I’ve been talking about Parenting From Neutral a lot lately, but do you really know what it means and why it matters?  I’ve mostly talked about how when you learn to Parent From Neutral, you take the heightened emotions of frustration, anxiety, and overwhelm out of your parenting process so you can calmly and effectively parent your best when your kids need you most.

But there is another factor to parenting from neutral ...

Have you ever wondered how to increase your child’s resilience?  Most parents would agree that they want to raise resilient kids, but they never really stop to think about what it is and how they might help their child develop this trait.  It’s typically not top-of-mind until they are in the midst of a challenge.  Given that we’ve been living through challenges on a global basis, the rising rates of mental health issues w...

Do you ever give your kids a High Five as a way to celebrate an achievement or encourage them to keep going?  The power of high fives has been well documented in a number of studies, and since April 22nd is National High Five Day, I wanted to highlight the power of this great tool you can use with your kids.

In a study titled “High Fives Motivate”, published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers split school-aged child...

When you make a mistake are you the first person to beat yourself up?  If you’re like most of my clients (and many friends), you likely berate yourself for your mistake. Most parents want their children to develop positive self-talk and be kind to themselves, but that’s not what we model for them when we beat ourselves up. I have to teach my clients the power of having their own back, especially when they are working on c...

Do you find that as a parent you go from zero to sixty easily, and find yourself snapping or yelling more than you would like?  Emotions are running high as a collective, and our nervous systems are already on edge.  Many parents are feeling like they’re hanging on by a thread, and any proverbial straw can break the camel’s back these days.  

When I first start working with clients, I ask them to list the top three emoti...

If I asked you how you would describe your child, what would you tell me?  Would you use words like quiet, shy, very social, smart, easy, challenging, anxious or disorganized?  How we think about our child and the words that we use to describe them have more importance than most parents are aware of.

The words that we use to describe our children — how we think about them and what we tell them — become the filter through...

Are you concerned about the emotional health of your kids?  This week my daughter shared that over 100 students have been hospitalized at her high school for mental health this year.  That’s just one school.  I can’t even fathom what that means on a nationwide basis.

Hearing about this mental health crisis with our kids, have you ever wondered if there is anything that you can do to help raise your kids to be emotionally...

Are your kids struggling with anxiety?  With everything that’s going on in the world, many people are experiencing heightened emotions.  Our kids easily pick up on the emotions around them, so it’s not surprising that your kids might be experiencing more anxiety right now too.

And, you might be finding that it’s coming up in completely unexpected areas — which is completely normal.  When we are experiencing a feeling, ou...

As parents, do you want your kids to think that the world is safe and that bad things don’t happen?  Most parents want to protect their children for as long as possible and for babies and toddlers that is absolutely true.  With the war between Russia and Ukraine featured in every news channel, all over social media, and as the topic of many adult discussions, if your kids leave the house they are hearing about it.  And ev...

As parents, we typically have an expectation of how things will go for our kids.  But what happens when they don’t turn out as we expected?  When this happens, do you think that something has gone wrong?  

I invite you to take a minute and think about how you react and how you parent from a place of “something has gone wrong”.  For most of my clients, when they believe something has gone wrong, they go into alert mode.  ...

Are you raising a “difficult” kid?  As a parent we tend to label our kids “easy” or “difficult” based on how they are for us to parent.  Unfortunately, the labels we place on our kids can become self-fulfilling so I’m hoping to introduce a new perspective.  

Characteristics to describe “difficult” children can include easily frustrated, consistently inflexible, and very vocal about their opinions — and when they are disp...

Do you wonder how you can raise your kids to be more kind?  The best place to start with raising kind kids is to actually be kinder to yourself.  So if you find that you are prone to beating yourself up, thinking that being hard on yourself will motivate you to change — you are actually making it harder for yourself to change. Kids learn through modeling, so when you take care of yourself and are kind to yourself, you’re ...