I appreciate your more relaxed attitude about phones for your kids. My boys both got phones this past year at barely 12 and 13 (though also had ipads etc prior that could do much of the same). I feel like so many articles and podcasts and blogs I’ve read lately tend to lean so hard the other way on this topic, where the parents are saying stuff like, “my kids will never have a phone!!” or “we are happy to be the only parents who actually will lay down the law and resist these awful phones!!” I’ve ended up feeling kind of bad sometimes about the fact that our kids DO have and DO use their phones (admittedly, quite a lot…)…. but it definitely seems like the norm overall, and as you mentioned, their entire social life revolves around them nowadays! My older son has one friend who has no phone, no device, and it’s literally impossible for my son to even contact him. So this kid is rarely involved in plans, because he’s just so out of the loop. Anyway, just commenting to say thanks for offering a more moderate alternative view to the extreme anti-phone movement. I agree, phones have their issues, and I don’t love everything about my kids having phones. But overall, I feel like it’s something we have to learn to live with and adapt to as part of modern day life. I still find it challenging to navigate and manage sometimes, but I’m not convinced that completely avoiding phones is the answer, either.

@Lisa – congrats on buying the tickets! And yes, selective eating is pretty common in little kids, and some are more selective than others. The good part of having five kids is that I know there’s nothing I did wrong and I don’t feel like a kid’s selective eating means I’m a bad parent. It’s just what he’s doing right now. He has other gifts — he taught himself to read during the pandemic and can do pretty advanced math problems in his head — and adventurous eating just isn’t one of them 🙂

It helps to hear that Alex is a picky eater – makes me feel a bit less alone. I keep hoping it will improve and we have gotten him to eat a few more things, but overall he is incredibly picky and will fish out the smallest bits of vegetables in things I make – like carrots I had blitzed in the food processor and put in pasta sauce. I haven’t thought about what we will do for lunch when he starts school in 2023! Bleh.