What’s cool today wasn’t cool last year and most likely won’t be cool next year. “Cool” is transitory, it comes and it goes, it’s superficial, it doesn’t’ have much depth, and it’s constantly changing.
When our children act out, they hurt us. They have disobeyed us, let us down, defied us, etc. We hurt and our natural inclination is to lash out and hurt them back. Human behavior teaches us we want others to feel our hurt and pain. That’s why we ground our kids for a month, make them put their noses on…
Most of the times our kids struggle to obey us it’s because they are scared. They don’t wan to misbehave but it’s the only way they can get out the stress that’s inside. What we want is to increase their ability to deal with stress and no how to verbalize and talk about. The easiest and best way to help…
One of the biggest struggles parents have, is seeing events through their children’s eyes or experiences. Parents will expect their child to respond to something as they would. Then they, the parent, become stressed, angry, upset, etc. when the child does not respond how they expected. STOP DOING THIS!! Here’s an example. A big struggle is when the parent, or…
I know it seems like a crazy idea, but if we want to understand someone better, we kind of need to ask them if they can explain their beliefs, thoughts, and points of view with a genuine desire to understand them and what they have to say. I have parents all the time say things like, “I don’t understand why…
Many times, when talking with parents this is the response they will give when talking about their child’s response to a difficult situation. It is well intentioned but not very helpful to the situation. If you have read my other blogs, you will now understand the behaviors we want to go away are simply the child’s ineffective responses to stress. …
Our natural instinct is to want to connect and engage with others. We want to feel close to our loved ones, especially our parents. When we feel good, we are able to freely engage with others. However, as stress builds up and our ability to cope with it diminishes, we begin to struggle to engage with others. Our first instinct…
Parents are always worried about emotionally hurting their child, or “screwing up” or doing something “wrong”. Well guess what, it’s going to happen. You’re going to say something dumb or hurtful or make a mistake or embarrass them, maybe even on a daily basis, maybe even in the next hour or minute. But that’s ok. Because we all do it. …
One of the biggest struggles parents deal with is their child lying to them, teachers, or other authority figures. They are completely flustered and have no idea why the child lies or how to stop it. Lying is simply not telling the truth. So, the question is, why is the child not telling the truth? It’s actually a pretty simply…
One of the major issues parents seem to deal with is defiant behavior. I get parents complaining their child never does what they are told, always talks back, argues about everything and anything and never follows through on what they are supposed to do. There’s a simple reason for this behavior. There’s zero buy-in from the child on what they…