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The Sydney Morning Herald •

I bought my seven-year-old daughter a squishy toy. Now, she’s fluent in therapy-speak

Nothing says “modern parenting” like watching your seven-year-old’s heart break over an exploded squishy full of radioactive goo. I finally caved and bought my daughter a “dumpling squishy” from the $2 shop. You know, the viral fidget toys keeping Border Force busy. (Note: they’re not $2. Small ones are $8. Large ones are obscenely pushing $45 and are kept behind the counter like ciggies.)Her joy was boundless: it was like Taylor Swift had dropped by on Christmas morning with a bunny. After an h...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Now that we’ve come to our census, let’s have a NAPLAN for grown-ups

Well done, Australia. We managed to pull together on a wintry Tuesday night to declare, in the national census, our sexual identities and whether we’re practising or nominal Jedis. Now that we’ve proven our ability to answer mildly invasive questions under bureaucratic pressure, it seems logical to expand the project into tracking our emotional and social intelligence. An adults-only NAPLAN, anyone?It makes sense – we’re so busy worrying about the next generation’s declining literacy and numerac...
The Big Issue •

Listen to This… | The Big Issue

Oh, I didn’t know you were musical,” a friend said to me recently, with bemused awe as though I’d told her I identified as a trumpet. I’d just admitted to years of piano lessons and that I can slalom awkwardly through Debussy’s ‘Arabesque No. 1’, which I played in front of examiners for my HSC. 
But my innate musicalness was always something far more than that. While it was classical music I’d learnt on the piano, I grew up in a house where the halls of our clean, white suburban Sydney home were...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

I may be a pesky Pisces but this gets my cosmic goat: I was diagnosed by astrology

I was recently venting a frustration to an acquaintance who abruptly said, “What’s your star sign?”“Pisces,” I replied, cautiously. She gave a knowing nod. “Ahh, yes. Typical water sign. You’re struggling to adapt because Neptune is doing doughnuts around Saturn right now.”According to her, I just needed the right energy – maybe some smoky quartz would bring my mojo back. I was taken aback by this non-consensual diagnosis. Someone I barely knew had assessed me based on the cosmic vibes of my bir...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

I’m not even 40 but love my 80-year-old selfie, so I’m with Bad Bunny

I’m turning 40 in 304 days (not that I’m counting), and while many women my age are quietly pricing Botox treatments, I’ve spent a genuinely alarming amount of time feeding selfies into AI to see what I’ll look like at 80. Just me, my laptop, and a face that’s seen it all and is mildly disappointed in my children’s life choices. (By then they’ll be middle-aged. I’m really fun at parties, I promise.)Anyway, imagine my unhinged delight when 32-year-old rapper Bad Bunny rocked up to the Met Gala as...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

I didn’t mean to spook the north shore woman in activewear, but I did

The other day, on my morning walk, I smiled at a woman powering past in activewear. She looked confused, as if she was an alien learning to human via student exchange. “Morning!” I said, further raising the stakes. Her confusion turned to mild alarm, and she powered on. I imagined her thinking, “Why is this woman in her $12 nylon tights trying to initiate social contact? Is this a scam?”The woman in activewear’s confusion turned to alarm when I said hello. iStockThese school holidays, I’m at my...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

My husband said he’d ‘build another bookshelf’. It was the sexiest thing he ever said

When I first arrived at the local Rotary Book Fair, I felt the giddy thrill usually reserved for Millennials going to a bespoke plant nursery on payday.Like houseplants, books are generally considered non-essential items, but no one would accuse someone of “hoarding plants”.I wandered down the long tables packed with an endless horizon of titles, organised neatly into categories: fiction, business, biography, James Patterson. My eyes would land on a book I’ve read and loved, and I’d be filled wi...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

I was the mother of holiday invention ... until my kids went feral and I went to yoga

At the start of school holidays, like a good disciple of modern mindfulness, I set my intention: the summer holidays will be fun and relaxing – a chance to reconnect with my kids. After all, I’d be off work as well. I would be the ringleader of fun.By day three, however, utterly exhausted from how much fun we’d been having, I caved in and booked my four- and six-year-olds into holiday programs so I could take a meditative yoga class.The first stage of school-holiday acceptance, denial, had swift...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Am I a Miss, Ms or Mrs? This teacher’s had some near Misses

One of the lesser-known perils of becoming a school teacher is not breathing second-hand vape mist (mango tango!), or working out why your students keep chanting “6-7” like small communists. It’s working out how you’ll be addressed.It began casually. After starting work at my school, another teacher was writing the updated list of names for the staff room door. “Are you Miss or Mrs?” she said. I wanted to be a “Miss”. It has a youthful vibe, like “Miss Anne of Green Gables”. I am legally Mrs, wh...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

My child’s Halloween horror story – at Bunnings

The other day, I was ducking into Bunnings with my four-year-old to grab some potting mix when we saw her: dark empty eyes, skeletal arms and wispy grey hair. It wasn’t another mum of small children, though that’s usually an apt description – speaking for myself at least.It was a Halloween display at the entrance, a ghoulish skeleton holding a chain and covered in spiderwebs, snarling with its dead eyes at passersby.The Halloween display at Bunnings that alarmed the author, Cherie Gilmour, and h...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

I took my daughter to see Dog Man. Now she’s hooked, and I’m spooked

Last school holidays, I took my six-year-old to see the film adaptation of Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man. It would be fun! Mummy-daughter time! Gourmet choc-tops! Popcorn! Although scoffing our choc-tops and popcorn during the trailers was fun, Dog Man exploded onto the screen with such feverish madness, a wall of colour and noise that, in my stupefied delirium, I wondered if the projectionist had accidentally switched the film’s speed to 1.5x.“Dog Man was like a collection of TikToks stitched together a...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Put down the AI toy: kids need you, not a robot

There comes a time in every parent’s life when you realise you need the mental grit of a hostage negotiator to withstand the rapid-fire questions from your small child. My six-year-old daughter is in her “spelling” era. “Mum, how do you spell ‘elephant’? How do you spell ‘vacuum’? How do you spell ‘kitchen’?” I feel like I’m in a demented game show dreamt up in the literary circle of Hell.“Mum, how do you spell ‘elephant’?”Credit: Getty ImagesBut the other day, while testing out Google Gemini’s...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

It’s hardly breaking news, people: Sex sells and Sabrina’s a savvy vendor

In case you’ve been living under a rock while the world quite literally blows up around us, for reasons unbeknownst we are still talking about Sabrina Carpenter, the “woman who ruled most of 2025”.If you need me to fill in the gaps, she’s that pint-sized ex-Disney princess producing earworms and pornographically suggestive album covers where she’s crouching on all fours in front of a man who’s grabbing her hair (and please give me the number of whoever designed the cave you’re living in).In fact...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

The digital age is a pain in the digit – and my texting thumb is over it

While I was grabbing the peanut butter the other day, a sharp pain shot through some obscure tendons in my thumb, making me shriek. A preliminary Google revealed that I’d acquired the embarrassingly 21st-century ailment of “texting thumb”, also known as de Quervain’s tenosynovitis, which should be reserved for a 15-year-olds discovering TikTok, not a 38-year-old mother whose text messages are limited to mundane missives like “see you soon”, “sounds good” or “on my way”.In my 20s, I texted with t...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

We’re becoming dumb and dumber – welcome to the idiocracy

In news that won’t shock anyone who engages with comments on social media or Married at First Sight, human intelligence is declining. The Financial Times reported the downward trend of literacy and numeracy in both kids and adults, as found by the OECD. It appears to be “a broader erosion in human capacity for mental focus and application”, John Burn-Murdoch writes.My mental faculties have been eroded by a diet of clickbait and Instagram reels.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphotoI relate entirely to...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Stairway to hell: How the fitness tracker ruins my life

I’ve never been one for numbers, but since I got a Galaxy Fit for my birthday, I’m obsessed. Why tell you I’m stressed out and sleep poorly when I can show you the cold, hard data that proves my endocrine system is on par with a guinea pig being handled by a sadistic toddler?Am I really that tired unless I have the data to prove it? Credit: Getty ImagesI wake up tired and check my sleep data, which confirms that yes, I should be tired after only five minutes of deep sleep. It’s like checking the...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Snappy dialogue and unlucky-in-love protagonist? It must be chick lit

ROMCOMBest, First and LastAmy MatthewsSimon & Schuster, $32.99Amy Matthew’s Best, First and Last has all the ingredients for a good chick lit: exotic location (Peru), a grieving granny who carries around (and chats to) her dead husband’s ashes, uses the words “sexting” and “catching feeling”, snappy dialogue that would put the Gilmore Girls to shame, and, of course, a smouldering stranger the heroine nicknames “Romeo”.The heroine in question is Heather, a young woman whose grandmother, the urn-c...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Here’s my truth: I’m sick of other people’s ‘truths’

If you’re playing Married at First Sight bingo this year, by which, every time an inane word or phrase is spouted by a participant, such as “gaslighting”, “walls up” or “being on the show for the right reasons”, it’s time to yell, “bingo”.But I’d like to propose a new addition to your bingo card: that zinger, “my truth”. As in, “If you are feeling a certain way about somebody, I feel like it’s better to speak your truth than hold it in,” as participant Rhi said during MAFS’ confessions week, whi...
kidspot •

These three little words solved my son's meltdowns

The lower lip juts out, the fists clench, and the face goes red; your toddler’s about to blow their top.Any parent who’s experienced a meltdown (a total loss of control) knows it’s like a tantrum (general anger that's demand-driven) on steroids. Want to join the family? Sign up to our Kidspot newsletter for more stories like this. RELATED: Yes. I'm laughing at your kid having a public tantrum Your previously 20kg child suddenly weighs 50kg of kicking muscle as you try to lug them into the car so...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Closing the gender gap’s a real pain. Period

At the chemist the other day, I noticed a large display for Nurofen; a stand packed with painkillers, announcing they are “Committed to closing the gender pain gap”. I paused, wondering what this “pain gap” is. Are they lobbying for men to experience period pain by having their lower torso repeatedly run over by a small tractor once a month? Or do they want men to feel the exquisite agony of labour pains like comedian Jack Whitehall having a TENS machine dialled up to 11 on his mid-section in Fa...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Banning G-strings at public pools is a bummer for some, but it’s the right move

While strolling through sunny markets with my five-year-old daughter last week, we encountered a bare bum. Bare bums aren’t an anomaly in my kids’ lives; quite the opposite. They’re an endless source of fascination, whether it’s your brother’s plump cheeks ripe for whacking, improving your flatuosity or de-panting to run unfettered through a sprinkler. They’re everywhere.But in this case, a woman was wearing a G-string bikini, perusing the homemade candles. “Mummy,” my daughter exclaimed, eyes w...
goldcoastbulletin •

I need to stop saying this one thing about my parenting

Don't miss out on the headlines from Parenting. Followed categories will be added to My News.But I kept hearing myself say this one thing: “I don’t think I’m a very good Mum.”I was trying to be real about my feelings, but after a while, I started to wonder - how helpful is that kind of talk, anyway?Want to join the family? Sign up to our Kidspot newsletter for more stories like this. RELATED: ‘I made so many rookie errors when my kids were little’I mean, let’s face it, does anyone actually walk...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

No, you can’t have my number. We’re not in a relationship

I’m waiting in line at JB Hi-Fi Albury to buy a cord to connect my phone to the car so we can listen to podcasts on our road trip. “I’ll just grab your phone number so we can send you a digital receipt,” the cashier says. “Um, no thanks,” I say.The cashier looks at me as though I’ve just told her I’m into harpooning whales. Who would turn down a simple opportunity to save the world (and whales) through one less printed receipt?I used to be liberal with handing out my number, like some female Lot...
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