By Simon Redcliffe · 26.04.2026 · 2 min read

Broadly, if you have a quiet hour, start with the plumbing and ignore everything else on the site. For what it is worth, each family life rundown ends with a concrete next step, so no person reading this is left wondering what to do with the recommendation.

Detours we keep seeing in family life

family life — detail
We would rather publish one unsentimental breakdown on family life than five that pad a word count.

Honestly, whether family life is worth it depends on what you actually want — and that is not a dodge, it is the honest answer. Give family life two or three evenings and most people know which camp they are in.

What family life really costs

On balance, cheap upfront in family life in our experience means expensive overall once you count the price of undoing a bad call. The candid range for family life is wider than headlines suggest, and anyone quoting one figure is quoting last year. For what it is worth, a straight family life budget has a line for the cost of switching later — leave it out and the number is fiction.

Keeping the pages here fresh

Family life does not stand still, so neither do the primers — meaningful updates are marked beside the date. In practice, when something in family life changes, the affected guides change with it — regularly, not eventually.

Elsewhere on the site: Family life: what we would tell a friend and Family life: seven things worth knowing.

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.