One brilliant, simple thing you can do right now to help end working mom guilt | Spawned ep 124
Working mom guilt is something every working mom has experienced in one way or another. And basically, it sucks. However, we’ve always heard that guilt is the most useless emotion — and now, consider us schooled. On this week’s episode of Spawned, we...
Make Your Kid a Money Genius: Financial tips from Beth Kobliner | Spawned Ep 123
If you’ve been wondering how much you should give your kids for an allowance, what to tell a preschooler about money, or when you should open your kids their own bank accounts, hey, us too. Get the answers and a whole lot more on this episode featuring special...
5 top time-management techniques from the experts: Can they work for parents? | Spawned Ep 122
With a new school year here, on this episode of Spawned, we’re taking a close look at 5 popular time-management techniques from experts, to compare them, debate the merits, and describe how they can work best for parents. If you’ve been wrangling a...
How to be a Happier Parent without guilt or shame: KJ Dell’Antonia lays it out | Spawned ep 121
In case the book title How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute sounds like something that’s not for you…you’d be wrong. Because it’s written by the hilarious, down-to-earth, wonderfully...
Why it’s good to ignore your kids sometimes. Yes, really. | Spawned Podcast Ep 120
While we’re enjoying a little time off for summer, we’re updating some of our greatest hits Spawned episodes you might have missed — and one of our favorites is this fantastic chat with Dr. Catherine Pearlman, author of Ignore It!: How Selectively...
A professional organizer’s top back-to-school organizational tips for the real world | Spawned Ep 119
While we’re enjoying a little time off for summer, we’re updating some of our greatest hits Spawned episodes you might have missed — starting with “organizer for the real world” (as we call her), Laurie Palau of Simply B Organized. She...
NBC’s Making It contestant Robert Mahar reveals one brilliant thing parents should do to bring out creativity in their kids
Imagine how thrilled we were to learn that our old friend and popular cool mom pick Robert Mahar was a contestant on the popular new NBC DIY craft show Making It. Yes, there might have been squealing involved. We’ve known him since we started our site 12 years...
How to deal with mean girls: Expert tips for building resilience + strength in our daughters
If you have a daughter, it’s inevitable at some point that she will encounter the heartache of mean girls. It may be when she hits middle school (oh God, middle school) — or it may be as early as kindergarten. And when it happens, it will hurt you as much...
Angela Santomero’s tips for raising smart, inspired, and engaged kids in a screen-filled world | Spawned ep 116
Whatever age your kids may be, we know that managing screen time and finding the benefits (and boundaries) is a huge issue with parents. Like, a non-stop concern. So we’re thrilled to chat with Angela Santomero, the successful creator of educational programs...
Can couples work together without killing each other? Try these tips, tricks, and a lot of humor | Spawned ep 115
Have you ever looked at those always happy husband-wife work teams and think, how the bleep do they do it? Well, now we know! This week on Spawned, we have an absolutely hilarious, engaging, mildly explicit (sorry, little ones) and truly informative conversation with...
Sleepaway camp: The pros, the cons, and the tears (mostly ours)| Spawned Episode 114
With summer pretty much here, that means Liz and I are about to say good-bye to a few of our kids as they head off to summer camp, some close by, and one well, to Japan! We get asked all the time about sleepaway camp, from wanting to know how to decide when a kid is...Hi! We’re Kristen + Liz!
We started Cool Mom Picks in 2006 to help make life cooler, easier, more organized, more meaningful, and more fun for parents of all kinds.
Trivia: It was called Cool Mom Sh*t for the first two days. (Yeah, we rethought that.)
We had no idea our site would grow to become a major lifestyle network, that we'd end up sharing our finds with the TODAY Show and Martha Stewart, that we'd be able to make a real difference for so many small businesses and women-run companies, or that we'd end up with an incredible community of the coolest readers on the planet. (If we do say so ourselves).
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