Michelle Duggar, 41, is due on New Year's Day, and the latest addition will join seven sisters and 10 brothers. There are two sets of twins.

"We've had three in January, three in December. Those two months are a busy time for us," she said, laughing.

The fast-growing family lives in Tontitown in northwest Arkansas in a 7,000-square-foot home. All the children — whose names start with the letter J — are home-schooled.

Duggar has been been pregnant for more than 11 years of her life, and the family is in the process of filming another series for Discovery Health.

Full story: Happy Mother's Day: Woman Pregnant With 18th Child

There is a great way for you to influence your child’s intelligence to help him excel later in life.  Teach him healthy sleep patterns while he is a baby.  This is one of the best ways to influence your child’s intelligence.

As your child crosses over into that strange and wonderful land called ‘adolescence’ you may find yourself thinking you have an alien living in your house.  The combined stress of exploring her independence, the pressures of schoolwork and societal expectations and the hormonal changes your child experiences may create problems for everyone in your family.

Women can influence the gender of their child with what they eat before they conceive, according to new research that lends scientific support to age-old superstitions about pregnancy.

The discovery shows higher calorie intake prior to conception can significantly increase the chances of having a son while women on restricted diets are more likely to produce daughters.

Scientists at Britain's Oxford and Exeter Universities, who studied eating habits of 740 women during their first-time pregnancies, say that their findings seem to back certain traditional links between diet and gender while disproving others.

"We were able to confirm the old wives' tale that eating bananas and so having a high potassium intake was associated with having a boy, as was a high sodium intake," research leader Fiona Mathews, a specialist in mammalian biology at Exeter University, told the Guardian newspaper.

Full story: Study shows bananas make baby boys

Momentum is crucial.

After a week of holidays, my preschool daughter, J, had lost the momentum of going to kindergarten. On the first day after the school reopened, she told me this with sadness in her eyes:

I don’t want to go to school.

To encourage your child, there’s a set of encouraging vocabulary that parents can use. This language focuses on the process a child does, not so much on the results. Let’s explore the seven aspects of this encouraging lingo.

Women seeking a lifelong mate might do well to choose the guy a notch below them in the looks category. New research reveals couples in which the wife is better looking than her husband are more positive and supportive than other match-ups.

The reason, researchers suspect, is that men place great value on beauty, whereas women are more interested in having a supportive husband.

Researchers admit that looks are subjective, but studies show there are some universal standards, including large eyes, "baby face" features, symmetric faces, so-called average faces, and specific waist-hip ratios in men versus women.

Past research has shown that individuals with comparable stunning looks are attracted to each other and once they hook up they report greater relationship satisfaction. These studies, however, are mainly based on new couples, showing that absolute beauty is important in the earliest stages of couple-hood, said lead researcher James McNulty of the University of Tennessee. But the role of physical attractiveness in well-established partnerships, such as marriage, is somewhat of a mystery.

Full report: Why Beautiful Women Marry Less Attractive Men

Have your kids been hampering you to buy a pet?  If so, here are 5 kid friendly pets which are not only conducive to children, but will offer enjoyment to the entire family.

When a marriage has broken down, divorce is often inevitable and a divorce lawyer needs to be found; some guidelines on what to look for are listed below:

• Skilled in this area of law
• Have the right disposition
• Be trustworthy 
  

Unfortunately, obesity is no longer just the realm of adults; this situation is now affecting children of pre-school age and is a worrying aspect.

Early morning was not my usual entertainment time. But just for fun, I switched on the TV to see what was on last week. And I saw one program that was so interesting that I forgot the time. The documentary discussed about child obesity and child eating behavior.

The way to keep children safe in the virtual world is to give them the skills that they have always needed in the real world

The day after Barack Obama won in Iowa, I tried to engage my nine-year-old daughters in a conversation about what had the feel of a historic moment. "Oh yeah," one replied. "I've seen him on Presidential Paintball." I looked bemused, and she promptly Googled up a game in which players could adopt the persona of White House hopefuls, blasting away at each other with green goo.

It was one of those moments that make you love the internet. Kids who would otherwise have no interest in US politics could now reel off the field of candidates as if it were the Arsenal team. But such moments are far outnumbered by the paralysing kind: the porn site stumbled on in a search for pets; the latest supposed web suicide pact; some fresh warning about grooming on social networking sites.

So Tanya Byron's study into children's computer use is a timely response to a widespread sense of anxiety. Any day on the talk boards of Mumsnet.com you'll find parents asking each other how to protect their kids from the perils of the virtual world (this week's scare story is Miss Bimbo, the online game tempting teenagers with plastic surgery and diet pills). The big bad world that once started beyond the front door is now in our sitting rooms or, worse, behind the closed doors of our children's bedrooms. There's a sense that nothing we do can thwart them if they're determined to break the boundaries.

But whether grooming (the No 1 fear for parents) and bullying (the No 1 fear for kids) are widespread or not, many of Byron's proposals - about laws on assisted suicide, child internet safety, and the classification system for video games - make good sense. Codes of practice for social networking sites are sensible, if only to flag up the need for caution about what children post.

Full report: Good old parenting will keep the online bogeymen at bay

After nearly 19 years of marriage, Robin Williams and his wife are getting divorced. Marsha Garces Williams filed a petition for dissolution of marriage on March 21 in San Francisco Superior Court, citing irreconcilable differences.

The two met when Garces Williams worked as a nanny for Williams' son Zachary, whom he had with his previous wife, Valerie Valardi.

Robin and Garces Williams also have two children together, Zelda and Cody.

Full report: Robin Williams, Wife Are Divorcing

“Potty train your child in five hours?! Are you kidding?”

That was my first response when I first stumbled upon the book “How to Potty Train Your Child in Five Hours.”

I thought it was another scam trying to steal money from desperate parents for something that is not possible.

Not until recently when I really sat down and read the book again.