In that essay, I shared how children begin forming ideas about work and their own future before they turn seven. They listen to how adults talk about their jobs, notice who they see doing different kinds of work and begin deciding what success means long before anyone asks them to choose a career.

At this age, career exploration can simply mean helping children understand what different people do, how their work helps others and how many different abilities can be useful in the world.

If you missed the original essay, you can read it here first.

A few of you also told me you would love some practical resources to help you start these conversations at home, so I spent the last two days putting together something special.

The Little Career Explorers Kit

This kit was created for children around ages 4 to 8, although you can easily adapt the conversations for younger or older children.

The purpose is to introduce children to the many ways people work, use their abilities, solve problems, create things and care for others. Children still have plenty of time to change their minds, try new interests and surprise us many times along the way.

The complete kit includes:

• Career Curiosity Cards

• What Does Mum or Dad Do? activity page

• 48 Profession Cards

• Interest Detective parent worksheet

• Our Family’s View of Work worksheet

Free resources for every subscriber

I wanted every Daily Wonder family to have something they could use, so free subscribers can download two activities from the kit.

1. Career Curiosity Cards

Eight conversation cards with questions such as:

• What do you love learning about?

• What are you really good at?

• What problem would you love to solve?

• What job would you like to try for one day?

• Whose work would you like to learn more about?

2. What Does Mum or Dad Do?

Before explaining your job, invite your child to draw you at work and tell you what they think you do all day, what they believe you are good at and how they think your work helps other people.

Their answers might be funny, sweet and surprisingly thoughtful. This page can also become a lovely little memory to keep and repeat next year.

Download Free Resources Here

Paid subscribers can continue below to download the complete kit, including all 48 profession cards and the two family worksheets.

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They are still too young to understand salaries, careers or why adults spend so much time answering emails, but they know that their mum gets dressed, packs her bag and goes somewhere to do work that matters to her.

They also see me writing at home, talking about marketing, working on my businesses and becoming excited when something I created does well.

They have watched me return to an office after five years of working from home while caring for them, and although they do not understand every decision behind it, they are learning from the life happening in front of them.

They are learning what adults do, why people work and what a successful life might look like.

I used to think these ideas developed much later, perhaps when children reached high school and began seriously considering careers, but research suggests that children start collecting information about their future years before anyone asks them to choose school subjects, write a résumé or decide what they want to study.

In 2018, the Drawing the Future project asked more than 20,000 children between seven and eleven, across 20 countries, to draw the job they wanted to have when they grew up.

The researchers wanted to understand what was influencing children’s answers, so they also asked how the children had heard about those occupations.

Among the 13,000 children surveyed in the United Kingdom, 36% based their career choice on someone they knew personally.

Among those who did not know someone doing that work, 45% said television, film or radio had influenced their choice.

Fewer than 1% had learned about the occupation from someone who had visited their school. (Drawing the Future)

Children naturally mentioned the jobs they could already see. Their ideas came from relatives, teachers, doctors, emergency workers, athletes, television characters and people in their communities.

Their imagined futures were closely connected to the world that had been presented to them.

This does not mean a seven-year-old’s answer determines the rest of their life. Most children will change their minds many times, and they should have the freedom to do exactly that.

The research reveals something more subtle: children cannot imagine a possibility they have never encountered.

My eldest is five. While I am reminding her to brush her teeth and searching for the drink bottle she placed somewhere five minutes ago, she is already learning what people do with their lives.

My four-year-old is collecting the same information, and even my youngest is beginning to understand what our family values through the conversations and routines around her.

A small longitudinal study published in 2025 followed 78 children who were seven to nine years old at the beginning of the research. Almost every child, 97%, could name at least one future occupation, and nearly 70% named more than one.

When the researchers returned to them later, 38% still mentioned the same or a closely related aspiration, while more than 60% had changed at least one of their choices.

The individual answers changed, although they continued to come from a fairly limited collection of familiar jobs.

The researchers found that children’s choices were often connected to their interests, the occupations they saw around them and the adults they considered role models. Family members were especially influential. (Humanities and Social Sciences Communications)

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That combination of change and limitation interests me.

Children remain wonderfully open to different futures, but their imagination still depends on what enters their world.

A child who loves animals may know about veterinarians without knowing about wildlife researchers, zoologists, animal physiotherapists or conservation officers.

A child who loves football may dream about becoming a player without knowing how many coaches, analysts, physiotherapists, journalists, photographers and event professionals work around the sport.

I do not need my children to choose impressive careers, and I have no desire to turn childhood into preparation for the workforce.

I want them to play, explore, become bored, invent games and change their minds hundreds of times.

At the same time, I want the world they encounter to be wide enough for their decisions to come from genuine interests rather than limited information.

Careers are only one part of what children are learning from us. They are also developing beliefs about effort, ability and what happens when something becomes difficult.

Another study followed 53 children and their parents from toddlerhood into primary school. Researchers observed the language parents used when the children were 14, 26 and 38 months old.

Five years later, children who had heard more praise focused on their effort, strategies and actions were more likely to believe that abilities could develop through learning.

The researchers were careful to describe this as a predictive association rather than proof that a particular sentence creates a particular outcome, but the connection was still present years after those early conversations. (Child Development)

Other experimental research has found similar patterns. In a series of studies with fifth-grade students, children praised for being intelligent became more focused on proving their ability and were less persistent after experiencing failure than children praised for their effort.

The children praised for effort were more likely to treat a difficult task as something they could work through. (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)

This made me consider the definition of success my children hear at home.

If success is always presented as being naturally talented, winning, earning the most or achieving something quickly, struggle can begin to feel like evidence that they are simply not good enough.

When children see adults learning, practising, asking for help and starting again, they receive a much more useful picture of how progress usually happens.

I want my children to know when I am proud of something I have created, and I also want them to know about the work behind it. They can hear that I have written online since 2013, received rejections, improved my work, submitted again and eventually had pieces accepted.

They can know that returning to running after almost nine years means beginning slowly, becoming tired and continuing anyway. They can see that adults are still learning and that being good at something often requires patience long after the first excitement has disappeared.

The way we speak about our jobs matters too.

Most children will grow up and need to work, so I do not want their earliest understanding of employment to be that it is simply an unpleasant thing adults endure for money.

Paying the bills is a real and important reason to work, especially when a family depends on us, although it is rarely the whole story.

I want my children to hear what I actually do. I can explain that marketing helps a business find the people who need its products or services, that writing allows me to share ideas, and that running a business involves solving problems for other people.

They can hear me talk about colleagues I enjoy working with, tasks I find difficult and the satisfaction of completing something well.

This does not require pretending that every working day is wonderful. Children can understand that worthwhile things still involve boring tasks, difficult mornings, mistakes and responsibilities we would occasionally prefer to avoid.

A healthy understanding of work has room for purpose, money, contribution, frustration, enjoyment and rest.

Research into the transmission of work values suggests that these early messages can remain with children for a surprisingly long time. One longitudinal study followed families from adolescence into adulthood and found evidence that parents’ attitudes towards work were reflected in their children’s values.

Some of the strongest similarities appeared when the children reached their late thirties, more than two decades after their parents’ values had first been measured. The researchers described this as “delayed activation,” where ideas absorbed within the family became especially relevant when the adult children faced changes and uncertainty in their own careers. (Work and Occupations)

We may not see the influence of our conversations immediately.

A comment made while driving to school or answering an unexpected question at the dinner table may become meaningful years later, when our children are trying to decide whether to apply for a job, begin again after failure or choose a life that looks different from the one they originally planned.

Parental support also appears to matter as children grow older. A three-wave longitudinal study followed 4,187 adolescents from seventh to ninth grade and found that parental support was connected to career development partly through its relationship with self-esteem.

Children who felt supported had a stronger foundation from which to explore their futures and make decisions. (Journal of Career Development)

Support, in this sense, does not require deciding a child’s future for them or expecting them to continue a parent’s ambitions. I think it looks more like taking their interests seriously, asking thoughtful questions, introducing them to possibilities and allowing them to become someone we could not have planned.

I do not know what any of my children will do one day, and I am glad I do not need to know yet. One may build a business, another may teach, create, care for people, or choose a job none of us has heard of today.

Their priorities may change across different seasons, just as mine have.

My own understanding of success has changed many times. At one point it was closely connected to achievement and career progress. Motherhood added other measures that are harder to place on a résumé: being present, building a loving home, raising kind people, keeping our faith central and making enough room in our days to enjoy the people we are working so hard for.

I want my children to have ambition, but I hope their ambition leads them towards a good life rather than an impressive one.

I hope they learn that earning money is valuable, caring for people is valuable, creating something is valuable and doing an ordinary job well is valuable.

They may not remember every morning they watched me leave for the office or every evening they saw me writing after bedtime. Those moments are still becoming part of their understanding of adulthood.

Our children are already deciding what is possible.

I hope the lives and people they encounter give them plenty to choose from, while the home they grow up in gives them the confidence to decide for themselves.

Now I would love to hear about you.

What do you do for work, and have your children already shown an interest in a particular career?

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Some mornings in our house begin before I have even opened both eyes properly.

One child needs help finding the exact pair of socks she has decided she cannot live without, another has changed her mind about breakfast, and the youngest wants to be held while I am trying to pack the final few things and remember whether everyone has brushed their teeth.

There are five people getting ready in our house, including three little girls who are five, four and one, so I do not expect our mornings to look calm and perfectly organised.

Someone will eventually spill something, lose something or decide that the shoes she happily wore yesterday are suddenly unacceptable.

Since returning to work after almost five years at home with my children, I have had to learn how to make our mornings work in a completely different way.

I cannot spend forty minutes looking for a missing childcare hat or begin packing bags when we should already be leaving… that’s obvious!!

I also do not want the final part of our morning together to consist entirely of me saying, “Come on, girls, we need to go,” seventeen times.

We are still finding our rhythm, but this is the routine that is currently helping us leave the house with everything we need, most of the time, and begin the day feeling a little more connected.

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I prepare the things that create problems before they become problems

I used to think preparing the night before meant completing an impressive list of tasks, making lunches, cleaning the kitchen, choosing everyone’s clothes and leaving the entire house ready for the following day.

That expectation lasted about three nights.

After bedtime, I am tired too, and I usually still have dishes, laundry, writing and at least one child calling me back into the bedroom.

I needed a version of evening preparation that I could realistically maintain, so now I focus on the things most likely to delay us in the morning.

I check that the bags contain what the girls need, place their shoes where we can actually find them and make sure my handbag, keys and work items are together.

I also look at the calendar in case someone needs something different, such as a library book, an extra change of clothes or something for a special activity.

If I have enough energy, I organise clothes and prepare part of breakfast. If I do not, I choose the two or three things that will save us the most time the following morning.

Ten minutes of preparation is usually enough to prevent thirty minutes of searching, negotiating and trying to remember what I have forgotten.

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I wake up before the girls when sleep allows it

I love the idea of waking up very early, praying, reading, exercising and drinking an entire cup of coffee before anyone needs me.

My actual life includes three young children, interrupted nights and mornings when someone appears beside my bed much earlier than expected.

When I have slept reasonably well, I try to get up around twenty minutes before the girls. That small amount of time allows me to get dressed, wash my face, make coffee and look at the day ahead before the house becomes busy.

On the mornings after a particularly difficult night, I choose the extra sleep.

A routine should make family life more manageable, and forcing myself to wake early when I have already been awake several times usually makes everything harder.

I have learned that I do not need an elaborate morning routine of my own. I need enough time to become a functioning person before three other people begin asking me questions.

We follow the same basic order every morning

Our mornings became much easier when I stopped giving new instructions every few minutes and started following the same simple order.

The girls have get dressed first, then breakfast, do their hair and brush their teeth before putting on their shoes and collecting what they need.

The order is ordinary, but repeating it helps them understand what comes next without needing me to direct every movement.

Young children can become distracted between the bedroom and the bathroom, so I am certainly still reminding them. The difference is that the reminders are familiar now, and I am no longer making up the morning as we go.

I also try to finish one stage before we begin another. Eating breakfast while one child is still getting dressed leaves me with two unfinished situations and no idea which one needs my attention first.

Weekday breakfast is VERY simple

I have accepted that weekday breakfast does not need creativity.

The goal is to feed everyone something they will eat without beginning a twenty-minute negotiation before eight o’clock.

We keep a few reliable options available, and I try to offer a limited choice rather than asking, “What would you like for breakfast?” That question can produce answers requiring ingredients we do not have, preparation time we do not have and patience I may not have found yet.

“Would you like toast or cereal?” is much easier for everyone.

There will be other mornings for pancakes, elaborate fruit plates and breakfasts that look lovely in photos.

On work and childcare mornings, familiar food helps us move through the first part of the day without using all our energy before we leave the kitchen.

The girls have their own small responsibilities

With three children so close in age, I can easily fall into the habit of doing everything myself simply to get it done faster.

That approach works for one morning, but it also means I remain responsible for every shoe, water bottle, jumper and bag indefinitely.

The older girls can place their pyjamas away, get dressed with no help and carry some of their belongings to the door. Even our youngest can bring her shoes or put something inside her bag when she is in the mood to cooperate.

Their help does not always save time immediately.

Sometimes watching a one-year-old attempt a task independently requires more patience than doing it myself, but little responsibilities are slowly becoming habits, and those habits will eventually make family life easier for all of us.

I also want my daughters to understand that getting our family out of the house is something we do together.

Mum is not the only person capable of noticing what needs to happen.

I try to create more time than the journey requires

For a long time, I calculated our departure time according to how long the drive should take.

A twenty-minute drive meant leaving twenty minutes before we needed to arrive, which was a very optimistic plan for a family with three small children.

The drive might take twenty minutes, but getting everyone into the car can become an event of its own. Someone may need the toilet, spill water on her clothes or remember an essential object at the exact moment I close the front door.

I now aim to leave earlier than the journey technically requires.

We do not always achieve it, but having a buffer means one unexpected nappy change does not immediately make us late.

That extra time also changes the way I speak to the girls. I am more patient when I do not feel that every small delay is ruining the entire morning.

I protect one small moment of connection

Returning to work has made me more aware of how our mornings end.

I do not want the girls’ final memory of me before we separate to be my stressed voice telling them to hurry.

We pray together in Portuguese while we are driving, then we listen to songs, sing and dance together, and talk about what they are looking forward to.

None of this takes long, but it helps me feel that we have connected before work, childcare and school divide our day.

There are mornings when one of the girls is upset and needs more of me, especially after illness, a difficult night or a change in routine.

I am learning to leave enough emotional space for that too. A child who needs an extra cuddle is not disrupting the schedule; she is telling me what she needs before we separate.

Getting out of the house matters, but the way we leave each other matters as well.

I have stopped trying to complete the house before leaving

One of the biggest changes has been accepting that the house does not need to look finished before I go to work.

Breakfast dishes may remain in the sink (or the bench), a basket of clean laundry may still be waiting and the beds may not be made.

I prefer leaving those things behind to spending the final fifteen minutes rushing around the house while everyone becomes stressed.

There was a time when I wanted to leave for work with every room reasonably tidy so I could return to a pleasant home.

I still appreciate coming home to order, but I now choose the tasks that genuinely help our morning and release the rest.

A clean kitchen bench is lovely. Leaving the house without snapping at everyone is better.

Our difficult-morning version is much smaller

Every routine needs a version for the mornings when someone is sick, nobody slept properly or life simply refuses to cooperate.

On those days, my expectations become very basic. Everyone needs to eat something, wear suitable clothes, have the essential items in the car and leave the house safely. Hair can be imperfect, breakfast can be repetitive and the dishes can wait.

I have stopped treating a difficult morning as evidence that our routine has failed. Family routines need enough flexibility to survive actual family life, including tears, sickness, missing shoes and mothers who occasionally forget why they walked into a room.

Our working mornings are still full, noisy and unpredictable, but they feel more manageable now that fewer decisions are waiting for me.

Preparing the most important things, following the same order and allowing extra time has given us a rhythm that works for this season of our family.

I still repeat myself, drink coffee that has gone cold and occasionally arrive at the car without something important.

I am no longer aiming for a perfect morning, though. I simply want enough structure to help five people begin the day with less stress, while making sure my daughters leave me knowing they are deeply loved.

What is one simple thing that makes mornings easier in your home?

And always remeber:

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Did I return that kinder form? We are nearly out of toothpaste. One child needs a library book for school. Another has been coughing, and I should check whether we still have her medication. There are clothes in the washing machine that need to be hung up. What are we having for dinner tomorrow? I need to reply to that message. When was the last time I changed the bedsheets?

None of these things feels especially big on its own. Together, they take up an enormous amount of space in my head.

The mental load of motherhood is difficult to explain because so much of it is just invisible.

It includes the tasks we complete and all the remembering, noticing, anticipating and planning that happen before anyone else even knows something needs to be done.

It is noticing that a child’s shoes are getting tight before she complains.

It is remembering which daughter will eat which sandwich, who needs a specific clean clothes tomorrow and when the next appointment needs to be booked.

It is thinking three steps ahead while making breakfast, answering a question and searching for the missing water bottle that was definitely on the bench five minutes ago.

Sometimes a friend ask if I need anything, and I genuinely appreciate the offer, but even producing the answer requires me to open the entire family filing cabinet in my brain.

I know I am not the only mother who sometimes feels physically tired from things she has only been carrying in her mind.

I have also learned that waiting until life becomes less busy does not help very much. With three young children, work, writing and a home to look after, there will probably always be something unfinished.

What has helped me is finding small ways to give my brain fewer things to hold at once.

I am still working this out, but these are twelve practical things that are making our family life feel more manageable.

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A few weeks ago, one of my children had a fever in the middle of the night, and after checking her temperature and making sure she was comfortable, I did what I think most mothers in 2026 would do: I picked up my phone and Googled it.

I only wanted to check what temperature I should worry about and what signs I should watch during the night, but one search led to another, then another, and before I knew it I was reading about symptoms she didn’t even have and diseases I hadn’t been worried about twenty minutes earlier.

Suddenly I was checking her breathing more carefully, wondering if she looked unusually sleepy (what does it even mean!?), touching her forehead again even though I had literally just checked her temperature, and trying to remember if she had drunk enough water that day.

I had started with a child who had a fever, something children have had since the beginning of time, and somehow ended up with a list of possible illnesses running through my head while lying beside her at 2am.

And the funny thing is that I had picked up my phone because I wanted reassurance, but after twenty minutes of searching I was more anxious than when I started.

Apparently, there is even research around this behaviour, and researchers use the word cyberchondria to describe excessive or repeated searching for health information online that can increase worry and anxiety.

A systematic review and meta-analysis involving more than 7,000 people found a positive relationship between health anxiety and searching for health information online, with an even stronger relationship between health anxiety and cyberchondria.

When I read that, I immediately thought about how many times I have picked up my phone looking for reassurance about one of my children and ended up finding another five things to worry about.

Of course, I’m incredibly grateful that we have access to health information, and I’m certainly going to keep looking things up when I need to, but we are the first generation of mothers raising children with almost the whole world sitting inside our pockets, and I’m not sure we really understand yet what having this much information, comparison and access to other people’s opinions is doing to motherhood.

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We can find an answer to almost everything

Think about how many things you have searched since becoming a mother, from whether a rash looks normal and how much a toddler should sleep to when children should recognise letters, why they suddenly started waking at night, what they should be eating, how much screen time is too much and what on earth you are supposed to do about the tantrum that has been happening for the last twenty minutes.

We can search almost anything about our children and, within seconds, have paediatricians, psychologists, teachers, parenting experts, occupational therapists, sleep consultants, nutritionists, influencers, other mothers, Reddit threads, Facebook groups, podcasts and complete strangers giving us an answer.

Usually, we don’t even get one answer because we get hundreds of them, and very often they completely disagree with each other.

You can find one expert explaining why you should sleep train and another explaining why you absolutely shouldn’t, one person telling you that childcare is wonderful for children and another telling you to keep them home as long as possible, while someone else is explaining why consequences are important and another person is telling you that consequences will damage your relationship with your child.

Then you move on to food and discover another thousand opinions, followed by screen time, education, discipline, toys, activities, emotional regulation, independence, reading, friendships, bedtime and pretty much every other part of raising a human being.

After consuming enough parenting content, even things that once felt fairly natural can start feeling like decisions that require research.

I’m incredibly grateful for the information we have available because the internet has genuinely helped me many times as a mother, but I also wonder whether having access to so many opinions has made us question ourselves more than mothers before us had the opportunity to.

Our mothers and grandmothers certainly worried about their children and wondered whether they were making the right decisions, but they couldn’t pull 400 different opinions out of their pockets while making breakfast.

We can, and I think that changes something.

We were never meant to compare ourselves with this many mothers

For most of human history, mothers could compare themselves with the women they actually knew, which probably meant their own mothers, sisters, cousins, neighbours, friends, women at church and other mothers in their community.

Of course comparison existed then too, because women have always been human and humans have always looked at what other people are doing, but the amount of other people’s lives we can see every single day is completely different now.

Before I have even made breakfast, I can see a mother homeschooling six children, another making homemade sourdough, another packing a perfectly balanced lunchbox, another explaining the five things emotionally healthy mothers never say, another travelling around Europe with her children and another showing me her perfectly organised playroom.

Meanwhile, someone in my house might be crying because I gave her the wrong colour cup, and somehow I’m supposed to look at all those little pieces of other families’ lives without allowing any of them to affect how I feel about mine.

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Research suggests that all this comparison may matter more than we realise.

A study involving 721 mothers looked at social comparison on social networking sites and found connections between that comparison and outcomes related to mothers’ mental health, parenting and relationships.

More recently, a 2026 study of 302 parents found that social media use, social comparison and parenting stress were positively connected, with researchers estimating that social comparison accounted for around 37% of the relationship between social media use and parenting stress.

Of course, research like this doesn’t mean that opening Instagram automatically makes us stressed parents, because family life and mental health are much more complicated than that, but I find the connection interesting because I can recognise how easily comparison happens in my own life.

We aren’t comparing our ordinary Tuesday with another mother’s ordinary Tuesday because we are seeing her best Tuesday, followed by someone else’s best Wednesday, another family’s Christmas morning, someone’s beautiful holiday, another mother’s organised pantry, another child’s reading level and another family’s lovely morning routine.

We can take in hundreds of little pieces of other people’s lives while sitting in our own kitchen, and that is a huge amount of comparison for one person to process every day.

Then there is what our phones do to our attention

While researching this, I came across another word I hadn’t really thought about before: technoference, which researchers use to describe the way technology can interrupt interactions between people, including interactions between parents and children.

These interruptions don’t have to look like a parent sitting on their phone ignoring their child for hours, because most of the time they are much smaller and much more ordinary than that.

You might be playing with your child when your phone lights up and you quickly check the notification, or listening to them tell you something when a message comes through and you reply because it will “only take a second”, or reading a bedtime story when you remember something you need to order and quickly open your phone before you forget.

A 2023 scoping review looked at 64 studies examining parental technology use during parenting and found evidence of changes in both parent and child behaviour connected with parental technoference, although the researchers also pointed out that the results varied and that there is still much more to understand.

I found this interesting because I really don’t want to turn phones into another reason for mothers to feel guilty, especially when our phones are genuinely useful for so many parts of modern family life.

Sometimes the phone in my hand means I’m working, writing, checking the weather, talking to someone I love, looking up a recipe, paying a bill, organising an appointment or taking a photo of my children that I know I will treasure when they are grown.

I think what matters is becoming aware of how easily these tiny interruptions can take pieces of our attention throughout the day, especially because each one feels so small that we barely notice it happening.

The internet can also become part of our village

I don’t want to talk about motherhood and technology as if everything about the internet is terrible, because that hasn’t been my experience at all and I think we would lose something important if we only talked about the problems.

Some of the most beautiful things in my life have come from being online, including things I’ve learned that have made me a better mother, books I’ve discovered and now read to my children, prayers and ideas that have become part of our family life, and women I first met online who became genuine friends.

For mothers living far away from family, mothers feeding babies at 3am, mothers raising children with disabilities or rare conditions, mothers who feel lonely or mothers who simply need to hear another woman say, “Yes, mine does that too,” the internet can become part of the village we are always talking about.

There is something incredible about being able to sit on your couch after your children are asleep and learn from someone on the other side of the world, or type a very specific question into your phone and find another mother who has been through exactly the same thing.

Technology has given our generation something extraordinary, and I would never want to go back to a world where mothers had less access to information, support and community simply because those things weren’t available yet.

I think our challenge is learning how to live with all of that access without allowing the whole world into every moment of our family life.

So what do we actually do with all of this?

The more I think about it, the more I realise that I don’t need dramatic rules around my phone because I know myself well enough to know that I probably wouldn’t follow them anyway, and my phone is too useful in my everyday life to pretend I can simply get rid of it.

What I want instead is to become better at noticing when the internet is actually helping me and when it is simply adding more noise to my head.

Sometimes that might mean searching the fever symptoms, reading information from a reliable source and then putting my phone down before I find another seven diseases to worry about.

Sometimes it might mean accepting that I already have enough information to make a parenting decision and that reading another fifteen articles probably isn’t going to give me the complete certainty I’m looking for.

I also want to pay more attention to the parenting content I consume, because some accounts genuinely teach me something useful and leave me encouraged, while others somehow make me feel like I need to change our diet, redesign our home, improve our routines, buy twelve educational toys and reconsider my entire parenting philosophy before lunchtime.

There are also little moments of the day when I want to be more intentional about putting my phone somewhere else, especially during dinner, bedtime stories, Mass or those first few minutes when we are all together again after being apart.

I don’t expect myself to give my children my complete attention every second of every day, because that isn’t realistic or even necessary, but I do want them to have moments when they know they really have me.

I love taking photos and I will probably continue taking far too many of them, but I also want to let some beautiful things happen without immediately thinking that I should document them, because I like the idea that some memories can simply belong to us.

And I think I want a little more boredom back too, for my children and for myself, because we don’t have to fill every waiting room, queue, car park or five-minute gap with something to watch, read or scroll through.

Sometimes I wonder how many thoughts I never finish anymore because the moment my mind has nothing to do, my hand automatically reaches for my phone.

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Maybe our children need something very old-fashioned from us

We are raising children in an extraordinary time, and I’m genuinely grateful that I get to mother with access to information my own mother and grandmother could never have imagined having in their pockets.

I can find reliable information when one of my children is sick, message someone I love when I feel lonely, learn from people on the other side of the world, carry thousands of books with me, read the Bible anywhere, take photos of ordinary moments I know I will miss one day and find answers to questions that mothers before us may have spent weeks trying to answer.

At the same time, this little device can bring hundreds of other mothers into my kitchen, hundreds of opinions into my parenting, thousands of things to worry about and an endless number of places for my attention to go.

Maybe one of the skills our generation of mothers has to learn is knowing when we have enough information, enough opinions, enough comparison and enough of everyone else’s lives for one day.

Our children don’t need us to know everything about childhood or follow every parenting expert, and they certainly don’t need us constantly checking whether another mother somewhere in the world is doing something better than we are.

Sometimes they need us to look up from the little screen in our hands long enough to hear the story that somehow takes fifteen minutes even though it could have taken two, watch the completely unnecessary cartwheel they have already shown us four times, sit beside them while they draw, read the same book again and listen when they interrupt us on the exact same page they interrupted us yesterday.

They need us to notice the little things happening right in front of us while they are still little enough to want us there for all of them.

We are the first generation of mothers raising children with the whole world in our pockets, and maybe part of learning how to mother in this very strange, very connected time is learning when we have had enough of the whole world for one day and can simply put it down.

Because there is already a whole little world happening right in front of us.

Do you feel like having so much information at our fingertips has made motherhood easier, or has it made you question yourself more?

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As mums, it’s easy to spend our days looking after everyone else and still feel like we’ve forgotten something.

I wanted to create a planner that wasn’t just about getting more done, but about helping us focus on what…

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I know I have.

There are days when I’m moving from one child to the next, trying to keep everyone fed, dressed, loved and on time.

The idea that every child needs a whole afternoon, a special outing or hours of one-on-one time can leave me feeling like I’m always falling short.

And then comes the guilt.

But I’ve realised something … connection does not need a lot of time:

It needs intention and presence.

A child who has your full attention for five minutes often feels more seen than one who has an hour of you while you’re distracted.

Here are ten little ways I try to connect with my girls that take less than five minutes.

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1. Read one book

Just one!!

Reading together doesn’t have to be a long bedtime routine. One picture book on the couch is enough to slow down, cuddle up and share a little moment together.

2. Sit down for breakfast

Some mornings I catch myself eating while packing lunchboxes and making coffee.

When I stop and actually sit with my girls for a few minutes, the conversations always surprise me (and their smiles warm my heart).

3. Ask an unexpected question

Instead of “How was your day?”, try something different.

What made you laugh today?

If you could have any animal as a pet, what would you choose?

What was your favourite part of today?

My daughters often open up when they don’t feel like they’re being interviewed.

4. Pray together

It doesn’t have to be long… they have memorised the prayer to their Guardian Angel and they often ask to pray together.

5. Let them help

Fold the washing together, water the plants, mix the cake batter.

Anything that makes them feel included and part of your world too.

6. Stop for a cuddle

Even if it’s only for a minute. Kneeling down and hold them for a few minutes. You reset their mood and yours too.

7. Tell them what you noticed

Instead of saying “Good job,” be specific.

“I noticed you shared with your sister.”

“I saw how patient you were.”

They love knowing that we really see them.

8. Step outside

Sometimes I just walk to the mailbox, watch the birds, look at the sun or the moon, or count the passing cars.

Five minutes outside has a way of slowing everyone down.

9. Laugh together

Dance in the kitchen or make up a silly song.

10. Tell them what you love about them

“I love how kind you are.”

“I love how curious you are.”

“I love being your mum.”

Those are the words I hope my girls remember.

I don’t think our children will remember whether we spent three hours or thirty minutes with them on a random Friday.

But I believe they’ll remember how we made them feel, and so often that happens in the smallest moments every ordinary day.

What else would you add to the list?

What are some little ways you connect with your children that take less than five minutes?

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Every afternoon, I used to ask the same question: “How was your day?”

And every afternoon, I got some version of the same answer.

“Good.”

Sometimes I got “fine.” And occasionally, if someone is feeling particularly generous, I get “good, Mum” with an extra word attached …. very informative!!

The funny thing is, I know my children have things to tell me. I know because the important information usually arrives at 8:47pm when they should have been asleep 47 minutes ago.

Suddenly I need to know that someone cried at lunchtime three days ago, their teacher has a new water bottle, a bird came dangerously close to them in the playground and they have decided they would like to become a vet.

So I have been thinking more about the questions I ask.

Children are not always going to summarise six hours of their lives for us on the drive home.

Sometimes they just need a smaller door into the conversation.

So, here are 50 questions to try instead.

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Some of it is deserved (hate admitting it!).

We all lose our patience sometimes or wish we had handled a situation differently, but most of it, though, seems to appear out of nowhere.

It settles in our minds little by little and we start believing we should somehow be able to do everything, be everywhere and never get tired.

Lately I’ve noticed more mothers talking about letting go of that pressure.

There seems to be a growing willingness to admit that we can’t optimise every moment of family life, and honestly, thank God!!!

Having children has changed many things about me, but one of the biggest changes has been learning to ask myself a simple question:

WHO told me I should feel guilty about this?

Quite often, I can’t find an answer for it!

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Somewhere along the way I picked up all these invisible expectations without even noticing.

I used to feel guilty if the girls said they were bored but now I smile because I know boredom usually lasts about three minutes before someone turns the couch into a pirate ship or decides to build a city out of cushions.

I don’t think every empty moment needs to be filled by me.

I’ve also stopped feeling guilty about serving an easy dinner every now and then. I love cooking for my family, but there are evenings when everyone is hungry, I’m tired and frozen fish with vegetables is exactly what we need.

Years from now, I doubt my daughters will remember what was on the plate. I actually hope they’ll remember that dinner was a time when we sat together.

These days I don’t rush to answer every message either.

Life with three little girls has taught (forced?) me that most things can wait half an hour.

If I’m reading a story, brushing tangled hair or listening to an excited explanation about a snail someone found in the garden, that’s where I want my attention to be.

One of the biggest changes has been letting go of the idea that I need to create magical moments all the time.

When I became a mum, I imagined I would be the cool mum and childhood would be built on grand adventures and beautifully planned traditions.

Some of those things have become precious memories, but I’ve discovered that our family is mostly shaped by ordinary Tuesdays.

Like reading books before bed, a cuppa coffee while the girls colour at the kitchen table or everyone squeezing into my bed on a cold winter morning.

Those very ordinary moments have become the heart of our family life.

I still have days when guilt creeps back in. I don’t think it ever disappears completely.

Whenever it does, I’m learning to ask myself whether that guilt is helping me become a better mother or simply making me believe I’m never doing enough.

Most of the time, the answer is obvious.

Motherhood has become much lighter since I stopped trying to live up to expectations that were never mine to carry in the first place.

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As I turned off the car, I looked through the window and saw three little girls running around the living room completely absorbed in whatever game they had invented that arvo. Then the question occupying my mind changed.

What has given me the greatest return in my life?

Not the greatest financial return, but the greatest return, full stop.

The answer surprised me because none of the things that came to mind had anything to do with money.

When I was younger, I thought the best investments would come with spreadsheets, bank statements, or contracts. I imagined wealth growing through careful financial decisions, and although I still believe saving, investing, and planning for the future matter, I have now realised that every single day I make investments that will shape my life far more than the balance of my bank account.

Every conversation with my husband, every bedtime story I read to my daughters, every page of a book, and every prayer I whisper is an investment in the life I’m building and the person I’m becoming.

None of those moments feel extraordinary while they’re happening.

Reading another chapter before bed, taking my daughters to the library, sharing another family dinner, or showing up to Mass on an ordinary Sunday all seem small on their own.

But when I look back, I realise my life has been shaped far more by those quiet, repeated choices than by any single milestone.

I didn’t become a reader, a writer, or a person of faith overnight, but they were all built day by ordinary day at a time.

What have you been investing in lately?

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She carries one from room to room, into the car, sometimes to the dinner table if we let her. She falls asleep with books beside her bed and often wakes up asking for another story.

Watching her has made me think a lot about how children become readers.

People often ask how to encourage children to love books, and there is plenty of advice available:

• Read aloud every day.

• Visit the library.

• Limit screen time.

• Fill your home with books.

I have done many of those things myself, and I think they help.

But when I look at my own children, I am not convinced that a love of books comes primarily from these techniques.

I think it comes from the atmosphere surrounding them.

Books have always been part of our family life. We read together on the couch, we bring books on holidays, we give books as birthday presents, we talk about stories at dinner.

My children see me reading, and they see their father reading too.

Books are simply part of our home.

And as we all know, children notice these things.

So, one thing I have realised is that my children needed to see me and my husbund reading for pleasure.

I want my daughters to grow up knowing that books are not merely educational tools or obligations because you need to pass an examen or write a report.

Books are amazing companions, a source of comfort, adventure, wisdom, and delight.

Another thing I have noticed is that children do not need to love every book.

For me, the goal has never been to raise children who finish every book but children who keep coming back to books.

I want them to see reading as something they get to do rather than something they have to do.

The older my girls get, the more I realise that many of their favourite memories around books have very little to do with reading itself.

They remember sitting beside me or remember their favourite stories being read over and over again.

They remember blankets, bedtime, funny voices, and the feeling of being together.

The stories mattered, of course, but I suspect the relationship mattered first.

When I think about the readers I know as adults, many of them seem to be returning to that same feeling.

The books are important and so are the memories attached to them.

Perhaps that is why I have stopped worrying so much about reading milestones and started paying more attention to whether my children genuinely enjoy books.

Reading can be taught but a love of books feels different.

And when I see my daughter wandering through the house with a book tucked under her arm, I cannot help thinking that this is what I hoped for all along.

A child who wants to read.

.

What are your family’s reading traditions? I’d love to hear how books became part of your home.

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Photos from Lina Kivaka

I think one of the strangest things about modern life is that we have never talked so much about happiness and yet so many people seem unhappy.

Happiness has become one of the great projects of our age.

We read books about it, listen to podcasts about it, follow experts who promise to teach it, and buy products that claim to help us find it.

We are constantly encouraged to improve ourselves, optimise our lives, heal our past, build better habits, and become the happiest version of ourselves.

At first glance, that sounds like a good thing:

Who would not want to be happy?

The problem is that somewhere along the way, happiness stopped being a pleasant consequence of a life well lived and became the goal itself.

Many of us now spend so much time thinking about whether we are happy that we forget to simply live.

The result is that happiness becomes harder to find because the more we search our lives for happiness, the more we notice what is missing, question how we feel, and wonder why happiness seems just out of reach.

I do not think human beings were ever meant to feel happy all the time, because a life filled with love, hope, responsibility, and imperfect relationships will inevitably include grief, disappointment, anxiety, and frustration.

To expect constant happiness is to expect something that no human life has ever provided.

Yet modern culture often gives the impression that happiness should be our natural state and that anything less means something has gone wrong.

We have been taught to believe that whenever we are sad, dissatisfied, or stuck, the answer is another solution, product, routine, or purchase waiting just ahead, yet happiness always seems to remain one step further away.

One of the biggest reasons for this, I suspect, is comparison.

For most of human history, people compared themselves to a relatively small number of people, that included: neighbours, friends, relatives, and perhaps a few people in positions of authority.

Today, we compare almost every part of our lives, our homes, marriages, children, careers, and holidays, against those of hundreds of other people, often measuring our ordinary days against someone else's most carefully selected moments.

No one wins that comparison.

Social media did not create comparison, but it has multiplied the opportunities for it.

We are now exposed to a constant stream of evidence that somebody, somewhere, appears to be doing better than we are and the consequence is often dissatisfaction with what we do not have.

When comparison becomes a daily habit, happiness becomes increasingly difficult because there is always somebody with more money, success, followers, a better house, a better relationship, or a seemingly more exciting life.

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Recently, I asked my subscribers a simple question.

“Do you think modern life puts too much pressure on us to feel happy all the time?”

The responses were fascinating because they revealed that there is much more happening beneath the surface.

Several readers pointed out that modern culture profits from dissatisfaction.

lian Wray wrote:

“I think modernity actually puts pressure on us to feel discontentment and then when we aren’t happy tries to sell us happiness. It’s by design. Create the need. Sell the solution.”

Many industries depend on convincing us that something is missing from our lives and that happiness lies in a better body, routine, home, mindset, or version of ourselves, creating an endless cycle of striving that several readers challenged by questioning whether happiness was ever meant to mean feeling happy all the time.

wrote:

“There’s a misconception that happiness means being happy all the time. No one is likely happy all the time or about everything, but can still experience a happy life.”

I think she is exactly right, because a happy life is not the same as feeling happy all the time, and a person can be exhausted, worried, or grieving while still living a good and meaningful life.

One subscriber, Kristina, from , described modern culture as having “weaponised happiness into a metric of success.”

That phrase explains why so many people feel like they are failing all the time.

If happiness becomes the measure of success, then every difficult emotion starts to look like evidence that we are getting life wrong instead of being human.

Not everyone agreed entirely.

suggested that modern life can sometimes give people excuses to remain stuck in misery rather than dealing with difficult circumstances and moving forward.

I think that perspective is important too, because the answer is neither to dismiss happiness nor to romanticise suffering, but to accept life as it is rather than expecting it to provide pleasant feelings at every moment.

Among all the responses, the distinction that appeared most often was the difference between happiness and something deeper.

wrote:

“There’s a difference between happy and contentment. But ultimately, I’m more intrigued by chasing and recognising joy.”

expressed a similar idea when she wrote:

“Happiness is a feeling, not a destination.”

Perhaps we have mistaken happiness for the foundation of a good life, when in reality happiness comes and goes, but contentment, joy, and meaning can sustain us through disappointment, suffering, and uncertainty.

That is why I do not think happiness should be our highest goal.

When happiness becomes the goal, we spend our lives looking inward, constantly evaluating our emotions and wondering whether we are happy enough.

Instead of asking whether we are happy, perhaps we should ask different questions.

• Are we loving well?

• Are we living according to our values?

• Are we being faithful to the people entrusted to us?

• Are we paying attention to the gifts already present in our lives?

• Are we becoming the sort of people we hope to be?

Paradoxically, happiness often appears when we stop pursuing it directly.

Happiness often finds us while sharing a meal with friends, reading a book, holding a sleeping child, serving someone else, praying, or laughing at something completely unimportant.

Perhaps the lesson modern life has forgotten is that the happiest moments are rarely the ones spent trying to be happy, and that a good life was never meant to be happy every day but meaningful enough to sustain us through every kind of day.

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The alarm goes off before the sun,

She’s already thinking of what’s undone.

Lunches to make, a uniform to find,

A hundred small things at the back of her mind.

Did I sign it? Is the consent form in?

Where did they put the consent form again?

She irons a shirt while the kettle boils,

Answers an email, unravels the foils

Of last night’s leftovers, that’ll do for …

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I am going through a huge transition right now, something completely new to me (I'll report back on how it goes!).

But I have been through some massive changes before: moving to a new country, learning a new language, starting with no village at all, then slowly building one, having two kids in one year during a full lockdown, navigating new schools, and…

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It doesn’t sit on paper and no one ever asks to see it, but it is always there running in the background no matter what I am doing.

It is made of small and ordinary things that on their own, would seem almost insignificant like bringing upstairs a pack of nappies and leaving another one downstairs so I don’t ha…

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There is so much courage in what we are doing.

When I became pregnant with my first child, I realised that I would have to learn the entire world of motherhood in a country that was not the one I grew up in. Everything was new: the health system, the words people used, the way things were done.

Even now, when I talk to friends from my country, I sometimes…

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You turn on the TV to de-stress after a full day at work, and the news leaves you feeling depressed and anxious.

Then you decide to scroll for a bit, hoping for some fun reels, and there it is again… more sad news and scary stories from every direction.

You go out with friends, everything feels light and good, until someone says, “Have you seen the news…?”

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I have people in my life that I adore who completely disagree with me, and as someone who doesn’t share much of my ideas with people in my real life, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to open that door.

At first, this was something I n…

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The house is white and open, with a wide porch that welcomes people without announcement, where shoes gather near the door and voices move freely in and out as the day unfolds, where windows open onto a garden shaped by seasons rather than design, worn gently by children who run through it without being called back too soon.

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