Smiling Parents Day

This Friday 27th February is "Smiling Parents Day". With so much negative news around, we thought we'd bring a little cheer to the news agenda. Alpha Mummy has already covered the fact that little kids are funny. We are picking up stories on Facebook and via email that are "laugh out loud" material.

Here is a sample:

• My youngest was feeling under the weather and said he wasn't well enough for school. I took his temperature and was shocked to see it was 43 degrees celsius. I was starting to panic until I realised he had put it in his hot drink thinking I wouldn't notice! Needless to say he went to school that day!
  
• I expected my 21 month old daughter to be as excited about the recent snow as I was. When I showed it to her out of the window however, she turned to me with a very worried expression on her face and said "Oh dear, dear, dear - mess!!" She was obviously thinking of what she could do about this 'mess' and the next time we looked out of the window at the snow, she said "Mummy, hoover!"
  
• We were returning from a Spanish holiday and our plane was coming in to land. After several attempts at landing, the plane was forced to circle the airport to wait for a slot. We were all starting to feel very nervous and tense. The lights started flashing on and off and a female passenger screamed. My daughter Alex, who was 5 at the time, shouted out in all innocence – “Who's messing with the lights?” Everyone laughed, releasing lots of nervous tension and happily, the plane landed safely!

The Facebook group we've set up has led to quite a few emails, and we've got some good local radio coverage to come on Friday morning. What we hope is that this kind of positive story will reach out to a lot more parents.

Our recent online survey of parents revealed that nearly half of parents laugh every day about the antics of their kids. Significantly though, about a third of parents were finding things tough and had little to laugh about. It tends to be at these difficult times that parents will get in touch with us for support using the 0808 800 2222 Parentline.