The only gift you need this year

‘Tis the season for…last-minute gift shopping, suddenly realizing one kid has too many presents and the other has too few, tweaking and re-tweaking your holiday party appetizer lineup, relating heavily to the lyric “mom and dad can hardly wait for school to start again” from “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” only to take it back the next minute, treating yourself to a festive coffee, spending what feels like the whole day sweeping up pine needles, saying yes to dessert…and so much more. 

It’s a wild, fun, chaotic time of year for parents, and we couldn’t be more grateful you’re spending part of it with us. We’ll keep things short today—we know you’ve got halls to deck and lists to check.

By the way: We’re taking the holidays to be with family and friends, so we’ll see you in your inbox again in January! 🎉

The biggest story of 2024 for parents of teens? Technology is getting to be a bigger and bigger part of our kids’ lives—for better and for worse. This feels like the most important conversation we’ve had all year.

Because tech is tough.

On one hand, it can help our kids with their algebra homework (goodness knows we can’t) and empower them to find people with shared interests they might not meet at school. It can show them cool, interesting cultures and new ways of learning.

But…it can also expose them to dangerous people and ideas, convince them to compare themselves to (literally) unreal examples of what a person should look like, and disrupt their sleep in a serious way.

I mean, just this month, two families sued artificial intelligence chatbot company Character.AI, alleging it showed sexual content to their children, encouraged self-harm and violence, and implied to a teen user that he could kill his parents for limiting his screentime. That feels unbelievable, but it isn’t.

Stories like that make us wonder…how do we protect our kids from technology we can hardly understand ourselves? It’s not something we can figure out overnight, but we do have a good first step: 

Screen Sense, our comprehensive guide to navigating teen cell phone use. It covers how to enable time limits, breaks down the function of every relevant app teens are using, teaches you how to track those apps, and much, much more.

Honestly, we made this because it’s a resource we wanted as parents ourselves (to a grand total of seven kids with phones). And this time of year, it feels like the best gift you can snag for you (plus it’s under $50…can your other wish list items say that?).

Check out Screen Sense here—you’ll also get a free Thoughts Between Us journal to help foster healthy communication, plus a year-long membership to The Common Parent, our community of parents just like you…trying to figure it out as we go—together.

It doesn’t have to be so hard. We hope this guide makes tech a little easier on your family in the new year. 🙂 

Holiday family gatherings are a time for laughter, cheer…and playing ridiculous games. You know how much we love a silly game (as evidenced here). Here are some favorites to pull out of your back pocket once the pie is sliced, the presents are opened, and everyone is ready to laugh their butts off.

• Martha Stewart presents: 22 Christmas games for parties of all ages. If Martha approves, so do we.

• 5 easy holiday party games…that may or may not get really competitive in our homes.

• And 5 more because why not.

• Our kids are going to love this play on a gift exchange.