With recent reports revealing that up to 30% of an Australian child’s waking time is spent in front of a screen, mums all around the country are beginning to look for ways to entertain their little ones during the holiday months when the weather might...

31 March, 2021

Yang Yang shares how encouraging her daughter to ‘live bilingual’ carries on her culture. Communication has become difficult since my daughter Yolanda turned four last year. She switches to English when she feels she isn’t understood or can’t find the right Chinese word to convey her...

24 February, 2021

Kate Gorringe-Smith decides that it is best to guide children through tough times rather than trying to shield them from them.  I knew things were bad, but I still didn’t expect to find my daughter sitting alone at lunchtime, crying. We’d been back in Australia less than...

30 May, 2019

Daniel Donahoo argues that in idealising the concept of childhood, our culture fails to recognise the diversity and potential of children. Of course our children are amazing and wonderful.  But they can also be frustrating, demanding, grubby, noisy and confronting. And they are supposed to be,...

30 May, 2019

While Nicole Hall received an earful of unhelpful advice, her son’s hearing problems went undiagnosed. My son Sam is five years old. He has auditory-processing difficulties and social-skills problems – and I believe the situation was preventable. I was constantly on guard, ready to leap in and...

06 March, 2019

Jeannie Herbert asks whether the gap between education outcomes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians can be closed. Professor Jeannie Herbert A.M  is Foundation Chair of Indigenous Studies at Charles Sturt University. She was born and raised in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Her grandmother was...

31 January, 2019

It’s great for young readers to find a book they love and that the author has continued the book in the form of a series -  just to make them want to read more! Keeper of the Crystals ‘Eve and the Kraken Hunt’ by Jess Black (New...

20 December, 2018

First published in 1918 and written to distract himself from the deprivations of the First World War (and to settle a bet with a friend, Bertram Stevens), Norman Lindsay described The Magic Pudding as a ‘little bundle of piffle’. Stevens claimed children wanted to read...

22 November, 2018
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