Empathy — the “vitamin” for emotionally healthy families

Would you like a world in which everyone only looks out for themselves or one in which people genuinely care about one another? How about in your family? Would you prefer to have a spouse that believes only his experience is correct or one who treats your perspective...

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...

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...

Habits aren’t helpful for conscious parents

I can be a complete control freak when it comes to parenting my daughter. Not a pretty thing to admit — and even uglier in action — it’s what happens when I’m under stress. In this state “controlling” is my default mode, an...

Apologies aren’t enough (from parents)

In my post, Apologizing — a skill of a masterful parent, I wrote about the importance of parents making apologies to their children. I emphasized that apologizing helped parents “cultivate a long-term, respect-based relationship with our children,” in...

Apologizing — a skill of a masterful parent

“Wait!” you cry. How can a “master parent” be someone who needs to apologize? Doesn’t being a “master” imply that mistakes aren’t made and moments of weakness are met with awesome self-control? If “mastery”...