Prioritizing your own self-care

I started this series with Self-care for Parents, a post that defined parental self-care and suggested ideas for assessing how attentive you are to caring for your needs. In the second post, What difference does parental self-care make?, I wrote about how taking...

What difference does parental self-care make?

“There’s this perception that if you worry a lot and if you look really busy and stressed out then you’ll be more successful.” ~Nancy Mayer I’m not sure how parents make it through that first year with a newborn. Even in homes where...

Self-care for parents

For many of us, our children occupy our first thoughts upon waking and our last ruminations or prayers as we fall asleep. We may choose paying work that allows us access to resources that we deeply want to give them. We may choose to have our family be our work and...

Better parenting starts with better beliefs

Parents (and non-parents alike) have plenty of opinions on what makes “better” children and “better” parents. Nursing. Attachment parenting. Continuum Concept principles. Bed-sharing. Early literacy. Limited media. Time outdoors. Unschooling....

Two opportunities in every parenting problem

  Problem. Issue. Challenge. Call them what you will, all parents face them. Ultimately, all parents also want to not be facing them. Problem solving Our culture, and most of our own backgrounds and experience tell us to spot the problem (usually “out...

Stop trying to fix your parenting problems

Yes, it’s a radical thing for a parent coach to say since that’s often why moms and dads first seek out my support. “Our son whines all the time, we just want it to stop.” “My daughter only wants me to comfort her. She never lets her dad...

Expecting more than our children can easily give

In my post Are you too helpful with your children? I wrote about how we can inadvertently reinforce beliefs of helplessness when we’re too quick to step in and give our children a hand. For some parents, or for some of us at different times, however, we hinder...

Reverence for our children

The other day I was in the kitchen preparing dinner while a Kindermusik CD played in the background. As Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour (often referred to as the Barcarolle) by Jacques Offenbach began, my daughter hopped down from her stool and started dancing in the...