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Many parents seem to resist leaving their children at home with babysitters. They take the kids along, even on weekend nights that were once reserved for date nights. What’s going on with parents who take their kids absolutely everywhere?

Can you believe it's already time to start applying to preschools? Here are the tips you need to help you navigate what can be a stressful time.

What should grandparents buy the kids for the holidays? Are loud, obnoxious, beepy toys OK? Should Grammy and Grandpa ask the parents' permission? And what is the most-wanted gift of all? These video tips will get you shopping-ready!

I love the holidays. Bright lights, sparkling cities, Justin Bieber crooning The Christmas Song and Martha Stewart making cinnamon bird ornaments. Does it get any better?

Yes! Because now’s the time of year when you get to spiff up the kids for family dinners, trips to the ballet, visits to Santa and outings with us.

By “us,” I mean grandparents. We live in that perfect world between the mindless minutia of diapers, Everyday Math and squeezed smashed squash, and the golden glory of first steps, itsy bitsy spider and giant sloppy kisses. Kids want us, moms and dads want to be us, and savvy marketers target us. We love to buy and it shows.

That’s why coming up with holiday gift ideas for our grandchildren is both 1. Difficult (so many ideas, so much cyberspace) and 2. Easy (see #1). So I’ve managed to narrow down my list into 6 simple yet sensational categories. One caveat: These work best for grandparents who live reasonably close by. But all can be modified (and Skype-ified) for faraway families — or reserved for holiday-time visits.

1. Projects. Kids love them! Yes, we grandmas and grandpas can paint and assemble and make scrapbooks, even digital ones, and we can help build robots from kits, which I know for a fact because my husband just spent two days building one with our 4-year-old grandson, actually two if you count the one that didn’t really work so we went back to the robot store and exchanged it for another one, but not before our grandson had a meltdown because he couldn’t decide if he wanted the battery-powered robot or the solar-powered one. But it was fun.

If you have a tween, then you are probably all too familiar with tween attitude. Linda Morgan, managing editor of ParentMap and author of "Beyond Smart" explains why this behavior happens and how parents can deal with it.

Tests are a reality in today's education system, but some kids have a difficult time with these tests. Linda Morgan, editor of Parentmap and author of Beyond Smart, visited with KING 5 to talk about what parents can do.