Learn how to achieve faster progress toward your parenting goals with expert guidance from a parenting coach. Discover tailored strategies, actionable plans, and personalized support to transform family dynamics and create a home filled with confidence, calm, and joy.
Read MoreHistorically, even as adults, we have lived near our parents, siblings and cousins. When we had parenting struggles, we also were surrounded by a host of people we trusted. Furthermore, we tended to gather in homogeneous neighborhoods, communities and uniting cultural institutions, like a common church or temple or the Italian (or Irish or Swedish) American Association. We also were more likely to have grown up babysitting, lifeguarding or scooping ice cream, giving us micro experiences with kids of different ages.
Read MoreUsing a parent coach to manage child behaviors makes more sense than you might think.
First, parenting is a skill; it is not innate.
Many parents hesitate to get help because they feel that a good parent should just know instinctively how to help and guide their child.
These parents do not realize that historically parenting knowledge has been handed down from generation to generation by the wise counsel of the village—by parents, grandparents, religious leaders in the olden days and more recently by teachers, coaches and even librarians.
Read MoreDiscover how parenting coaching can help new parents navigate the critical early years. Learn strategies for effective communication, creating a family vision, handling conflict, and understanding key developmental stages. Set your family up for success with expert guidance and practical tools from a seasoned parenting coach.
Read MoreParenting is hard enough. Being a single parent can be even more isolated and overwhelming. A parenting coach can be a godsend to a single parent in need of support.
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.
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.
I 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
A lot of people—parents, kids and teens—are anxious about returning to “normal” whatever that is going to look like post-covid. It is my sincere hope that families work to incorporate the silver linings of #parentinginplace into the new school year. That might include family dinners, kids doing chores, family meetings or even new hobbies that keep us grounded and relaxed.
Read MoreTheory is one thing. Putting your best parenting practices into play in the heat of the moment is quite another story! Come read my true confessions of feeling I too often failed my visiting niece and nephews this past week. Boy, are my skills rusty! And, wow, was I reminded how much of parenting is the mental game!
Read MoreThe idea of talking to your kids about porn may make you want to hide your head, but who better than you to do it? Recently I had the pleasure of hearing sex educator Amy Lang give a webinar on how to talk to your boys about porn. I felt like what she has to say is so critically important that I wanted to pass on to you the key ideas I got from her talk. (And while it was directed towards parents of boys, everything Amy said sounded like I could have easily used it with my daughter, too.)
Read MoreI hear from a lot of people, “My parents never talked to me about that.” The “that” could be sex, sexuality, rape, relationships, a family history of mental illness, divorce, money, suicide, smoking, drugs, alcohol or addiction, dating history, you name it.
Many adults report wishing their parents had been willing to talk to them about difficult subjects and reflect that maybe if their parents had talked about these issues, life for them might have been easier.
Wondering How do I talk to my kids about sex? About drugs? etc. Here are some general guidelines to consider.
Read MoreAs a parenting coach I love giving talks around the San Francisco/Bay Area. And now that we are all sheltering in place, I have been doing coaching online by giving webinars. Every once in a while, I leave 10 minutes for Q + A at the end of a talk and I realize upon reflection that I should have talked for 10 minutes and left 50 minutes for Q + A. Since a lot of the questions that come up have similar themes and might be showing up in your house, I thought you might like to read some of those questions and answers.
Read MoreThe fact that your child has been diagnosed with ADHD may bring up a lot of emotions—fear, sadness, guilt, anger, confusion. But to my mind the diagnosis is good. Let me tell you why. You have been living with a child with ADHD for quite some time now. Whether or not you knew it, you knew your child is different. To my mind, having a diagnosis is a good thing: It means you can get the professional help your child might really need. In the meanwhile, all the parenting techniques that support harmony and cooperation in any household are even more important with your kids with an ADHD diagnosis.
Read MoreThe tagline to my business Joyful Parenting Coaching is Be the Architect of Your Family. With that, I really mean to parent deliberately. Here are three reasons I see structure as supporting a happy, harmonious family life: It makes kids feel secure; it gives opportunities for independence; and it can improve connection among family members.
Read MoreHave you been looking for a break all summer but still haven’t gotten any vacation? Do you resent your kids lying around all day? Here are some reminders how both working parents and stay-at-home parents need to reinforce their work life balance routines.
Read MoreThree months into COVID-19, we are more antsy and our nerves are more frayed. It is no surprise that our kids’ behavior might be amping up. You should expect to see more moodiness and more negative interactions as they lose the structure remote learning (such as it was) provided. The best way to counteract that is CONNECTION. In a world that is feeling slightly crazy, it is even more important that kids feel anchored to the family. The forced physical proximity of being home together helps, but kids too often withdraw into their rooms and onto their screens. Get them off their phones and to the table for family dinner!
Read MoreNow that we are parenting 24/7, it can feel like we are responsible for engaging our kids 24/7.
What if we didn’t? What if we left children to their own devices so they could discover learning on their own? What if by doing so, we were actually helping our kids develop some important independence and autonomy?
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