprised how many “experts” do not. For me, basics need to be basic. The simpler the better for parents to remember what and how to react in a crisis situation. This blogger has some useful points for parents to follow. Can you add to them?

schnaars

There are a lot of amazing new educational apps out there, whether you’re looking for native apps or Web apps, apps for your mobile phone, for your tablet, or for your laptop. There a number of app stores too where you can find and download them: Apple’s iTunes and its Mac App Store, the Amazon Appstore, Google’s Android Market, the Chrome Web Store, the Google Apps Marketplace, GetJar, and so on.

These app stores all offer products in a designated education category, ostensibly designed to make it easier to locate apps for learning and studying (as opposed to apps for productivity or for entertainment, although sometimes these categories do overlap). But having an education category doesn’t necessarily make it easier to locate quality apps, as any cursory search there will quickly show you. Apps for teaching pre-schoolers the alphabet are grouped alongside those for studying calculus or human anatomy. Spanish for Beginners flash cards are found next to GRE test preparation.

When you’re spending money on these apps, those $1.99 charges add up.

Take, for example, a look at the educational apps in iTunes. The category highlights the top paid and top free apps, that is, listing them in terms of download and sales numbers. It also features “New and Noteworthy” applications, as well as “Staff Favorites.” But these are a wide variety of apps: Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream for your iPhone and an interactive Winnie the Pooh e-book.

This problem with very broad categorization exists outside the education category, too. If you search, say, for “science,” you’ll get some science magazines, some reference apps, and some not-safe-for-work results too.

iTunes does offer a ratings system, as do all the major app stores, whereby users can give apps zero to five stars and can write detailed reviews of their experiences with the app. But this too is frequently an unreliable way to discover new and interesting applications. Oftentimes, like websites such as Yelp, those who leave these reviews have either had terrible experiences with the app (“It crashes every time I use it”) or rave about it uncritically (“This is my preschooler’s favorite app.”) Too often, there are so few reviews, it’s hard to know whether customers’ responses are typical or not.

Although sites like the Google Apps Marketplace do try to help the review process by highlighting those tools that have been reviewed by a “Verified User” (in other words, by a real customer rather than a fictitious account created just for the purposes of boosting ratings), these ratings aren’t weighted more heavily or any differently than anonymous reviews. An app can have 20 anonymous five-star reviews, and without a closer look, it’s easy to mistake that as something better than an app that’s got only five reviews, but all from verified accounts.

The alternative, of course, to searching through App Stores and taking your best guess based on the review information there is to rely on the recommendation of people you know. Indeed, word-of-mouth remains one of the most important ways that developers can sell and buyers can find quality applications. Several educational blogs write detailed reviews of new educational apps, and sites like Moms With Apps try to showcase “family-friendly” developers’ work. And while “caveat emptor” holds true in app purchases as with anything you buy, one has to wonder if there aren’t better ways to help showcase quality apps.

It’s one thing, of course, when the applications are free. If you download a new educational game and you find that it’s not fun and not smart, it’s easy to simply delete it. But the stakes are higher once you’re looking at spending money on these apps (those $1.99 charges add up), particularly since the return policy for app marketplaces is limited: Android apps can be returned within 15 minutes, but iOS apps are non-refundable.

Readers, how do you find quality educational apps? What changes would you make to the app stores to give consumers better information, particularly when it comes to educational apps?

Ron Huxley Learns: How many parents have a smartphone or tabet that a child doesn’t want to play with? If there are going to use your digital device it is a good idea to have child safe apps for them to play and learn!