This year, as school begins anew, I vow:

–I will not mindlessly toss school papers on the kitchen table where where they will collect in a foreboding heap until such time that a) we have people over for dinner and have no choice but to clear the table or, worse, b) the soccer booster lady e-mails: “YOUR daughter can’t play soccer today because she hasn’t filled out her emergency medical form.”

–I will sign all permission slips, medical forms and PTA forms as soon as my children place them in my hands.

–I will be especially careful to read the fine print on any paper that says “Volunteer opportunity!”, making sure to sign up for only such activities that do not come with a one-page job description.

–I will devise a system for saving those pieces of my kids’ school work that are worth saving, and immediately throw out the rest.

–Not only that, I will sort through the boxes of papers in the basement that date back to my first child’s first preschool, circa 1990, keeping only the most significant pieces. After all, like my friend Megan says, “Do I really need page after page of my kids writing the letter ‘L’ in cursive?”

– I will, once and for all maintain a bottomless cache of cash in the little pottery cup in the kitchen cupboard, so that when my daughter suddenly remembers she forgot to pack her lunch as she is running out the door, there will be money to give. And give. And give.

–When school lunches are remembered, they will be healthy and yummy and made before 8 a.m. with slim-to-no supervision from me.

–There will be no midnight oil, as bedtimes will be at healthy times for each age group. Mornings will be organized so that nobody is running out the door with cereal in a coffee cup, screaming, “I didn’t have time to brush my teeth.” Afternoons will be calm and all-knowing, not like last year when I couldn’t remember which day I pick up my daughter from school and which day she has soccer practice.

–I will remain steady and calm for all my children. This includes the aforementioned 16-year-old. This year, I vow to know when she needs me and when she wishes I lived in a different time zone. I will know when to stay in the kitchen and when to bound up the stairs to her room, where I will sit on the side of her bed and ask, “What’s wrong, honey?” in the sweetest voice known to humankind, even if it is 11 at night and my own eyeballs are moving to the back of my head with my own fatigue and overwhelmedness.

This year, I vow not only to be a calm, steady and all-knowing mother, but the calmest, steadiest, most all-knowingest among all.

Instead of my daughter coming to me and telling me how Abby’s mother never complains about driving back and forth and back and forth - did I say back and forth to the high school enough? - every other half hour after school, I will be the mom who gets put on the pedestal.

My daughter’s friends will talk about how Mrs. Hook always has hot zucchini bread on the table after school, a really cool shirt on her bod and a smile on her face, even when the papers start piling up on the table and there’s no lunch money in the pottery cup.

If only.

-Debra-Lynn

My house is on a half-acre lot next to tons of other houses on their own half-acres.

The Suburbs.

My kids love it. The constant socializing, activity, and proximity of friends.

I long for woods, lakes, and tranquility. Even though my reality is the suburbs, I have a few parenting tips to encourage a love of nature wherever you live.

My sister-in-law coined the phrase, “clues of nature” about 10 years ago when her oldest was a toddler. As soon as her child could walk she started taking walks to find “clues of nature.” This includes pretty much anything non-manmade. For a 1-year-old, “tree” may be a new word and concept. A 5-year-old may compare a maple leaf to an oak. A 10-year-old might note the direction a river flows. As we walk and discover new things, the kids (which now number about 10 nieces and nephews) exclaim, “a clue of nature.” Kind of silly, but we’re all programmed to look for clues of nature and it’s amazing how many we find, even in the suburbs.

I have a few simple crafts and activities to get you started on becoming more aware of the “clues of nature” in your neighborhood.

• Make a stepping stone. Collect interesting stones or pebbles on a walk. Pour Quikcrete (fast-setting) into a mold. Push in the rocks around the edge and make a handprint in the middle. You can purchase a plastic mold at a craft store or I simply used a foil pie pan. Let set, pop out, and enjoy.

• Collect “clues of nature” such as leaves, plants, pebbles, feathers, etc. Glue onto construction paper to make a collage. Label items for preschoolers.

• Staple plain white copy paper into a book. On the left page, scotch tape a common plant (blade of grass, dandelion, leaf). Child finds identical item outside and tapes it on the right page. Great scavenger hunt idea for preschoolers.

• Make a simple book as above. On the left side of page, label with some examples of “clues of nature” readily available where you live (bark, flower, rock, tree, ant). Give each child a pencil and tell him or her to sketch a corresponding picture on the right-hand side. They should actually sit near the object for a few minutes trying to copy the details. Did you ever really look at bark? A rock is just a rock until you really stare at it and notice its uniqueness.

• You’ve probably done this one so this is just a reminder from your own childhood. Put a leaf under a piece of copy paper with veins up. Take paper off of a crayon and rub edge of crayon on paper over the leaf. It’s so cool and so successful, even for small children.

• Put leaves or flower petals between two pieces of wax paper. Place kitchen towel over and iron to make a pretty picture.

• Press flowers. Cut the stem off of a flower and press between two pieces of parchment paper in a book. Place weight on top and leave for a few weeks. Just saw this on Martha Stewart and it reminded me to do it with my children. Her company sells some fancy wooden tool to dry flowers in, but books work well.

• Older children enjoy using a digital camera to capture nature. My 12-year-old has photographed flowers but also has some cute chipmunk and squirrel shots. She can use those pictures to make note cards and calendars on Photoworks. Cute!

This should get you started. Obviously, ideas can be basic. The goal is simply to instill a love of nature in your children.

-Kay

When it comes to shopping for school supplies, timing is everything.

You want to go after the store is adequately stocked with 59-cent boxes of 24-count colored pencils.

You want to go before there are a kazillion haggard mothers clogging the aisles with gaggles of manic munchkins all screaming in manic munchkin voices, though not in unison: “Mommy! Mommy! I need mechanical pencils/non-mechanical pencils/three one-inch three-ring binders/two two-inch three-ring binders/four three-inch, three-ring binders with Strawberry Shortcake on the front!””

It’s not as though they don’t ever get anything (deprived).

Or they are so excited about going back to school (depraved).

It’s that, for once, the shopping excursion is all about them. They know they can ask for anything, and you will throw it in the cart until the cart fills up and you have to get another one.

“I need the four-star (expensive) spiral notebooks, Mom. I need the 9-mm (expensive) mechanical pencils. I need Crayola (expensive), not Rose Art.”

What decent mother is going to risk her child getting a bad grade in sixth-grade math, then not getting into a good college, landing a good job, buying a good house, having a good marriage, retiring at a condo in Florida, simply because she chose the plastic ruler over steel? Life is hard enough without Mom not coming through with the right kind of protractor.

I have to admit I got the timing all wrong this year. It was the Friday before school starts – hello –and the Target parking lot looked like Beijing’s closing ceremony. It didn’t help that I’d had enough iced tea to float a small flotilla and that I was determined to get out of there before I had to go to the bathroom again, even as the aisles were being trampled by 18 packs of wild dogs, and I clutched not one, not two, but three lists of school supplies for my trio of puppies.

It did help that I made contact with one of the pack leaders, a father with a furrowed brow and a pen in his mouth with four children hanging on his T-shirt.

“Are we having fun yet?” I said.

“Oh yeah.”

It wasn’t like I was flirting or anything. He wasn’t even that cute. It’s just that when you’re in Discovery Zone surrounded by packs of wild animals and your child is running up to you with different kinds of Trapper Keepers – are sixth-graders beaver hunters or something? — it helps to find somebody as tall as you to make eye contact with.

Adult eye contact might even come in handy later, like when you can’t find a nice, simple ruler. Not the kind that sings “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” or that has some kind of thing in the middle that helps you hold onto it. Not the steel one that costs $2.49. Or the see-through one that costs $2.74. Just a 49-cent plastic ruler, please and thank you.

“You seen any plain old rulers,” I asked my new BFF after I’d deep-breathed up and down every one of the school supply aisles until I’d ended up in the lamps.

Ruler Man pointed, unable to speak because of the pen in his mouth, but more than happy to oblige the woman who acknowledged his presence among the other mommies. Asking him for a ruler, I’m sure, was affirmation that dads might also know the difference between college rule and wide.

So school starts tomorrow and I’m way ahead of the game, certainly compared to my other new BFF, the blogger for everdaybabysteps.com, who on the day before her kids’ school started, opted not to write a blog entry so she could go get school supplies and back-to-school clothes instead!

ON THE DAY BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS.

I just hope she finds herself a Ruler Man.

- Debra-Lynn

Yeah! We’re almost done school shopping! And, believe me, it wasn’t easy getting two preteen girls through the experience without losing the house and my mind. My kindergartener was a breeze, thankfully. Here are tips for saving money and sanity when school shopping.

• Set a budget before you leave your house and share it with your children who are old enough to grasp the concept. Knowing that a $39 pair of jeans would take 1/5 of her budget kept my 12-year-old looking. She found great jeans at Rue 21 for $19 and the deal was buy one and get 50% off of the second pair. That means two pairs for about $30. Not bad.

• Steer your kids toward basics. Jeans over those cute retro-flowered pants. The basics can be worn over and over but those flowered pants will be worn five times and out of style by the time a younger sibling grows into them. Learn from my mistakes. Anyone want a pair of flowered pants?

• Take one child shopping at a time. I get confused when my kids team up and need feedback and attention. I end up spending more than necessary and regretting some purchases. In addition, my 10-year-old can find her own style rather than mimicking her hip, older sister. Besides, it’s good for kids to have some individual Mom time.

• Keep all receipts. You need to make this a habit or the receipts will get misplaced (again, learn from my mistakes). Then you end up getting .99 back for some shirt because it has, of course, gone on clearance since you paid $12 for it. I have a big crock that I shove all receipts into immediately upon arriving home. Even stuff like dog food receipts that I can’t imagine needing again. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to dig through that jar. Plus, very helpful at tax time.

• Allow relatives to help, if they offer. Some of my lucky friends have family traditions that help out their family budgets. One grandmother takes the kids boot and coat shopping each year. Another takes the kids for all of their school supplies, which is another big fall expense. I know of one aunt who plays Auntie Mame for the day and spoils her two nieces at Limited Too.

• Use coupons! I have a coupon file in my filing cabinet that I shove all coupons into that come in the mail. Use your store credit cards occasionally to make sure you receive them. Also, check online coupon sites and print out any coupons you may want. If the store asks for an e-mail address, give them one so they can e-mail coupons to you. I have a hotmail address just for this purpose. Lastly, check at the management office before you begin shopping. I did that last week at my mall and by showing my AAA card, I received (among other coupons) a $10 off any $30 purchase at Aeropostale. I did mention I had two preteen daughters, right?

• Pass clothing down. Communicate to your child that this is a lucky way to get clothes and they’ll totally buy into it, at least for a good number of years. We keep all outgrown clothes and shoes in plastic bins in our basement. We go to the “basement store” for new clothing for my five-year-old. She excitedly (and proudly, I might add) told her daddy last week that we’d gone to the basement store to shop and she was now ready for Kindergarten.

I did take my youngest daughter shopping this year so she could get some Mommy time, too. We shopped for new underwear! It was so exciting! There were so many choices! She finally decided on Pooh Bear, and upon arriving home she proceeded to model all six pairs for the entire family. It was one of those moments when I looked at her and just marveled at what an adorable, funny, sweet child she is and that by the grace of God, she’s mine.

So lucky. So lucky. So lucky.

-Kay

I have this weird look on my face this morning – kind of a mix between a smile and a frown. The reason? I placed both my wee ones on the bus – my daughter started 2nd grade, my son started kindergarten.

It is quiet here, but my mind is “busy.” The feelings I am feeling are so muddled – thrilled for them to be off and flying, anxious about how they’ll handle opening the containers I packed in their lunches, wondering what their classmates will be like, hoping I prepared them to face the challenges and dreaming that they will enjoy the moments.

I’ve been feeling all these feelings for the past few weeks. And, I know I’m not alone ( www.cafemom.com).

To create positive energy and deflect the negative feelings, we spent the “last weekend” packing in tons of fun. The most memorable – going roller skating at United Skates. Boy did we ALL have fun (and, yes, I strapped on the roller-blades even though I have not been on them in 15 years!).

Why am I telling you about roller skating? It was neat, as a Mom, to watch my kids succeed and have fun. That big roller skating circle was a great look at life’s challenges and how my kids handle them.

It was my son’s first time on skates EVER. I was proud of him for his tenacity – every time he fell on his little bottom, he got right back up and kept trying. This, of course, was a relief - to know that he isn’t going to sit down and cry every time he fails. Watching him keep on keeping on reassured me he was going to do just fine out there in the world.

My daughter is the “experienced” roller-blader. I was impressed with her tenacity as well. She is a typical first child who needs to be successful, period. She took her time, concentrated and never fell down. Her focus will do her well, too.

All that fun going around in a circle with them was a great experience for ME. Because it was the day before school started, I must have been in a really “analytical” frame of mind. Watching them helped me realize they’re going to do great. Both of them try really hard, both can focus and (most important) both know how to have fun. This is a really good feeling.

Now I just have to get them to try hard, focus and have fun with their homework!

- Lisa

I could not be consoled as my husband and I pulled away from Camp Hayowentha.

We were dropping off the last of our three kids at summer camp, and we wouldn’t see any of them for nine days. The unprecedented separation felt like the beginning of the end. Motherhood was over.

“Life is cruel,” I said, tears pooling, as my husband and I drove away in our suddenly oversized mini-van. “We hold these kids in the palms of our hands for two decades, knowing every breath they take, every green bean they eat, how much tissue they use when go to the bathroom. And then what happens? They leave. We have to let them go.”

Within eight minutes, we were cranking the music and starting a nine-day party. We ate out every night. We drank a lot. We trashed the house and left the lights on. We listened to music we liked, went to bed when we wanted and never once heard the words, “soccer,” “pizza” or “I lost my cell phone.” For a week and a half, we were Peter Pan and Wendy, Thelma and Louise. We were Cleopatra and what’s-his-name, Bonnie and Clyde. We were Butch Cassidy and Sundance - two freedom-seeking bandidos off into the wilds of the local brew pub.

We were, as much as anything, surprised: After all these years of slinging pasta and sippy cups, we had worried that once the kids were grown and gone, we’d look at each other and say, “When did you grow that goatee?”

On the contrary, life after kids does not have to be the two of us sitting in a paneled den, one of us watching TV while the other plays Yachtzee alone.

What with that new goatee I guess he did grow this summer, what with 49 being the new 39, what with me finally turning around from the kitchen sink and looking at him, I found that my husband of 21 years is actually kinda hot.

He’s also interesting, well-developed in the areas of politics, music and the arts. And he has a keen eye for bathroom hardware.

There is no better time for a home renovation, as it turns out, than when the kids are gone - nobody sleep-walking in the middle of the night to where the toilet used to be. Nobody trying to weigh in with lime green on our paint decisions. Nobody listening to my husband and me yelling about where we think the towel rack should go.

This freedom to argue thing, by the way, is one of the best-kept secret benefits of not having kids in the house, When there are no kids around to traumatize, you can yell really choice words at each other at really loud decibel levels.

And then of course, it ended. The kids came home looking tanned, happy and taller, like all their pants would be too short if they tried them on.

My husband and I ended back on our theme that life is cruel. But with a twist.

It is a cruel world indeed that has one’s favorite heartstring-pullers in the universe suddenly up and saying “Mom, Dad, it’s been great, but gotta go to Barcelona to work for Vista International. See you at Thanksgiving 2011.”

It’s also really great to know that seven years from now, when the last child is out of the house, my uber-hot husband and I will not be knitting in front of the TV. Instead, we will be quite capable of rewriting our own version of the children’s book, “ Where the Wild Things Are.”

- Debra-Lynn

Next summer I vow will be the summer when I establish just the right balance between my needs and my kids’.

I will post a schedule, with just the right amount of flexibility built in, that will demonstrate once and for all that just because Mom works at home doesn’t mean I am actually here 24 hours a day and/or ready to take everybody swimming/to see “Kung Fu Panda”/ to make pineapple smoothies for the entire neighborhood at a moment’s notice.

I will not feel guilty for spending the morning writing while the kids spend the morning bouncing around the house because I will know there are lots of four-hour blocks designated, “Take the kids swimming.” I likewise will not feel guilty for taking four hours out of the day to take the kids swimming, because I will know that there are also big honking spaces on the schedule that say, “Mom’s work time.”

Next summer, thanks to this clear and perfectly balanced schedule, not a single child of mine – especially my pre-teen who is too old to just hang and too young to drive - will ever lift his head off the pillow in the morning and say, “What are we going to do today?” This always casts a pall on Mom’s entire day as she is left feeling guilty, conflicted, pressured and confused, not to mention unworthy and fearful that her children will not have a carefree, barefoot-in-the-clover summer like she’s convinced she had every year when she was a kid.

Next summer, the child will not have to ask, but will simply go to the schedule and see for himself what “we” are going to do today, which will, God forbid, include such things as “down time.”

Next summer, during said down times, my kids will sit outside on lawn chairs watching the grass grow, so that when winter comes and the plants on the back deck look like Mrs. Simpson’s hair, only in snow, not hair, they will remember that grass not only exists, it grows.

Next summer, there will not be a single, solitary “I don’t have anything to do, I’m bored” because I finally will have learned to say, “You don’t have anything to do? I’ll find something for you to do,” which will magically result in all three of my kids sitting at the kitchen table playing Monopoly from dawn `til dusk.

Next summer, I will have designated a block of time very early on for back-to-school shopping, so that I am not waiting `til the last minute to get new school uniforms for my sixth-grader, which will be all picked over by the time I get there.

By this time next summer, with thanks to our meticulous planning, we will be funned-out, rested up and ready for fall. And the garden will have been weeded. We will have had just the right amount of work, just the right amount of play. We will have just the right tan, which my husband believes is psychologically uplifting even if it is bad for the skin. We will have just the right amount of muscle tone, signifying exercise and sport, and just the right amount of atrophy, signifying relaxation. We will post pictures on Webshots.com and send them to all our friends and family, proving that we can, and did, have the perfect summer.

Yes, next summer, we will have it all figured out.

Next summer for sure.

- Debra-Lynn

So for my book club, I read this “young adult” novel, Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow. (Don’t ask me, a 26-year-old, hard-working, harder-playing bachelor, why I belong to a book club comprised mainly of leathery men two decades my senior. It’s beside the point of this post, so don’t ask. It just works.)

This book is really important. Maybe the most important I’ve read in years. Buy it for your young adult ASAP. The premise: a high-school kid gets mistaken for a terrorist in a post-9/11 near future and is “disappeared” by the TSA. He and his friends wage an underground campaign to combat the ever- Orwellian tactics the TSA are implementing as part of a post-terrorist-incident.

The key to this book isn’t the plot though, it’s the substance of it. The book provides a convincing counterargument to the knee-jerk, reactionary fearmongering prevalent in today’s mainstream media. Every teen could use a primer in the freedoms guaranteed us by our Bill of Rights & Constitution. Truly, I cannot find a better written rebuttal to the age-old flawed tautology: “If you’ve got nothing to hide then why do you need privacy?” If you think America’s forgetting what it means to be American, getting a young person this book will be a direct countermove to this trend.

It’s also a very useful real-world tool that will teach your teens to cover their digital tracks in an ever-less-private mediascape. Tools for data encryption, online identity management, and more are profferred by futurist Doctorow (of boingboing.net fame), in the spirit of empowerment rather than mischief. If indeed the future our kids will inherit is as much or more entrenched in the online world than it is today, mastery of these tools won’t just be for the fringe power-users but fundamentals in staving off the prying eyes of a plethora of entities, not necessarily Uncle Sam.

As someone who lived very near the WTC on 9/11 and during its aftermath, some scenes in the book depicting the palpable sense of panic and terror on or around such events hit home very intensely, which, to me, is a good thing. Not many fictional accounts have nailed the sense of confusion and helplessness, and as a firsthand witness, I’ve got to say Doctorow nailed it, and it’s a healthy thing to relive through the medium of fiction.

The prose is easy-to-read (took me a few hours cover to cover), solid though maybe not worthy of poetry awards… but to look at this aspect of the book misses the point.
It’s a novel of ideas, which is something that strikes me as strangely absent from the Young Adult genre. Truly, get this book for any 12-year-old in your life. It transcends politics, so it doesn’t matter if you’re red or blue. It’s highly entertaining. And most importantly, it’s just a remarkable effective method of delivery for important discussions of privacy and liberty versus security in both the digital and post-9/11 age, which may or may not be the most important issue of our times… ambitious for a Young Adult novel, but ultimately successful in its mission. NOW GO BUY IT! SERIOUSLY!

Little Brother
By Cory Doctorow

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Or order it on Amazon

There is a trend in America to entertain less frequently within our homes. It’s down 45% in 20 years. Why? I believe it’s because we are so crazy busy with our families, jobs, activities, church, schools, and on and on.

The thought of cleaning our house, making a meal, and then having enough energy left over for a coherent discussion can seem overwhelming. Frankly, why bother?

Well, lots of reasons.

• It’s fun. The power of laughter is amazing. Do you ever sit around laughing your head off when you’re mowing your lawn? No. You need to take a break from your “life” and have some fun with your friends. Last week we got together with good friends and got into a discussion about McCain and Obama (see, we can be serious, too). Then we started talking about their political commercials and pretty soon we were brainstorming new ones. We cracked ourselves up. Think SNL only not funny at all to anyone other than ourselves.

• It’s good for your kids to see healthy, long-term friendships. Some kids have a tendency to have a new best friend each week. Or to drop someone if it’s no longer fun. It’s character building for your child to see that even when the friendship may be a bit difficult, good friends hang in there. The friends I mention above moved hundreds of miles away but we still make it happen. I’ve had friends struggle with cancer, death, divorce, handicapped children, finances, and other challenges. It’s not always easy but our relationships are solid.

• It creates pseudo-cousins for your children. I grew up with layers upon layers of cousins and loved being known and cared for by so many people. Still do. Unfortunately, my kids don’t have that experience. They have cousins they adore but there is only a smattering of them. The children of our good friends have the same type of relationship with my kids as I had with my cousins. They look forward to spending time together and start up where they left off.

• It’s good for marriages. Relaxing with friends allows me to see my spouse in the same role as when we dated. The relaxed, carefree guy I fell for instead of the work driven, busy guy I live with on a daily basis. And vice versa. I admit I’m usually too busy switching loads in the laundry or putting band-aids on boo boos to look lovingly in my husband’s eyes (which are a spectacular blue, by the way). The nicest thing you can do for your kids is to love your spouse.

Entertaining does not have to be overwhelming. Here are some tips for simplifying:

• Keep it small. I think two families at a time is perfect for conversation and crowd control.

• Don’t try new recipes. In the summer, I grill. In the winter, I make meatballs. If you hate any cooking, don’t hesitate to order pizza. Make a green salad and you’re good. It’s about fellowship, not food.

• Don’t over plan. I know one woman who orchestrates the entire evening and it makes me a bit anxious. No sooner do you finish your dessert and she shoos you into another room for an activity. And on it goes. It’s very Martha Stewart-like and, honestly, I’d be a bit intimidated to invite her to my home.

• Be open to different ideas. For years we had a group of friends that always gathered on Friday nights. We rotated homes and made it a potluck. It was fairly effortless and lots of fun. Our neighborhood meets up with neighbors around campfires in backyards. It’s usually spontaneous and the host provides S’mores ingredients and beverages. How easy is that?

• Involve your kids. They can easily make invitations, place cards, and menus online. Totally unnecessary for your gathering, but kids love having input and feeling needed.

Remember, the goal is to make genuine connections. Good luck and have fun!

-Kay

When doling out anything to multiple little people, I often say, “same, same” to hopefully eliminate any comparisons and jealousy. I’ve done it for years and am not sure exactly how it started.

Just yesterday, I caught myself saying it as I handed out juice boxes to my nieces and my daughter. I’ve probably said it a million times, but every once in a while I actually hear myself and wonder if I’m doing the right thing by trying to make everything equal.

Maybe I should say to the preschool crowd, “you have orange juice and you have grape, and that’s the way it is. It’s okay to have different drinks and they’re both just great.” Then when they start whining and crying because they want what they don’t have, it would serve as a life lesson. I could add, “Get used to it because life is complicated, messy, and definitely not fair.”

I remember going to a boyfriend’s house for Christmas and being amazed to see that his mother had the exact same number of boxes for each of her four grown children. She told me that she had always done that in order to be fair. 

That’s “same, same” to the extreme. 

Likewise, I have a friend who actually counts the M&M’s she places in Easter baskets.  Come on. I think we can all agree that’s a bit over the top.

Yesterday, I took my three daughters school shopping. My oldest daughter needed the most new clothing simply because no older siblings are passing them down to her. It’s definitely not “same, same” and my middle daughter noticed it.

So bottom line, I’m not exactly sure how much parents should make everything equal and how much we should expect children to understand that life isn’t exactly fair all of the time. It’s a hard lesson even as adults. When I swim in my brother’s beautiful in-ground pool, I can’t help but feel a twinge of that old childhood sibling rivalry. “Why does he get this great pool, and not me?” Honestly, I’m happy for him. But, it is a great pool.

For what it’s worth, here are a few lessons I’ve learned over the years about trying to treat children equally.

• It’s impossible to keep everything exactly equal so don’t try. You’ll drive yourself crazy and actually cause your children to make more comparisons, not fewer. It promotes greed and dissatisfaction. Instead, say, “everybody in our family gets what they need.” I used this line on my daughter while shopping yesterday and surprisingly she dropped the subject. She knows she has all of the clothes (and more) that she needs for school, and her older sister does not.

• Don’t announce discrepancies. I’m sure my soccer-loving daughter would feel a bit jealous if she realized how much dance lessons cost for her sister. But, there is no need for either daughter to know that information. They are both content with their activities and that’s the goal. Right?

• If you have a child who always seems to feel neglected or jealous, give him or her more time and attention. That’s what it’s usually really about. Not stuff.

I do think it’s fine to say “same, same” to young children when handing out inconsequential things like drinks or crayons. But, as our children get older we really don’t want them to strive to be just like everyone else in all situations. And we certainly don’t want them to feel jealous of those who have more or better. So, rather than concentrating on creating an identical experience, focus on meeting the needs of each individual child in your home.

-Kay