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READ MORE: The Fatherly Guide to Sex After Kids Roy and Sarah Pierson are all about contracts. Their book, I Love You, Sign Here: Contracts For Couples, humorously packages more than 60 contracts couples can fall back on, from the relatable to the somewhat ridiculous. It seems tongue-in-cheek, but actually isn’t — except in a few places where it clearly is. “The first contract we ever made for ourselves was about limiting spending,” Roy explains....

But a common problem to face is that you decide to let this one go, and the next one, and the next one until, eventually, you let everything go. Few people relish confrontation. We avoid pain, and just the idea of raising a concern and potentially burning a bridge or getting counterattacked amps up the stress in the mind and body. It’s understandable to want to ignore an issue and pretend nothing is wrong, but if something is wrong it won’t suddenly self-correct....

READ MORE: The Fatherly Guide to Parental and Paternity Leave So how can you talk to your boss about making paid family leave less of a pipe dream? Katie Bethell is on the frontline of this battle. She’s the Founder and Executive Director of PL + US, a grassroots advocacy organization working on making time off a reality for all parents. If your company doesn’t currently have a paid paternity leave policy, here’s how she’d ease your employer into the conversation....

It should not come as a galloping shock that not every parent does this. READ MORE: The Fatherly Guide to Socializing Kids But have no fear! Dr. Lisa Vallejos, a psychologist and relationship counselor, is a coach herself — in multiple senses. She not only teaches and encourages adult to open positive and productive lines of communication, she used to coach her son’s flag football team. Over the course of that experience, she says that she was witness to a wide variety of communications and interactions, some positive and many not....

How to Build a Basketball Court Chicago-area Oakley Home Builders designed this basement as a basketball arena for a family of enthusiasts. Although the court isn’t regulation size, the collegiate posters make young players feel like NCAA champions, and painted three-point and free-throw lines provide meaningful boundaries for practicing their shots. To reduce echoing by absorbing sound, carpet covers the lower walls. How to Build a Golf Course Practicing one’s putt doesn’t require a ton of room, and a proper net in a place with enough space can even allow for swing practice....

Why Does My Belly Buttons Smell? Like your other recesses, your belly button is a warm, moist bowl of sweat, dead skin, and grime — the perfect environment for bacteria to thrive. In fact, there are twice as many species of bacteria in the average belly button as there are species of North American birds, according to a 2012 study. For the most part, our entire body is swarming with all types of bacteria, but they’re largely harmless....

Handling It Now The odds that words alone will be enough to squelch the chaos rises exponentially if you are dealing with just one child. In a calm but firm voice, say something simple and direct, like: “The noise from your game is too high and it is making it difficult to drive. I need you to either turn it down, or stop playing until we arrive.” With some luck, your child will comply....

“The surrogate can be a person that the couple knows and they recruited themselves, like a sister, or somebody from the family, or a childhood friend,” explains Elena Trukhacheva, MD, MSCI, who is the medical director of Reproductive Medicine Institute in Chicago. “Most of the time, a surrogate is recruited by the surrogacy agency. And the couple uses the surrogacy agency kind of as a middleman, to navigate the process and protect them, to some extent....

Andrew’s daughter was two, and he was playing a game with her, raising and lowering her on the footrest of a reclining chair. At some point during the game, the 2-year-old lost her balance and got her finger caught in the bracket of the chair. “I swear, I thought I cut off her finger,” says Andrew, a restaurant manager in Rhode Island who asked Fatherly to withhold his identity. As it turned out, her finger was only cut....

The roommate phase of any relationship is very real. Life gets busy and, many couples, caught in the rhythms of it, become passive participants in their marriage. This happens in particular when the relationship doesn’t feel new and exciting anymore. This is normal and simply requires the people in said relationships to make changes to snap out of it. When stagnancy becomes a permanent state is when issues occur. This could indicate the spark has completely gone out and the two of you are simply occupying the same space....

“We really don’t need the old views anymore because they haven’t helped, and they haven’t been supported,” Kazdin explains. “Many people who are angry do not hit walls. The issue has to do with all kinds of other things.” Kazdn points out that childhood violence can be caused by issues with the brain circuits for impulsiveness or the fact that engaging in (or watching) aggressive behavior triggers the same reward systems as when adults tango with drugs, sex, and food....

“Don’t have high expectations,” says Tovah Klein, director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development at Columbia University and author of How Toddlers Thrive. “Some children are very excited. Some children completely ignore it or worse.” READ MORE: The Fatherly Guide to Raising Brothers and Sisters Klein notes that tempering expectations can keep the focus on the long term instead of the short term. While a great hospital moment is ideal, and it’s possible to set up the meeting for success, parents shouldn’t stress over it....

What You’ll Need: ½ cup liquid body wash2 tablespoons tablespoon honey2 tablespoons almond oil1 egg white Instructions: The amounts here are somewhat flexible: If you prefer a more moisturizing soak, add extra almond oil. If you are seeking bigger suds, add another egg white. Also, kids love color, so entice your little one into the bath by adding a few drops of non-permanent dye to your concoction. (Check the label to make sure it’s stain-free!...

“You don’t ever want to surprise a child,” says nurse practitioner Maile Moore of the Sleep Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. So the first step to getting a kid to sleep without a lullaby from Mommy is letting them know in advance what’s going to happen. “Tell them, even if it’s just a night before. Less advanced warning is actually better because they will have trouble conceptualizing if you tell them too early....

1. Ask Good Questions It’s easy to go about our routines and forget to learn about our partners, assuming we already know what there is to know about them. Nicholas Hardy, a Texas-based psychotherapist who specializes in individual and couples counseling, notes that this is common even during the most normal of times: We assume we know what our spouse is feeling and thinking which, of course, likely isn’t true. To avoid this, he suggests the obvious: asking questions you might not normally ask....

The difficulty, aside from office politics or career risk, starts with defining what unfair is, says Catherine Shea, assistant professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University. It’s a normally tough discovery, complicated by the pandemic, where people haven’t been able to rest and communication is done over Zoom, text, email, everything but in person. “We’re tired, stressed out and anxious,” she says. “No one is good at processing information in these negative states....

YouTube Watching Mister Rogers on YouTube is possible, but if you go this route you certainly won’t be in the safe confines of the friendly digital neighborhood you seek. Yes, there are a ton of great clips and some complete episodes of Mister Rogers on YouTube, but you’ve got to be careful. The quality is all-over-the-place, and sometimes weird parodies will pop up on a playlist. Your best bet here is to search YouTube for something you want specifically like his famous trip to the Crayola Factory....

How to watch the 2021 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade On Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, November 25, you watch the parade on NBC from 9 am to 12 pm, local time. This means the airtime will adjust depending on your timezone. You don’t have to wake up at 6 am if you live on the west coast. On a regular TV, this will be on your local NBC station. It will also stream for free on the NBC streaming service Peacock....

I’ve been a stay-at-home dad for more than 7 years now. I get everyone in my family out of bed and into the shower in the morning. I make breakfast and pack lunch boxes, drive the kids to school and do most of the shopping. In the afternoon I operate dad’s taxi, shunting our teenage boys to and from a bewildering variety of after-school activities, and in the evening, I cook dinner....

But we do pray. Because why not? It’s important to take a mindful moment to reflect on gratitude, show grace to our fellow humans, and manifest our profound needs. When we pray, we reflect on our day, our dreams, our future, our hopes. Expressing gratitude makes people happier. And I do believe there’s an energy that unites all human beings…and that’s interpreted as spirituality. So we pray. This story was submitted by a Fatherly reader....