We have been through some wild things as a family in our lives, but none of them have strained us as thoroughly as these past few weeks. They’ve been the hardest for our family’s well-being, the most difficult to parent, and the worst my mental health has been in a long time. I’ve been struggling … Read more
Immediate obedience is a fear response. There isn’t immediate obedience when you’re committed to parenting your children without making them afraid of you. Sometimes your kid just needs a second to process what you asked them. They’re not afraid of you, so they don’t fearfully freeze while they process, or override their logic brain that … Read more
Sometimes I get stuck in awkward situations with other adults where the other adult feels like they need to correct a child in some way that feels wrong to me. It might be exacerbated by my presence — like, for example, at a park when a parent is over-correcting what their kid is doing because … Read more
Note: I don’t mean literal boxes. Although they might do that too. 😉 Four-year-olds (and five- and six- and even seven-year-olds, and maybe three-year-olds, and yes maybe even older depending on your unique child — but here I’m talking about averages and norms) are very black-and-white. They do not understand intricacies and nuances. They are … Read more
Someone recently told me, “Ugh, I know that the 3yos in my preschool class are supposed to be wiggly and playful and loud and silly. But I know that they’ll have higher expectations in the 4yos class next year. I’m always torn between letting them be themselves, and trying to prepare them for what will … Read more
This quote sums up everything I’ve ever tried to say about “behavior” and does it so perfectly succinctly in four sentences. What’s the best-case scenario? That instead of wanting to get revenge on children for the ways they act that inconvenience, bother, or annoy us, we start to soften. We start to see them empathetically. … Read more
When I was ten years old, my family was helping start a new church. This is something we did often when I was a kid. The church had a pastor and many of the other staff members needed to run a church, but it had no building. We were renting or borrowing a building from … Read more