Our home is a beautiful chaos. There is always something going on: a little game in the hallway...

There are moments when living with a teenager feels like a constant negotiation: reminding them to pick up their things, to keep a commitment, or not to always leave for tomorrow what they need to do today. Adults insist, young people resist, and a daily matter ends in an argument. It is easy to interpret this as a lack of will. But learning to take on responsibilities is more complex than following instructions.

Like penguins is an autofiction show, in which I tell the story of Helena, who is me. In it, I explain why I became a clown.

Gabriel Ginebra is part of the Regional Expert Council of the TUI (Time Use Initiative) and will be one of the speakers at the Time Use Week that is being held from October 19th to 21st in Barcelona. He is part of a family of twelve siblings, he has raised seven children with his wife, and now he has two grandchildren.

Three summers ago we traveled to Croatia and Montenegro and we drove around in a rented car. To take a shortcut, we passed through Bosnia. We had no problem entering, but when it came time to leave, there was an error with Laura's ID card.

After having two children very close together and finding herself locked at home with COVID-19, Evelina Johansson, a professor of gender studies at Örebro University (Sweden) and a specialist in Marxism and feminist theory, reached her breaking point. "I was having a very hard time, overwhelmed and very tired," she recalls. Looking for a way out of the tunnel, she began reading and researching the role of the home in society and delving into literature on the abolition of the family. This school of thought does not advocate ending love, affection, or cohabitation, but rather opposes the privatization of care and the dependency, sometimes somewhat forced, on a small unit, the family, in order to survive. It advocates for a world where everyone has access to an unconditional and collective network of support, food, and shelter, regardless of who you were born to.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends allowing at least three years between one pregnancy and another to favor the physical and emotional recovery of the woman between both gestations, and several scientific studies state that the ideal age gap between siblings would be between 1 and 4 years. However, as we know: theory is one thing, and practice is something quite different. Just ask Laura and Joan, a blended family where he brought a daughter, Emma, who in January, at 13 years old, became the big sister to the couple's first child together, Agnès. The age gap, however, was not the main headache for both parents when considering expanding the family; for Laura, the concern was “thinking that Emma had grown up until then as an only child and not knowing if having siblings would really make her happy.” Joan, on the other hand, was worried about not knowing what his eldest daughter's reaction would be, as well as “the uncertainty of knowing if she would accept her for all intents and purposes as a sister even if they did not have the same mother.”

My character is a real person, Verónica Estay. As an actress, playing someone real is quite a challenge. When she saw my work, she was very happy. She told me that there were moments when she felt that I was more her than she was herself.

The concept of family at home has become more extensive for us, and the one in charge of explaining it to me was my youngest son, who is now seven years old. Not long ago, when I proposed a whole slew of plans to do as a family on the weekend, he replied: “Okay, mom, but with whom will we do this, with the small family, the medium one, or the big one?”. Suddenly, we had three families, from the smallest to the largest, like all the objects and utensils in the three bears' home. He soon clarified his definition and who was part of each.

Wonderful and dazzling minority with sash and seven-ribbon espadrilles. And, very often, with a barretina and everything. In the country there are 3,000 to 4,000 groups of popular and traditional Catalan culture, which bring together more than 100,000 souls. When parents and children participate together in a group – bigger or smaller, more or less well-known – the magic happens: bonds are strengthened, the children work on values and socialize at a rapid pace, and the new generations take root in the country with much more intensity. Most of the time, the older generation drags the younger one along, which inherits, almost genetically, the passion for castells, giants or stick dances. But it must be said that, in some cases, things can go the other way: there are families whose little ones have joined the group first and, little by little, have encouraged the older ones to get involved. We approach this reality and observe it through the eyes of a child based on the testimony of three families linked to Sabadell entities coinciding with the city's main festival.

The school year begins, and with it, families set in motion an almost perfect machinery: the fashionable backpack, the wonderfully covered books, schedules squared to the millimeter, and WhatsApp groups in full swing. We try to anticipate everything so that our children begin school calmly and without difficulties. But, sometimes, in this legitimate attempt to protect them, we are literally leaving them unprotected, because we eliminate what will help them most to become strong: the small daily setbacks. The start of the school year is a magnificent moment to train resilience, especially when they haven't gotten the teacher they expected, or their best friend is in another class, or everyone says it will be a complicated year.

The elderly woman, all dressed up, the way elderly women get dressed up to go do an errand (I've heard them on the train, going to see a grandfather in a nursing home), calls to her husband, a grumpy man with a mustache that seems to indicate he's very much in charge. They are on the station platform, and further down is their daughter, who resembles them greatly. “Dami, it’s ready now,” says the woman, showing him the phone she’s holding. She means she’s finished talking and the device must be his. Dami, who doesn't look like he's called Dami at all, looks at her angrily. “Don’t you know how to hang up? Don’t you know how to hang up?” The daughter turns and puts her finger to her lips. What's curious about this gesture, so common, is that she doesn't direct it at him, but at both of them, as if the woman were also partly responsible. The woman purses her lips and shrinks with shame, just like a scolded dog. She extends her hand further. He then snatches the phone from her with a flourish and, addressing us all and no one, exclaims, in a tone of someone who wants to be heard: “The aunt doesn’t know how to hang up a phone!”

The same Mediterranean that for some families is synonymous with holidays, beach, and long afternoons is today, for others, the memory of a life that no longer exists. A few kilometers away, two realities coexist before the same blue horizon. In Gaza, the Jneid family looks at the sea from a tent set up on the coast. In Tel Aviv, families go down to the beach when the workday ends and try to hold onto an idea of summer that, since October 7, 2023, is no longer exactly the same.The voice of Naeem Mohammed Jneid, known as Abu Obaida, comes from a reality that is difficult to imagine from the other side of the Mediterranean. Throughout his life, he has worked with a clear idea: to build a stable future for his children. Before the war, he had managed to turn the family business into the center of daily life. He owned a supermarket where his children worked and a farm with about 1,500 chickens.But the memory that Abu Obaida holds most strongly is that of summer. Before the war changed the streets, the houses, and the routines, the arrival of the heat meant one simple thing: being together. "We used to go to the sea as a complete family. It was our time to rest and enjoy," he recalls. Summer was also the time for weddings and celebrations. Among all the memories, there is one he holds especially dear: his son's wedding. "It was like a festival. All the family and friends came. There were singers, a stage, and everyone he loved was there."Today that life no longer exists. The family home, 240 square meters in Jabalia, in the north of the Strip, was destroyed, according to the family, during the war. One of their sons, Amr, died in July 2024 while looking for products to maintain the small business they had set up during their displacement to Deir al-Balah, in the center of Gaza. Now, Abu Obaida lives with part of his family in a tent in Gaza City, on the same coast where they used to spend summer afternoons. "Our house was large, it was equipped and had air conditioning. It was a place where we could be calm," he explains. Now, the feeling is of living "practically on the street". "We have no security or stability. Anyone can enter the tent. There are rodents, stray dogs, mosquitoes... My grandchildren are sometimes even afraid to go out to go to the bathroom," he adds.Their days begin before the sun rises. Around six in the morning, the family goes out to queue for water and then waits at the food distribution points. In the afternoon, the children collect firewood to be able to cook and, when they can, they try to continue learning in improvised educational activities. Despite everything, Abu Obaida still imagines a normal summer afternoon: a table full of fruit and drinks and, most importantly, with the whole family gathered.

Anyone who has children – I have three daughters – knows what it is to love unconditionally. Even a character as unsympathetic to others as Donald Trump demonstrates daily the importance of family. He has not hesitated to favor sons, daughters, sons-in-law, and young people with positions and contracts. In our country, the cases involving part of the Pujol family precipitated the downfall of a true statesman who did not deserve the end he had. Zapatero could not find a better digital marketing expert than his daughters. In the court and capital, José María Aznar, when he could, did: and his daughter's husband became stuffed with lobbying for Endesa or Telefónica. In France, in 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy's son, 23 years old and without finishing his studies, was proposed to preside over EPAD, the public body that manages La Défense, the financial district of Paris. And so on, as many as you wish.Ripoll, which is not Barcelona, nor Madrid, nor Washington nor Paris, has also shown us how far a mother's love (and the discredit of politics!) can go. I can only describe as endearing the performance by Sílvia Orriols adorning herself with a local police t-shirt to explain, before the council, that working as a temporary in Ripoll's security forces had been her daughter's lifelong dream, a dream that was now coming true. A mother cannot destroy such a precise and well-articulated vocational horizon: local police, temporary contract, Ripoll. She cannot do it even if it means not sleeping, drenched in anxiety for the girl's safety, an adolescent on patrol through the urban jungle.

In 1999, coinciding with the total solar eclipse visible in a small strip of the United Kingdom – the first in over seventy years – the Morgan family gathered in St. Davids, in the Welsh county of Pembrokeshire. Among those present were some elderly relatives who remembered the 1927 eclipse. "But, as often happens in the United Kingdom, the clouds prevented us from seeing the spectacle. Nevertheless, the most vivid memory is not of the missed eclipse, but of the family reunion".

Teo's weekends are usually spent among parks, slides, and trains. At almost two years old, any outing is an adventure, especially if it includes a visit to a train station. Neus Modoro and Kiyofumi Kurata try to make the most of their free days to spend time as a family, whether playing in one of Tokyo's many green spaces, visiting a zoo or museum, or occasionally taking a trip to Osaka to see his paternal grandparents. Theirs is an apparently ordinary family life, but marked by a reality that combines languages, references, and customs from two ends of Eurasia.

Parents and mothers arrive at summer with an invisible backpack full of expectations. We want to make the most of each day, create unforgettable memories, make up for the time we haven't had during the school year, and ensure that our children will be super happy. But expectations often come with pressure. Social media, moreover, increase this anxiety when we see perfect families smiling in front of a sunset, relaxed and tanned parents, and siblings sharing the same shovel without arguing. And when we see others' photographs, we possibly have the feeling that only we are improvising.

First days of school and a long weekend in sight. That is why we have prepared a good collection of activities for the coming days, such as attending FiraTàrrega, where you will be able to see 57 shows by local and international companies; enjoying La Terrasseta in Tarragona, an independent festival with musical and contemporary circus proposals; listening to and reading stories at the 16th edition of the Medinyà Story Fair, and delving into Gaudí's imagination by visiting La Pedrera - Casa Milà, among others.

It's almost a classic in the family imagination: sooner or later we end up heading to the famous Parisian park to experience a few days of pure fantasy. The excitement in the children's eyes when they see the big castle or hug their favorite character is an image that remains etched in the retina forever, and that is undeniable. It's one of those places you have to go to once in your life. However, once the dream is fulfilled, parents also know the fine print of the experience well: budgets that require financial engineering, hours of queuing that test the limits of our patience, and the feeling of being in a constant traffic jam of people and strollers.

Living with a teenager during the holidays is a great balancing act. Families want to make the most of their time together after an intense school year full of responsibilities, but teenagers need just the opposite: more freedom, fewer schedules, and to feel they can decide about their time. Understanding this apparent contradiction is, probably, the best way to experience a summer with fewer conflicts and more complicity.For adolescents, holidays represent much more than not having class. They are weeks to recover sleep hours after months of academic demands, to free themselves from schedules, reduce stress and dedicate time to what becomes fundamental at this stage: friends. The peer group occupies a central place in identity construction, and sharing experiences with them is part of the natural process of growing up. This does not mean that the family loses importance, but rather that the adolescent needs distance and intimacy to discover who they are.