DadSkills
The Journal
How to Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike
The fastest way to teach a child to ride is to skip the training wheels and teach balance first: get the seat height and helmet right, size the bike by height rather than age, then work through a glide-then-pedal progression that has most kids riding in a session or two.
Basic Home and Car Fixes Every Parent Should Know
The ten-minute home and car repairs every parent should have in their back pocket, from shutting off the water and resetting a breaker to jump-starting a car and changing a flat, plus basic childproofing and a clear sense of when to call a pro.
First-Aid Basics Every Parent Should Know
How to stock a first-aid kit and handle the scrapes, cuts, burns, sprains, stings, nosebleeds, choking, fevers, and head bumps of family life, with clear signs for when to get professional help. General information only, not medical advice.
How to Build a Family Budget That Actually Works
A practical budgeting system built for family life: work from take-home pay, separate fixed and variable costs, adapt the 50/30/20 rule with worked numbers, use sinking funds for irregular bills, and run a fifteen-minute monthly review.
Teaching Kids About Money, Age by Age
A stage-by-stage guide to teaching kids about money, from coins and a clear jar at age three to first paychecks and the mechanics of compounding in the teenage years, with real worked numbers and no promised rates of return.
Camping With Kids: A Beginner's Guide
Everything a first-time family needs to camp with kids and actually enjoy it: choosing an easy site, the gear that matters, weather backup plans, campfire habits, keeping kids warm, simple meals, real jobs for the kids, and a safety talk.
Coaching Emotional Resilience in Kids
What emotional resilience really is and how to build it at any age: validate feelings first, allow productive struggle, referee sibling conflict lightly, model your own coping out loud, and repair after the blow-ups.
What a Growth Percentile Does — and Doesn’t — Tell You
A growth percentile is a position among other kids the same age, not a grade. Worked examples show how the same height swings from the 93rd to the 1st percentile with age alone, and why a child's own trajectory over time is what actually matters.
Car-Seat Stages Explained: Why the Manual Always Wins
The four car-seat stages exist to solve real fit problems, not to mark a birthday. Worked examples from our own calculator show why age and height guesses have to make judgment calls a real seat's printed limits never need to make.
Sizing a Kid's Bike by Height, Not Age
Bike-shop age ranges are a rough guess. A worked example shows a 9-year-old sized by age lands on a 24-inch wheel while the same child sized by actual height lands on a 16-inch wheel — a mismatch that matters for control and stopping.
Setting an Allowance That Teaches Something
How to set allowance rates, split chores into baseline and bonus, and adjust the save/spend/give percentages as a kid grows, with real worked numbers from age 5 through 16 and a plan for the inevitable "that's not fair."
Building a Family Budget That Survives a Real Month
A budget that only works when nothing goes wrong is a wish, not a plan. A pre-agreed tight-month split, a clear order for what gets cut first, and a way to talk about it together turn a rough month into a five-second decision.