What to do for Mum?

Many of us are parents and are hopefully on the receiving side (of love and affection not necessarily of gifts) on Mother’s Day as well as the giving side (again I hope many of you are able to pass on your love to your Mother).  For me I usually find it rather stressful as Mother’s Day is another opportunity for us men to show our complete incompetence in gift buying.

We have a few new Mothers in our family and I thought it would be a good time to help them celebrate their role as a parent.

We all know that our life is being constantly spied on by marketers, collecting data for businesses.  It’s not often that we get to benefit from this but I recently saw some consumer data on addthis.com about new Mums’ behaviour that might help us get it right on Mothers’ day.

For a start, compared with average consumers, new Mums use their cars far more.  How about something nice for her car on Mother’s day? Or an audiobook or a Spotify subscription to listen to whilst driving.

New Mums click on websites that deal with health, fitness and nutrition three and half times more than other women: maybe some nice novel-but-healthy food-treats – there’s all sorts of weird stuff at health food shops – or cooking a meal for her or some nice fitness gear might be good (not that I ever felt confident making clothing choices for my wife).

New Mums read more books and magazines – I mean real ones made of paper – and are more than twice as keen on home decorating, too; so… I know gift cards might sound a little like a cop-out but I’m thinking you couldn’t go too far wrong with one from a mag shop or decorators.

Finally, marketers can tell Mums are super keen on photos. Why not download a few from your lady’s Instagram or Facebook and print and frame them?

What would life be like without Mums? Inconceivable! Let’s make a fuss of them.

By John Cowan, The Parenting Place

Improving and equipping families to thrive.

Read more from John and The Parenting place here.