Today I want to tell you about an article I wrote for DataCamp called The Best Data Books for Kids in 2025. This article is a curated list of the best books I've found for engaging your kids of all ages in math and data concepts. These books are not designed to be homework, but rather to excite and encourage your kid! I recommend that every parent check this out and put a few good books in their home libraries for their kids to discover.

Check it out here: https://www.datacamp.com/blog/data-books-for-kids

This morning, I let my 4-year-old and 2-year-old paint at the table over our white carpet. 

Did your heart drop when you read that sentence? What if I told you it took me only 5 minutes to clean up after they were done?

Paint can be scary for a parent to let kids use in the house. An obvious solution to many parents is to make painting an outdoor activity. I love this idea! And I absolutely paint with my kids outside!

I designate the messiest paints outside, especially the non-water-soluble ones. I also prefer to paint outside when we have large groups, like for a birthday party or if we have friends over. And if you use paints with fumes, the outside has the best ventilation!

But painting outside is not always feasible; for example, when it's raining. So, it's nice to have a plan for painting inside as well.

For painting inside, I prefer to use watercolor sets like these from Crayola. The main thing I like about these is that they don't spill! And they are water soluble, which means if it does get on the carpet, I can easily wash it out with a wet washcloth and some elbow grease. 

My kids also find these watercolor books amazing! Each page has a color palette printed on the top that's activated with water. You simply touch the color you want with a wet brush or sponge and then paint normally. It's mess-free and looks like magic to kids. It's also great for traveling!

Scissors, glue, and glitter are staple art tools for kids, but they come with anxieties for many adults. They also have a bit of a learning curve for kids. Let's explore some ways we can help our kids become pros without destroying our sanity (or our homes).

Scissors
Using scissors strengthens kids' hands, teaches them about subtraction (in a very literal sense), and helps them to focus. Kids as young as 2 can start using scissors, with supervision. 

The two main concerns I hear about young kids using scissors are: 
1.) They might cut things they shouldn't (like their sibling's hair).
2.) They can't use scissors one-handed because they can't open the scissors after they close them.​​

​​Of course, over time, and with supervision, both of these concerns will pass. Kids will learn what they are allowed to cut and what they are not. And their hands will strengthen allowing them to open the scissors one-handed. In the meantime, I recommend two different types of scissors, depending on which of these concerns you're facing right now.

If you're worried your child will cut their hair, clothing, or finger, I recommend getting plastic scissors. I have KidiCut plastic safety scissors that I use to teach scissor safety to my kids when they first start out. They will cut paper (though not as easily as metal scissors). But they won't cut hair, clothes, or skin. They're great for exploring and teaching safety rules and basic concepts.

Once your child understands not to cut things they shouldn't, they may run into a different problem: strength. Using scissors one-handed is challenging for kids because their muscles are still developing. Spring-loaded scissors can help with this! I got spring-loaded scissors for my 4-year old from the DollarTree and it's made all the difference! He didn't like using scissors much, because he said it hurt his hand. But switching to the spring-loaded scissors was easier for his hands and re-engaged his interest. 

Glue
Glue is another kid art essential. Glue sticks are great for indoor art activities. There are no fumes, it doesn't spill, and it works just like a crayon (for kids who are just starting out). I like the purple glue sticks that dry clear. This allows my children (and me) to see where the glue was put down while it's still sticky. 

For liquid glue, Elmer's school glue is still the best! Non-toxic and washable are my favorite qualities! It will also be familiar to most school-aged children, since it's still the most widely used glue in schools. If you want to shop around a bit though, Amazon Basics has the same stuff for $0.25 a bottle.
​

Glitter
To this day, my mother hates glitter. My brother and I would bring home a school project involving glitter and she'd have glitter all over her house for months. Fortunately, there are many ways to prevent this catastrophe in your home.

These days, we don't have to rely on sprinkled glitter that gets everywhere. Glitter pens, glitter paint, and glitter markers all give art that sparkly quality without the mess. My favorite, though, is glitter glue. These glitter glue pens are intuitive to use, even for toddlers. They provide a sparkly end product on your artwork and they contain the glitter to the area you want it to go. It's also easier than using separate glue and glitter, making it accessible to very young children. The DollarTree has a similar product.

While these are great choices, let's be real: sprinkle glitter is just fun! If you do want to use sprinkle glitter, the key to minimizing the mess is to keep the containers small. Glitter is not something to buy in bulk! Instead of buying a big container of glitter, opt for several small bottles, with shaker tops. This gives you a variety of colors and ensures that any spills are minimized. If there is a spill, use a wet towel to grab it, instead of a dry one. The glitter will stick to the water on the towel, allowing you to remove it easily. If it gets in the carpet, a high-powered vacuum is your best bet.
​​

Art is a core childhood experience! It helps us connect with each other and express our emotions in a constructive way. It helps us develop fine motor skills and focus. I hope that with these tips, you can feel empowered to have an art day with your child, even when the weather's bad outside.

With the school year starting back up across the country, it's a great time to think about how to organize our homes to best serve our school-going children. Let's cover a few of my favorite back-to-school tips!

Of course, if your kid goes to school with a packed lunch, that lunch will probably need to be stored in the refrigerator. But even still, that means there's only two places you need to look before getting out the door in the morning: the fridge and the staging area.
​
​A wall hanger like this one has hooks for backpacks as well as a pocket for homework, paperwork, and permission slips.

​I also think it's important to have one main homework area, as well as one or two alternate, but suitable, spaces. Having a default area, like a table or desk, can help your child build consistency and a healthy habit around doing their homework.

However, sometimes a different place or setup can help break up monotony and stimulate creativity and interest, which can help your child engage meaningfully with their schoolwork. This alternate space could be a couch or the floor with a lap desk or a small folding desk

Back-to-school season can be exciting for parents and children alike! Just a few changes to our home environments can give our young students the support they need to be successful. Happy back-to-school!

Allow me to introduce you to the only baby gate in our home. ​

I talk a lot about baby gates because traditional babyproofing relies so heavily on gates and locks and generally keeping kids out of their own homes. It suggests using baby gates to keep kids out of any potentially dangerous areas, including the bathroom and the kitchen.

Instead, I advocate for making those dangerous areas safe, by removing or securing the dangers, and allowing your children in. Using anti-tip restraints for large shelving and keeping chemicals and sharp objects up high, out of reach, are great starting points for making our homes safe without relying on keeping our children out. You can check out my book for a room-by-room guide to creating a child-friendly home that doesn't rely on restricting child movements.

However, that doesn't mean there's no use for baby gates at all. There are a few places where the safest option may be to use a baby gate. Let's go over a few of them.
​

Child drownings are all too common and very preventable! If you have a pool on your property, I highly recommend having a gate.

​Before your child knows how to swim, they can drown quickly if they fall into the pool by accident. I highly encourage every parent to teach their child to swim as a life skill!

But even after they know how to swim, they can encounter dangers. If you don't have steps or a ladder in the pool, it may be difficult for a child to get out on their own. They can only swim for so long before exhaustion leads to drowning.

Alternatively, your child could hit their head or have a medical problem while swimming unattended. A normally non-lethal medical problem, like an asthma attack, could turn deadly if it happens while they're swimming unattended. 

Children should never be allowed to swim unattended. This is one case where I am pro-gate!
​

Some homes have very tall, steep staircases that can be extremely dangerous to young children. Until children are capable enough to walk safely up and down the stairs, they should have a gate at the top.

For areas with just a couple of steps, it might not be as necessary. For example, my grandmother's home has a living room that is not level with her kitchen. To make up the difference, the builders added two steps between the kitchen and living room. These shallow steps do not need a baby gate, because the most that would happen when falling down is the baby would be shocked and need comforting.

Consider this hypothetical when deciding if your stairs need a baby gate: what is the worst thing that could happen if your child fell down those steps? If your answer is a twisted ankle or a booboo, then you probably don't need a gate there. Just teach them how to navigate these couple of stairs from the moment they start crawling. But if your answer is death or several broken bones, you should invest in a secure baby gate for the top of the stairs.

And, of course, as your child grows, teach them how to safely navigate these obstacles themselves. Learning to navigate your own home is an essential life skill!
​

The previous examples were common safety examples where baby gates are likely the best option. However, my home has neither of those big dangers, and yet I have a baby gate. Why?

There are always going to be unique needs in everyone's home. You need to evaluate those needs and find the best solution for your home. Hopefully, that solution will not keep your children confined; however, there are some circumstances that do call for a gate.

In my case, I have a cat. My kids love my cat, but sometimes my cat needs a place to escape. To facilitate this, I provided tall cat trees he can hide in throughout my house, along with small "cave" hideaways where he can disappear and get some peace. However, these types of spaces didn't work well for his litter box. If my kids interrupt my cat at his litterbox, he stops using the litterbox. Not ideal!!

So, I chose the smallest room in my house, my laundry room, put his litter box inside, and put a gate up so he can pee uninterrupted. Since this area is already blocked off, it's also where I preferentially put my household chemicals. But I still keep them up high, just in case my kids get past the gate or are in there helping me with laundry. 

​I encourage you to look at your home and see where you can remove baby gates safely (if you have them). Evaluate the needs of everyone in your home, pets included, and see how you can design your home to make your whole family feel welcome.

Our homes are designed for adults. 

That makes sense since adults are pretty much guaranteed to be living there. After all, what child can afford to rent a house by themselves? But it does make it more difficult to be a child in our homes.

Nowhere is this design choice more obvious than with the placement of light switches. They are generally placed 48 inches off the ground, which makes them convenient for adults to turn on and off. However, there is quite a bit of variability in the actual placement. For example, my bathroom light switch is 54 inches off the ground. And I have a few switches in my basement that are actually on the ceiling! Of course, this makes it virtually impossible for a child to turn the lights on and off by themselves.

If we want our children to be independent in their home, it's important that we give them access to the light switches they need. This may include their bedroom light and the bathroom light among others. There are a few different ways to make these switches available to them.

If you want to go all out, I suppose you can have an electrician lower your light switches. But that seems like an overreaction to me, and I don't recommend anyone do that. So let's move on to less drastic measures.

The first option is simply to put a stool near the light switch. I personally prefer a lightweight stool that they can move so they can put it where they need it the most. Here's one stool option I use in my own home.  

The next option are light switch extenders. I love these cute light switch extenders that have storybook scenes on them! This is what I use in my bathroom so my potty-trained child can turn the lights on and off without my help.

Lastly, if your child is verbal, you can use smart bulbs. Smart bulbs like these will pair with your phone or smart home device and you can simply ask it to turn on the lights. Be aware though, that these devices may have trouble with immature voices that can't pronounce things correctly. Also, siblings may use these to prank each other, so you might want to have a backup plan. 

Personally, I use all three of these options in different parts of my home for different light switches. Which combination works best for you will entirely depend on your situation. 

Access to light is fundamental to participation in our world. By giving your child control over when they have light, you will open up their world and give them more independence in their lives.

Ok, so the title is a bit of an exaggeration. Of course, I keep my children's environment safe for them. But I do have a problem with the modern view of babyproofing that's fed to new parents.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I read everything I could about how to keep my baby safe. I remembered back to my babysitting days and how we used babyproof locks on all the cabinets and babyproof knobs on all the doors. I bought gates to keep my baby out of the kitchen and the bathroom. I put babyproof locks on the cabinets and drawers, bumpers on table and bed corners, kept the door to the closet closed....

And I looked up and realized my child had very few places he could be. If I went to the kitchen to cook or wash dishes, he'd scream and cry that he couldn't be with me. Even though I could see him and he could see me, there was still a gate between us. He could see me, but he couldn't be with me. Every time I needed to be in the kitchen created this stressful situation.

He would also get frustrated that he couldn't open any cabinet doors. And frankly, so would my husband and I! Needing to take extra steps to open the door before being able to get the tv remote while a baby is screaming at you or trying to figure out how to open the lock to the cleaning sprays when there's a poop-splosion in your living room are stressful situations! And what I realized was, they were stressful situations I had engineered for myself.

The version of babyproofing that I was taught as a babysitter and as a first-time mom seemed designed for two things: 
1.) to get me to buy a lot of things!
2.) to lock my child out of large portions of my home.

There had to be a better way!

I thought about how I designed my home for myself.

There were cabinets and shelves in my apartment that were too high for me to reach without a stool. So, I didn't put things I needed every day in those cabinets. I used them to store items I only needed a couple times a year.

I needed a home office where I could focus (and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment at the time). So I used a bookshelf to divide the living room to create an office.

I put cooking utensils closer to the stove and serving utensils closer to the table. This helped to avoid collisions in the kitchen between the cook and the table-setter.

There were a million things I did to customize my home to fit my needs. I did them without hesitation because this was MY home. Traditional babyproofing seemed trying to keep a baby safe in MY home. A home that was not designed for a child. A home that was designed for an adult. 

I mean, what if we just adultproofed our homes the way we're taught to babyproof them?

I burn myself on trays coming out of the oven occasionally. Should I put a lock on the oven door so I can't use it? Or should I put heat-proof gloves near the oven to protect myself while still allowing me to use my home?

Instead of only allowing my child in a few places in MY home, what if I made it HIS home too? What if I designed my child's home to be fit for a child?

Wild idea, right? 

That was the impetus for changing the way I approach arranging my home. I've lived in several homes since then and had the opportunity to redesign my space several times. Each time, I've discovered new techniques and ideas that gave my children more freedom in their home, decreased stress in our whole household, and made my home uniquely suited for my family.

So I don't babyproof. Just like I don't adultproof. Instead, I design my home to fit the particular needs of all the people who live in it (and the cat that lives in it too!).

When my husband and I were touring homes we got the same set of words defining the rooms.

"This is a two bedroom, one bath."

"Here is the dining room, the living room...."

And even now when people ask me how many bedrooms I have in my house, it throws me for a loop. According to the realtor, I have three bedrooms. According to me, I have one.

For most of my life, I was under the false impression that you had to have certain specific rooms in your house: bedroom, dining room, living, kitchen, and bathroom. I had the further false impression that if I ever wanted a home library, I'd have to buy a mansion since those are the only listings that even mention a library.

I've since completely changed my thoughts on this topic. A room is just a room; you can make it whatever you want to meet your needs. 

So that's what I did.

In my previous home, the three bedrooms each had tiny closets and only one bathroom. So we turned one bedroom into a communal closet, which we called a Changing Room. We added several dressers and chests for clothes. We equipped it with a mirror and a tray so my husband could trim his beard without taking up the bathroom. It was unconventional, but it worked for us and solved our problem.

In my current home, the master bedroom is huge. So, we put all the beds and dressers in there. Now it's the only bedroom in my house, which frees up the other "bedrooms" to be put to other uses. One was turned into a haven for my kids: the Playroom. The other into a haven for adults: the Library. 

And it's not just bedrooms that we change. We rarely eat dinner at a table together. Dinner is usually a much more dynamic affair in my household. But we do art projects together and need a space to store our creative tools. So our "dining room" became our "art room". There's still a large table in the center that can be used for dining when needed. But the built-in shelves house crayons, glue, and glitter instead of China and silverware. The cabinets hold stickers instead of glasses. And one wall is a chalkboard and another houses a kid-level whiteboard.

Similarly, we don't store our car in our garage. That's our workshop and storage area. And that small addition that was used as an office before? Yeah, that's now the walk-in pantry I always wanted. Do I use that closet for storage? No, sir! That's the Electronics Closet where all the chargers for all the devices are mounted. And that defunct fireplace? That's a bookshelf for my kids.

In order to make the best use of a home, we need to ignore other people's labels and prioritize our needs and wants. A room is just a room. It's how you use it that gives it its purpose.

I want to take a moment to talk about the walls in our home. 

In most homes, walls are simply a structure that holds up our roof, protects us from the elements, and maybe hangs our photos or calendar. But I believe they are the perfect surface to use interactively in our homes! They're everywhere. They're sturdy. And they will never get lost under the couch!

​Here are a few ways I like to use walls interactively in my home.
​

I believe the walls in our homes can be an interactive part of our environment. By using our walls, we get more out of our space.

What are some creative ways you use the walls in your home?