It’s “trendy” to offer your kid choices. 😉 It’s one of the easy, catchy, go-to parenting “tips and tricks” that I guarantee you’d see on almost any advice article, book, or even just talking to another parent. “Your kid feels like they don’t have enough power, offer them choices!” (Sometimes this spirals into giving them … Read more
This made me laugh out loud. When kids love something, they’ll explore it in every facet of their play if you don’t get in their way! You don’t have to turn it into worksheets. (Yes, even for academic objective purposes. I have a kid with whom I’m working on fine motor control. It would theoretically … Read more
When I originally saw this posted on Flourishing Homes & Families, not with the original caption, but in the original comments, a lot of people seemed (to me) to have missed the point. They took it at face value, as if the meme were saying that this is actually true. I don’t think it is. … Read more
Young children repeat the same thing over and over and over (like the same joke, the same observation, reading the same book, playing the same game…) because they are strengthening the connections in their brain that are learning from that repeated experience! In addition to whatever they’re learning from the experience they’re repeating, they also … Read more
While going through old posts, I found a great exchange in the comments that now I’m turning into its own post… Q: It’s important to me as a parent to let my child play freely and explore and learn through playing. However, their older sibling feels like they need to “teach” them how to do … Read more
There is no need to borrow worry from the future. And that’s exactly what this kind of thinking is: it’s borrowing worry. 5 year olds are not just future adults. They are also present 5 year olds. And they need time to be 5. I tend to talk in generalities when it comes to the … Read more
“Sometimes, my son asks me a question. If I tell him I don’t know the answer—and I truly don’t know the answer—he’ll get mad and protest, ‘you DO know!’ How do I explain to him that I really don’t? How do I make him understand?” This is one of those instances where parents commonly think … Read more
If a child called “oppositionally defiant” could label the adults in their life, what kinds of things might they call them? Needlessly antagonistic? Endlessly demanding? Perhaps their adults themselves would receive the diagnosis of ODD — Overly Dictatorial Disorder. What about a child called “pathologically demand avoidant”? What might they call their adults — the … Read more
When you start to understand how thin — or nonexistent! — the dividing line is between “playing” and “learning/growing”, suddenly so much more of what children do makes sense. And suddenly so much more of when adults do/don’t choose to correct them about it seems…totally nonsensical or arbitrary, from a child’s point of view. My … Read more
Hey! This post is going to be about Jesus, and child development, and the kind of Christianity I grew up in, that I’ve moved away from, and where I see myself now. I recognize that there is a lot of hurt and tenderness in this topic for many people, as well as you maybe just … Read more