According to a recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average young American now spends more than seven and a half hours connected to some electronic device. Do you think it's impacting your kids?

During the holidays, kids are home from school, cooped up at home looking for indoor activities to keep them occupied. Do you like to "put your kids to work" in the kitchen?

Holiday time means cookies, cakes and sweets galore! And even though we want the kids to have fun, too much isn't good. What's the secret to keeping it healthy without being a Scrooge? Share your secrets.

Cereal maker General Mills recently announced they're going to reduce the sugar in cereal marketed to kids. Do you buy those cereals for you kids? Vote and share your thoughts.

With all the economic woes, many parents will have to cut back on holiday spending this season. But how do you prepare your children for being frugal without ruining their fun? What will you do to keep your kids’ holiday spirit without breaking the bank? Share your tips, and we may feature your advice on an upcoming segment of TODAY.

From Laura T. Coffey, TODAYshow.com contributor

I've never been a real food snob, but living in the Pacific Northwest for many years has rubbed off on me in this undeniable way: I now have a deep and abiding love for good coffee and good beer.

It's funny because I don't drink very much of either beverage. (I couldn't even if I wanted to, for reasons that will soon become apparent.) But the time I do spend drinking good coffee or good beer is an EVENT. Something to be savored. Something to be planned around, even. This is serious business!

Or it had been, at least. Until I had a kid.

It literally took months for me to awaken enough from my sleep-deprived stupor to realize the new pattern that was afflicting me, not just every now and then, but every single day. Each morning I would pour myself a cup of coffee and doctor it up in just the right way, with a little bit of sugar and milk. Then I'd begin tending to my infant son. (As the months wore on, he transformed into a toddler son.) Rush-rush-rush, hustle-bustle-hustle-bustle ... and then I'd finally remember my neglected cup of coffee and take a sip.

"Oh no!" I would think. "It's cold." (Not just lukewarm, by the way. COLD.)

Good coffee ain't cheap, so I'd nuke my cup and soldier on. And then it would get cold – again!

That's when I'd reach a crossroads: Do I nuke it a second time?

I'm frugal, and I already feel guilty enough about the money we spend on coffee, so you can guess what I've been doing. And I'm here to report that thrice-nuked coffee is DISGUSTING, no matter how good the pot was when it was fresh. The milk in it even starts to curdle into solid little doohickeys that float along the top. (Why does THAT have to happen??)

I also can tell you that coffee sitting in a pot for seven-plus hours doesn't taste that great by the time naptime finally rolls around, either – no matter how much you've been waiting to savor it.

I often encounter a photo-negative of the exact same problem in the evenings with beer – not every day of the week, as happens with the coffee, but often enough to notice a pattern. In a spirit of generosity, my husband will crack open a frosty Sierra Nevada for himself and grab one for me too. That open beer bottle will sit there, forlorn and increasingly dripping with condensation, from approximately 6:45 until 9:15 p.m. when I can finally sit down. That's when the beer and I come face to face with one another – and again, I reach a crossroads.

"Hey Michael," I'll say to my husband. "If I put this back in the fridge, will you drink it when it turns cold again?"

"Why would I want to drink an open beer?" he'll say. "I'll just get a new one."

"But this is a perfectly good beer. It just needs to turn cold again."

"Why don't you drink it?"

"I don't think I'll last that long. I think I'll be sleeping by the time it finally turns cold."

And so it comes to pass that on many a weekday morning, I find a bottle of cold Sierra Nevada sitting open on a refrigerator shelf, losing precious fizziness and zip. I'll feel so cut to the heart by this sight that I'll cover the top of the bottle with plastic wrap or tin foil and vow to drink it that night at approximately 9:15 p.m.

It's so nice to have treats like this to look forward to at the end of a long day, isn't it, moms? :-)

It seems shallow to complain about not getting the gender you wanted when a baby arrives; many pregnant women are conditioned to say they’ll be happy with whatever they get. But even though the issue of gender disappointment isn’t talked about very much, it shouldn’t be shrugged off. Having spent months anticipating a specific outcome in the delivery room, some new moms are devastated over the sex of their new baby — but they feel they can’t say anything about it, lest they seem completely ungrateful for the gift of a healthy child.

In an Associated Press report, one mother described her heartbreak upon giving birth to a son:

“You're kind of bummed in the back of your mind. There's not going to be any pink dresses. There's not going to be any scrapbooking. That's not going to happen," [Christine Lich] said.

Lich gets tired of people making comments such as: "Are you going to try for the girl?" or "You need to have the girl." Even now, four years after her third child, she can't bring herself to buy clothes for a little girl's birthday because she just can't look at the outfits.

Lich’s experience might seem extreme to some, but it does touch upon a rather taboo topic — moms expressing any type of disappointment over a child’s gender without an army of naysayers screaming “Be thankful you even have a baby!”

Many of us remember waking up with excitement to some change under the pillow, making the loss of that front tooth and the accompanying lisp all worth it. Does the tooth fairy visit your kids? Has the payment increased since you were a child?

Halloween has morphed into a gore fest that has kids as young as 6 unleashing their inner monsters in ultra-violent costumes — blood-smeared chain saws and spiked killing gloves sold separately. But some parents think that marketing characters from such movies as “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Friday the 13th" to small fry is going too far.