I’m pretty obviously a fan of stay at home moms. Wouldn’t run this site if I weren’t. It’s an important job and one I wouldn’t trade without a lot of pain. But I’m also not as insistent as some that moms should stay at home with their kids.

It’s a very personal choice to me.

Now if you change that to should a parent stay home with the kids while they’re young, you’ll get stronger agreement from me. I do think that when possible one parent or the other should be at home. But it doesn’t really matter to me which, so long as the one who can best care for the kids is the one doing it.

Yeah, most often that’s going to be the mom. But two of my sisters have their husbands as the at home parent, even when the kids were babies and breastfed. It took some extra work for them to pump enough milk for their babies, but they both did pretty well at it.

Now, take a book such as Dr. Laura’s In Praise of Stay-at-Home Moms and I can see good and bad to it.

Yes, many stay at home moms do need support. There are many people who make it a harder choice than it should be. Even now I sometimes get asked about when I’m going back to work… despite earning a reasonable amount at home. Still haven’t reached my goals that I discussed back at New Year’s, but I’m always working towards it. I’ll get my income up higher on a regular basis yet!

I’m not exactly a Dr. Laura fan. She has some good points, but then loses me entirely other times, such as the time she scolded a mother for working 4 hours a week outside the home. That’s rather extreme. As I recall, the mom taught an exercise class of some sort. Not exactly the kind of thing that will traumatize a child.

Stuff like that is why I don’t listen to her show much. I prefer to relax when I listen to the radio.

I don’t consider working moms to be neglectful of their families. I’d better not - my own mother worked outside the home. Admittedly that was in part because my parents divorced when I was very young, but still she showed me that a mother can work outside the home and care very well for her family.

We were admittedly fortunate in our daycare and remained with one provider until my sisters and I were old enough to be home on our own. She was pretty nearly a second mom.

I know most daycare experiences aren’t like that. My mom was the only one of her friends who didn’t have to regularly change providers because their person quit.

With that kind of background I suppose that it’s no wonder that I support working and at home moms. It’s a tough world out there even when the economy is good.

In my opinion, stay at home moms should be praised. Working moms should be praised. Dads should be praised. Any parent who is doing his or her best to provide and care for their family deserves praise. No matter which way you go about it, it’s a tough, stressful job.

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Ok, hopefully I haven’t scared too many of you off with the LOLcat picture and title. I’ll behave now. Maybe.

Parenting is a tough job. We all know that. Everyone’s an expert and no one knows what they’re doing. Maybe that’s a contradiction, but I think it describes parenthood rather well. Especially motherhood. I think it safe to say I know rather less about fatherhood.

Moms working outside the home are criticized for not spending enough time raising their own kids.

Stay at home moms are criticized for being lazy.

Work at home moms are criticized for not maintaining the exact right balance of work and parenting.

Now, I’m a big fan of having at least one parent home with the kids. I say parent because I know some fathers who do quite well at it. I don’t care which parent is at home, which is the breadwinner or if the parent at home also works.

I also really don’t worry about it when both parents work. That’s often necessary, either for financial reasons or personal ones.

For the most part, no matter which way you parent, you’re getting it right.

It doesn’t matter if you breastfeed or formula feed. It doesn’t matter if you vaccinate or not. It doesn’t matter if you put your kids in a good daycare or stay home with them yourself.

What does matter is that you love your children and do your best by them. That you give them consistency. That your children are not abused. That you encourage them to be independent in appropriate ways at appropriate ages.

Yes, all parents make mistakes. We’re human. We get tired, stressed, impatient, angry, frustrated, etc. We make decisions for the wrong reasons sometimes.

But most of the things we do that seem like they will traumatize our kids forever probably won’t.

It’s not easy to get some kids to eat right.

Come to think of it, it’s not easy to get some parents to eat right. We’re the ones who start it a lot of the time, aren’t we?

When you’re at home with the kids all day there’s a lot of pressure to feed them right. You just don’t have the excuse of having been at work outside the house all day for why you’re too tired to cook. Plus you’re there to see what they eat for every meal.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t always make it easy to teach good eating habits. Some kids are pretty resistant to the idea right from the start.

Start Them Off Right

Once you’re past the baby food stage, resist the urge to get a lot of prepackaged foods. It’s more work for you, but if you can cook most foods from scratch or something close to scratch you will have much better control over what your kids eat.

You’ll also be teaching them to appreciate more flavors, as most prepared and prepackaged foods are relatively bland, designed to appeal to the widest possible range of palates. They may also contain artificial colors and various types of sugar, such as high fructose corn syrup, that you are best off trying to minimize in your children’s diets.

Get the Kids Involved in Food Preparation

Most young children love helping in the kitchen. It’s something they can do with you, or at least watch what you do. Make sure you let them help as appropriate.

Kids can tear lettuce for salads, throw chopped vegetables into the bowl, help you measure ingredients and watch you do the actual cooking from a few feet away.

If you have the time, space and inclination, a garden is also a great way to get children interesting in healthy foods. Kids are more likely to enjoy vegetables that they have helped to grow, not to mention the great taste of produce fresh from your own garden.

Make Healthy Fun

Not all healthy food is boring. A common favorite is the fruit smoothie. You throw a variety of fruits, some juice and ice, maybe some honey for sweetener, into a blender and start mixing. Tastes great, very healthy.

You can make it more healthy by adding some vegetables into the mix. Carrot goes well in many cases, as do some leafy greens such as spinach. Just make sure there’s enough fruit to appeal to the kids.

I like to use frozen fruit in my smoothies, as it cuts out the need for ice.

The great thing about smoothies is that you can experiment with them. Berries of all sorts go very well as a general rule, and can easily be bought frozen for much cheaper than they are fresh much of the year. Bananas work very well. And if you want some dairy in there, yogurt adds a wonderful flavor.

What If They Just Don’t Like Healthy Foods?

Not all kids make their parents’ lives so easy, naturally. Some will express distaste for every healthy food you try to offer them.

Some say to disguise the vegetables. Books such as Deceptively Delicious and other titles provide recipes so that you can work vegetables into a wide variety of foods.

That’s not my own favorite method. You aren’t teaching your kids to appreciate vegetables and other healthy foods for their own sakes when you do that. However, if you need to work them in and nothing else is working, it’s a reasonable enough measure to take until you can get something better going.

Spring is a great time of year to think about your family’s habits and what you can do to keep your kids healthy. The weather is getting better in most areas, and even when it’s bad you can think about what you would like to do as a family to build better habits.

Gardening

Whether you’re in a home or an apartment, gardening can be a fun, healthy habit. If you aren’t into digging in the yard or don’t have one, you can plant herbs and maybe some tomatoes in containers.

Growing your own herbs or other foods can encourage a lot of healthy habits. My kids love to nibble on freshly picked basil leaves and mint leaves, for example. They also add a great flavor to your cooking.

Get Outdoors

Turn off the TV and the computer and play or exercise as a family outdoors. A walk around the block is a wonderful family activity you can do in most areas. Alternatively you can go to a park or play in your own yard together.

Play Indoors

No, not on the computer. Not video games. Well, maybe some of the more active video games; the Wii Fit; does have some good points when you’re trying to be healthy and active.

Then again, you can make room for the kids to dance. Younger kids in particular will love this. A bit of music and some encouragement and they’re off.

Creative play is fun too, especially for the younger children. Help them build a fort. Put on a puppet show. Encourage silliness.

Don’t Forget the Chores

Yeah, no fun and sometimes hard to enforce, but chores are good for the entire family. It helps to keep your home functioning and clean. Even very young children can help. The sooner you get started the more of a habit it will become for everyone.

If you’re having trouble getting anyone to do chores, consider a chore chart or other motivation. My kids love their magnetic chore charts, and we set rewards for accomplishing their chores on a weekly basis. It’s still possible to slip up and start ignoring the charts, but once you have the habit they’re quite helpful. Or you can consider alternatives that work better for your family.

Walk to School

At least where possible. I live within blocks of my daughter’s school, and due to the traffic involved, walking can actually be faster than driving there. It’s just about a 7 minute walk by myself, 10 with kids.

If it’s too far to walk, it may not be too far for riding bicycles with kids who are old enough. Schools in my area only allow that for grade 3 and up. You’ll save gas and get a nice bit of exercise.

Walking to school can also be a great time to have a conversation with your kids. They don’t have to be on any big topics, just whatever comes to mind.

Keeping your family active and cutting back on the TV and computer habits can help you to enjoy your time together more. Certainly there will be times that you need a break from doing things together, but overall it’s a good way to make special time together on a regular basis.

I really dislike arranging playdates for my kids. It’s not that I don’t want them playing with their friends, it’s that playdates are so limiting!

A part of it is how often, or rather, how rarely I manage to get other parents to agree to playdates. My kids are available to play with friends so much more often than any of their friends are. Drives me nuts!

But the other problem is that so often the other parents tell me no because their child has a playdate with someone else. That drives me nuts because I’m just as happy to have group of kids come and play with mine as I am to have just one of their friends over.

Kind of like when I was a kid.

We’d go over to one friend’s house to see if they could play. Then we’d go together to get more friends. There’d be a nice group of kids playing together, not just two.

These days the only time I see a group of kids invited to play together is for birthday parties. I’d love to see them get together at other times too.

I’m hoping this gets better as the kids get older. I don’t see much sign of it in the neighbor kids, though, so it’s hard to say. I’ve always figured I would rather be the mom with a crowd of kids playing at her house than the mom unsure what her kids are up to. Not that I will mind at all when my kids go over to other friends’ houses.

What are your experiences? Do your kids get to play with a lot of other kids or is this something your family struggles with too?