Your Halloween Rants + Tips

WHY CAN'T THEY DECIDE ON COSTUMES OMG. Plus: Are you a bad parent if you punish your kids?

I don’t know what it’s like at your house, but we have officially entered HALLOWEEN SEASON over here. My 9-year-old now spends all her allotted screen time scrolling through Halloweencostumes.com — she’s deciding between an elephant, a kangaroo, and an evil jester, and probably will be until October 29th, at which point I’ll have to pay $400 in expedited shipping — while my 12-year-old has announced that he’s going to be a pirate because “all my friends are going to be pirates,” which, if that doesn’t embody the mindset of a middle schooler perfectly, I don’t know what does.

It’s cute. Kind of. But also, there are so many feelings, and so much flip-flopping. And there are LOTS OF OPINIONS about when we should put out the Halloween decorations and how many pumpkins we should get and what kind of candy we should buy even though nobody trick-or-treats at our house because we live on a mountain in the middle of nowhere.

Has Halloween season started at your house? If so, how’s it going? Feel free to vent, if you need — or, if you have a strategy for managing all of the feelings and opinions and mercuriality, please share!

Are Punishments Bad Parenting?

And now for this week’s

Today I’m commenting on this Instagram post from @raised_good, which has more than 7,000 likes:

Here are my thoughts.