By Simon Redcliffe · 10.06.2026 · 2 min read

For what it is worth, most people arrive mid-problem, so each rundown works on its own without the rest. Broadly, pick one primer, act on it in a lunch break, and come back for the next — that beats reading all of them.

Common questions

Realistically, no question about family life is too basic for us; the basic ones are the ones visitors and never ask have. On balance, half of what we write about family life started as a question from a passer-by, plainly.

Is family life worth it?

Plenty of the people who write in do fine without family life; the unvarnished version of this page says so. Honestly, the question is not whether family life works, but whether it works for what success looks like for you — and only you can weigh that move.

Family life costs and budgeting

As a rule, budgets in family life rarely break where most people expect — it is the hours spent fixing it that catches them out. Put simply, we set out where the money actually goes in family life, and which corners are reasonable to cut.

family life — on location
In short, no piece on family life goes out on the strength of one source; we want the boring detail first.

Reading beyond this site

We keep a short list of family life sources we check first and link out whenever someone covers a topic better than our own write-ups do. Nobody learns family life from one site — ours included, and we would rather tell newcomers that without dressing it up.

What changed recently

On balance, the pieces here get a second pass twice a year at minimum; nothing sits untouched for long. Realistically, dates on these articles are real: a page marked this year was read again this year, in plain words.

Read next: Nine notes on family life from this year and Family life step by step: a short framework.

Simon Redcliffe
I’ll tell you how life happened. I was born in 1988 in a draughty, high-ceilinged house in Leeds, West Yorkshire. My mother was a nurse who smelled faintly of antiseptic and peppermint tea, and my father spent his days fixing printing presses, coming home with grease-stained knuckles and terrible jokes.