How Your Support Helped a Child Learn to Take Her Own Time-Outs
“I wasn’t safe! I need to go to my room to think about this,” exclaimed five-year-old Selah after hitting her infant brother Caleb. It seemed almost miraculous that she would say such a thing.
The Golden Opportunity of “I’m so STUPID!”
“I’m so stupid, I’m SO STUPID!” Most parents at some point are faced with a discouraged, self-condemning child. That’s painful to hear. Our anxiety often drives us to try to talk a child out of their opinion, in an effort to soothe everyone’s distressed feelings. “You are not, you’re plenty smart!” The child, now feeling […]
Why Do My Kids Misbehave to Get My Attention? [video]
Recently, Connected Families Co-Founder Lynne Jackson sat down with Connected Families Coach Chad Hayenga to get his thoughts on why kids misbehave to get our attention and how we can help them to get our attention in healthy ways instead. Click above (or click here if you can’t see the image) to watch the whole video, […]
3 Hands-On Practical Tips to Teach Kids Character
Often times in the day-to-day messes of family life we need practical, specific ideas for how to communicate with our kids. Below are three of our most popular and practical tips — ideas that will provide a concrete tool in your parenting belt as you work to help build your kids’ character.
How Parents Can Predict a Meltdown…
In order to get control, we say things like, (“Come on!… Hurry up!… I mean NOW!… You gotta get going!”) We raise our voices and furrow our brows, which can communicate that the child is “being bad.” This is yet another way of predicting a negative outcome.
Are You Teaching Your Kids to Be Angry?
It starts with our example. Angry kids almost always have angry examples to follow. If those examples are parents, and those parents stay angry over the years, little can be done before their adulthood to re-teach kids about healthy anger. So if your kids are angry, think about what they’re seeing in you and their […]
Why Kids Explode and What to Do About It
Just like us, our kids sometimes react angrily when something important to them feels attacked. First expressions of anger are almost always aggressive. As kids get old enough to express themselves, the aggression becomes words and actions. One day I even saw it at the Post Office. A toddler was angry that her mom wouldn’t […]
How Flushing without Pooping Can Help Your Parenting
I was mad. Several times in recent weeks our kids had become careless about their toilet flushing habits. So when I went in to use the bathroom and saw the most recent “solid evidence,” I was irritated to say the least. As one prone to reversing words in sentences my loud expression of this frustration […]
A Parenting Fairy Tale…
Once upon a time, near a woods far away, there was a family named the Scrumpkins. Bingle (the dad) and Kalinda (the mom) were fearful of what might happen to their children if they explored the dark, foreboding woods behind their house, so they proclaimed, “You’re not going in the woods and that’s final. No […]
An Often Overlooked Motivator of Good Behavior…
Many parents think that some sort of painful punishment is the best motivator for kids to improve their behavior. Other parents “focus on the positive” and offer rewards when kids do well. Research about what motivates workers to do well reveals that extrinsic rewards are less important than intrinsic motivation, and that a key element of intrinsic […]
