Middle school is a time of intense growth. Your child is forming their identity and can be more influenced by peers than ever before. Friendships become complex, intense, and sometimes confusing. Social hierarchies and cliques emerge, along with the overwhelming pressure to fit in. And short-lived friendships can lead to feelings of uncertainty and instability.
Read MoreMany of my clients first came to the United States as adults, sometimes for graduate school, but often for a job. Some of them brought their young children with them; some had their children in the United States.
But here’s the truth: If your child enters preschool or Kindergarten in the United States, you are raising an American. At the very least a hybrid child.
It is only natural, that you will have some cultural crashes with your children.
Read MoreGetting out the door with little kids can be quite an adventure! Here are 10 tips to help make the process smoother and less stressful.
Read MoreYou would think that as a middle school teacher, I would have been telling parents to make sure they help their children get homework done. You would think I would have them prioritize that over getting to bed on time or over a family outing.
No.
My advice to parents is to always put your relationship with your child first.
I say that because there is nothing more precious.
Read MoreHow to navigate having your young adult children live with you after they have been away and established their own routines and schedules. You can still foster a healthy relationship by setting expectations while still letting them be an adult and not the little kid who gets told what to do all the time.
Read More“I adore my husband, but I hate parenting with him. I feel like I can handle the kids alone, but he comes in and mixes it all up." Seriously, when parents contact me, conflict with one's spouse about how he or she parents is always some part of what is keeping their household from being as fully calm and harmonious as they want it to be. That means that one of my biggest roles as a parenting coach is to help parents get on the same page.
Read MoreImage credit: https://images.pexels.com/photos/6212771/pexels-photo-6212771.jpeg
Read MoreDo you struggle to help your kids find balance with their screen times? Today’s guest blogger outlines some ways to be in conversation with your kids about their use of electronics.
Read MoreDo you have a love-hate relationship with summer when it comes to your kids? Especially your teens?
If you answered yes, you are not alone! I get this a lot from the parents I work with.
Summer used to be the ice cream truck, spending hours in the pool, and riding our bikes around the neighborhood.
Now it’s feeling torn between work and being there for our kids, logistical nightmares of getting kids to a different camp every week and spending the whole summer feeling guilty that our kids are spending too much time on their screens.
Read MoreOne of the negative effects of all this technology at our fingertips is that we are not asking our kids to really think things through or be critical thinkers. Our kids today are used to getting instant gratification by the ease of finding information online --that use of tech together with our tendency to helicopter parent and plan everything out for our kids--we are essentially imposing our executive functioning instead which doesn't allow them to use their own executive functioning. We as parents may be taking over too much which doesn’t allow our kids to learn how to be critical thinkers.
Critical thinking is the logical planning, evaluating, looking back, and looking forward in the process of making a decision. Parents are automatically doing this instead of letting their kids learn it naturally.
This can end up being a real problem for our kids!
Engaging our kids as critical thinkers is going to help kids across multiple measures. It's going to give them a sense of efficacy, a sense of autonomy, and of self-confidence because they are thinking things through and figuring things out on their own.
Too often we have kids that don't listen because we have trained them not to listen! We do that by making a request of them without following through. In that way, by the time our children are tweens or teens, they have a honed sense of how seriously they have to listen. They know you don't really mean it until you get loud or mad.
Instead, learn The S-U-S-T-A-I-N-E-D Connect to teach your kids to follow through without you ever having to raise your voice or sharpen your tone.
After sheltering in place during Covid-19, many kids have social anxiety and lack the skills they need to get along well with their peers. Empathy is a key way to improve social interactions. Here are 5 Tips for Teaching Kids to be more empathetic.
Read MoreWhen it comes to parenting, we are always only making our best guesses. But both of these examples illustrate how when some piece of the parenting still isn't working despite our best arguments and creative solutions that our own emotional baggage or needs might be getting in the way.
The good news is that if we are willing to be open and curious about our own reactions, we have the potential not only to become more effective parents but to heal our own wounds at the same time.
When we are clear about who we are—and really own it with confidence--we are better able to separate ourselves from our kids and let them be who they are (and who they are becoming).
Read MoreA home is not the same as a classroom full of twenty to thirty kids.
But there are some things that parents can learn from the way good teachers do things.
When teachers are evaluated for effectiveness, the measure used is Time on Task. That means how many minutes of the day are students actually learning or practicing content. Any minutes spent doing organizational tasks—taking attendance, collecting lunch money, turning in homework—do not count towards a teacher’s effectiveness.
At home with families, there are necessarily a lot of things that just need to get done—laundry, food prep, clean up, kids getting dressed/undressed, bathed, etc.—but the truly meaningful time is the time spent bonding together, connecting and having fun. In families, that is the Time on Task.
Do you struggle with what consequences to give your kids? The goal of a consequence is not to humiliate, shame, or punish. It is to shift behavior.
Read MoreLots of parents fear potty training and worry that it is going to be a big struggle. The trick to shifting kids successfully from diapers to underwear is to strike a balance between teaching a child about the potty and how to use it, inviting them to use it when then want to and then letting them do so on their own schedule. If you just trust your child is going to get there eventually and project no tension about the process they are making, the child’s natural instinct to do “big kid” things will kick in. Here are some concrete ideas to consider.
Read MoreI was first exposed to Positive Discipline as a classroom teacher, and I was very glad to have it in my toolbelt when I became a parent. Positive Discipline supports Authoritative Parenting—represented by the balance of high warmth with our kids and high expectations for our kids. It has long been known to be the most effective parenting style for raising kids who thrive.
Read to find out more and to hear, specifically, what Positive Discipline Looks like with Tweens and Early Adolescents go
At the start of the new school year, everyone feels motivated—teachers, students and parents. As the year wears on, however, especially students—even more so tweens and teens—lose their motivation. That stresses and concerns parents a lot (In my Middle School Moms FB group unmotivated kids is a topic that comes up fairly often). And it should concern us because how miserable is it to send our kids off to school every day if they are not arriving happy and eager to learn.
So let’s look at how to motivate kids (and how we can keep from demotivating them).
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