I had my daughter very young and, what's more, I had to live through a time of transition in many ways of understanding motherhood and parenting. I remember that when I gave birth, several midwives assisted because some had never seen a natural birth. Today this seems unthinkable, but back then many things were changing very quickly.What convictions did you have, then?

Holidays multiply hours of coexistence, but they also offer a unique opportunity for children to learn to manage conflicts and strengthen their bond.Every summer, a familiar scene repeats for many families. Two siblings who just minutes ago were sharing games and laughter end up arguing about who gets to choose an activity first, about the last ice cream from the freezer, or about deciding what to watch on television. Arguments arise suddenly, often for seemingly insignificant reasons, and can wear down coexistence. Faced with this succession of daily conflicts, many families ask themselves the same question: how is it possible for children to fight so much during a time that should be associated with rest, shared time, and calm?The answer has a lot to do with the changes that holidays bring. During the school year, children spend a good part of the day separated. School, extracurricular activities, and friends offer their own spaces and reduce continuous coexistence. In the summer, on the other hand, many of these structures disappear. Siblings share more hours, more spaces, and more moments of boredom. And when coexistence increases, disagreements also inevitably increase.

Almost all families reach a day when their son or daughter asks for branded clothing. It may start first with just a sweater that has a specific name very large on it. Then pants where the label can be seen. It may also be that they reject pieces – and avoid wearing them – that are not from the brands they like. And it can end up being a whole lady's demand. There is a moment in the transition to adulthood when clothing – like other consumer goods – takes on a value linked to a whole series of names and logos that children increasingly recognize from a younger age.

With the arrival of the holidays, it's time to plan a getaway or outdoor activity with the little ones at home. The search for summer ideas begins, allowing us to escape the high temperatures and avoid the sofa at the same time. We'll save the movie and popcorn plan for next winter, and now it's time to enjoy our surroundings, discover new landscapes, and get away from the urban routine. To make it easy, we suggest five ideas for simple routes and shady plans to do as a family.

For days we have been living with this sticky heat. That puts us in a bad mood. That makes our children (and teachers, and monitors, and people who work in educational centers) finish the course inside boiling classrooms. The platform has denounced it Classrooms on Fire, and by moving its map of Catalonia you can see high school classrooms that reached 39 degrees. Also a chilling string of classes that have surpassed the legal limit, which states that “The temperature of the premises where sedentary work typical of offices or similar is carried out shall be between 17 and 27 degrees”. And the course has already ended and we seem to forget about it, but it shouldn't be like that.

Summer means holidays, traveling and enjoying moments with your loved ones that daily rush often doesn't allow. But the company with whom we spend this time of leisure and pleasure can vary over the years. While children normally spend their holidays with their family, there comes a time when, as adolescents, they start looking elsewhere. There's always that first summer when they propose to their parents their desire to go on a trip with friends, away from the family. Although it's a totally normal situation, sometimes it's not perceived that way by parents, who have to learn to manage a role change in their relationship with their children.

Many parents do not talk about money with their children because they are not very happy with what they do to earn it. Surely it is not what they had projected for their lives and, in this renunciation, there is a kind of shame. This often makes them not want to talk about money, seeing it as something dirty that has forced them to betray their lives.Wow, I had never looked at it that way.

Pau was within the top 10 (it was ninth) of the most given boy names in Catalonia in 2024. But its peak popularity was in 2003, when it was the third most common name. In fact, between 2000-2009 it was given to over 9,000 newborns and between 2010-2019 to almost 5,700.

On social networks, the word journaling often goes hand in hand with stickers, glitter, and fluorescent markers. But in reality, it is the habit of writing experiences, thoughts, emotions, or memories in a notebook through writing, drawing, lists, collage, or questions. Many companies have seen a commercial vein in this and the practice has adapted to new audiences, such as children. However, beyond its marketing aspect, is it a tool that works? For Èlia López, doctor in educational sciences at the University of Barcelona (UB), the answer is yes. “"Oral history"}journaling can become an educational, pedagogical, and emotional tool of great value. Beyond aesthetics, it offers children a personal space for expression, awareness, and emotional regulation,” says López, who warns that “it should not be seen only as a creative or decorative activity, but as a pedagogical and emotional resource that can significantly contribute to children's well-being”.

The last weeks of the school year have been intense for the first-year ESO students at Institut Teresa Pàmies (Barcelona), who have managed to complete the co-creation project of a public-use plot of land on which they had been working all year. They did so within the framework of the workshop Architecture and senses, a plot for everyone, one of the 400 architecture workshops that 130 architects have taught in 25 educational centers in the province of Barcelona between May and June, coinciding with Architecture Week. Although this year the workshops are part of the program for Barcelona 2026, World Capital of Architecture, the initiative is not new, as the College of Architects of Catalonia (COAC) has been organizing it since 2019. Over these eight years, more than 55,000 primary, secondary, and high school students from more than 200 educational centers have participated.

In childbirth classes, they talk a lot about sleepless nights, cracked nipples, postpartum blues... but little is said about a topic that will haunt you every year and is much worse than having to put cabbage leaves in your breasts to relieve milk engorgement: summers with children. Schools close in June. But, Oh, surprise!, your children still exist.

“With my eldest son, Luis, I experienced how, little by little, he was left alone. At first, due to his intellectual disability and his autism, he didn't perceive it as much, he didn't understand it. But as he grew, he realized it, and this had a very big impact on his mental health,” explains Denisse, mother of Luis, 13 years old; of Izan, 12; and of Hugo, 6. This mother lives with the disability of two of her children: the eldest, Luis, who in addition to autism has a rare disease, and the youngest, who also has autism and ADHD. Knows well what it means to be left out of the social circle: no birthday parties, no cinema outings, no invitations to spend the afternoon. She suffers from it, and so does Luis, who is fully aware of it. “Having an illness or a disability doesn't mean I can't play. I want to play with friends, I want to have fun, I want to go to birthdays, I'm tired of not being invited, I have the same rights,” explained Luis himself in a video on his mother's Instagram profile. explained Luis himself in a video on his mother's Instagram profile.

I have always talked to my daughters about motherhood. I have been a mother who has not hidden her mistakes or weaknesses. I have not wanted them to see me as a heroine. It surprises me that they worry about the same things as my generation. Being able to have a professional career and being able to combine it with a desired and fully lived motherhood. Things haven't changed much.Are you worried about your future motherhood?

It had been brewing for a few years and, finally, the Generalitat has approved the Strategy for the Recognition of Associative, Voluntary and Community-Based Educational Leisure. In the liquid and associative fragility times we live in, having a new framework long claimed by scout groups and youth centers is, without a doubt, a step in the right direction.I was thinking of the late Carles Capdevila, just nine years after his death, poetic things in life… His mythical article "Entusiasme sospitós" humorously portrays who is behind this leisure: “Some strange beings between 18 and 25 years old who call themselves leisure leaders, or group heads. You will recognize them because they get dirty every Saturday afternoon in the dens setting up gymkhanas, they lose their weekends on excursions and they waste fifteen days in July going camping. They are not a sect and their will is totally constructive (oh dear, what an outdated concept). They are a complete anomaly in defeatist environments and decadent societies. Someone should stop them before they think of truly changing the world”.

Summer and heat are here, and we change our footwear, but which is the most suitable for children's feet? Podiatrist and communicator Neus Moya advises that to choose respectful footwear, you must observe that the child walks exactly the same as if they were barefoot. "The shoe must respect the shape and function of the foot. It must have an anatomical toe box and allow movement".

Another course is ending. June is an intense month for teachers, many topics need to be closed and we carry accumulated fatigue. Irritable students, final recoveries, tutoring reports, final exams and a lot of heat. These are days for making memories and putting down in writing all that we have experienced. I look back and I am left with five things that have happened this course: We have returned to writing by hand. My colleague Cristian Olivé said it in an Instagram post: “AI has become the most dangerous tool in classrooms”. In order to avoid it and prevent it from completely killing creativity, I have had to dedicate entire classes to writing in the classroom and ask for writings that can be started and finished in an hour. I have avoided assigning digital work and have insisted that everything be submitted handwritten because handwriting helps to fix ideas. I myself prefer to make handwritten lists of pending tasks rather than on my mobile, because when I transfer it to paper everything looks clearer and less burdensome. Talk, talk, and talk. The AI tsunami in education has made oral presentations fundamental for assessing a topic. I'm at a point where I no longer even ask for digital support (like Canva), because it ended up becoming a reading of what ChatGPT had created. You know that teenagers save more words and avoid calls more and more, and I've noticed a decline in communicative ability. That's why I'm also a big proponent of not cutting short conversations that arise in the classroom and letting students express themselves even if it's not strictly about the lesson. The questions or interests that arise spontaneously are unrepeatable and make that class unique. Perhaps I'm romanticizing the Socratic method, but I believe there's nothing more powerful than a good conversation. Reading in the age of screens. I have noticed a growth in the number of student readers. I believe we can now banish the refrain that says young people don't read, because I increasingly see teenagers reading between classes and even during recess. At first, I found it unprecedented and rubbed my eyes as if it were a miracle; now I'm used to it. I have also seen another change in the use of mobile phones in secondary school. At my school, every morning students must leave their phones in a drawer, and we return them at the end of the day. In all the years I was a tutor in 1st year of ESO, the drawer was quite full, but for a couple of years now, the situation has declined significantly, and this year I only kept eight phones in the drawer. I believe we are all educating more consciously and responsibly about the proper use of screens.Graduations have gotten out of hand. Here I open a can of worms that might be worth a whole article, but I find the topic of graduations very exaggerated. I'm not saying they shouldn't be celebrated, mind you? It's an important milestone, especially in the second year of high school, but all these identical dresses, in bright colors and designed for normative bodies, make me reflect a lot on the aesthetic pressure (which falls on them) and on the Americanization of this act. The dining hall as an educational tool.Graduations have gotten out of hand.Many times I am asked if I don't get tired of explaining the same thing, but you can see that each course is different, and new challenges always arise that make it a changing and chameleonic job. Teachers, it has been an especially intense course, and from here I send you infinite gratitude for the commitment and vocation you have. You can already see the light at the end of the tunnel. Rest a lot.

Repeating a grade is not the same in primary school as in secondary school. In primary school, it helps a student with difficulties fit in better with classmates born after them. It is evident that in early ages, a difference of eleven months can be noted in the degree of maturity. In primary school, it can be beneficial for consolidating literacy and detecting problems with dyslexia, dyscalculia, or attention deficit. It is the period in which any special need should be diagnosed; if it is done in secondary school, we are already working against the clock. In fact, the debate about inclusive schooling revolves around this: the sooner we detect individual needs, the sooner we will achieve optimal learning. Unfortunately, repeating primary school is not well regarded by parents, as they believe that their child will recover the lost learning over time. Normally, as the years go by, deficiencies become greater. There is the sorrow of friends, yes, but in the short term it can boost the student's self-esteem if they adapt to the level. Because in the long run, they will integrate into a new cohort of classmates and will probably graduate successfully. The secondary is not working

On the other hand, in secondary school, repetition does not seem so productive to me. In full adolescence, poor academic results are usually related more to their disruptive attitude than to learning difficulties. That is, we normally have support groups for students who, in secondary school, have significant content deficiencies without having to go through repetition obligatorily. If a student does not want to enter the role of "being a student", they could repeat infinitely and would surely burn through the promotions they encountered along the way. Therefore, in the cases of behavioral students, they are passed to the next grade even if they have failed everything. It is usually waited until the fourth year of ESO for them to repeat or enroll in a PFI (training and insertion program) and graduate outside of the institute.

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The school year ends and the closest horizon for students is the summer holidays, but a little further ahead, as the calendar progresses, there is the start of a new school year in September and meeting up with friends again. Taking a step forward and, in some cases, changing stages. But there are a few students for whom these holidays will only be the prelude to Groundhog Day, as they finish the school year knowing that the next one they will return to the same classroom, the same subjects, the same teachers, but with different classmates. While, years ago, it was a reality that was rarely questioned, now many variables are considered before making a student repeat a year. In fact, in Catalonia, it is only applied in studied and exceptional cases and when it has been proven to be the most beneficial option for the student.

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“At first I was afraid of everything: of the food, that something might happen to them, I was even afraid of them sleeping away from home. But after the first experience, the girl came back very happy and the fear has passed,” explains Nabila, mother of three, about the summer camps. Her daughter Yosra, eleven years old, has already been to camps twice, once with school and once in the summer. Her son Marouan, 16 years old, has also been – this year will be the fourth time – and the youngest, Omar, hasn't dared to go yet, although Nabila has hopes.

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At home we juggle our diverse neurodivergencies -especially high abilities and others too- and this makes us quite wacky artists. Arashi has been focused on manga for a couple of years; he is capable of creating complex stories and well-rounded characters, with very careful drawing technique. Ausiàs has designed about thirty fabric animals that he has cut, stuffed, and sewn, asking for just the right amount of help: "We won't buy you any more stuffed animals, as you won't fit them in the room anymore!"How is your way of being a mother changing?

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