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Your family is sitting at the table, with plates of food in front of them. Conversation is flowing naturally, your children are happy and smiling, freely sharing the details of their school day. 

Wait, what?!

For most parents, the movie-perfect dinnertime is a farfetched fantasy. Let’s be real: school, work, homework, sports, after school activities, and a million other commitments often interfere with the family eating together, much less having the time to converse during it! In fact, recent studies have shown that while 84% of parents agree that eating together is important, only about 50% of meals are actually eaten together as a family.

Finding ways in which to increase opportunities throughout the week in which the entire family can eat together may look like a complex jigsaw puzzle of scheduling- and that’s only part of the struggle!

Even if your family does not eat together as often as you’d like, think about the times in which you do. What does it look like? Are there conversations and eye contact or are all eyes and ears focused on phones, iPads, or the TV? Are there connections being made or is everyone retreating to their own worlds?

While you may want conversation and connection to happen amongst the family, it may not come as easy as you would like, especially after a long, hard day of school and work. The next time you find yourself around the dinner table struggling to prompt conversation, remember that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. [Read more…]

I was a shy kid growing up, evidenced by hilarious home videos at gymnastics or Easter egg hunts, where I would walk hesitantly from station to station or gingerly stroll as I collected a grand total of two eggs. 

While most of the other kids were going wild, being adventurous, and jumping into the action without a care in the world, I preferred to hang near my parents. I would stick close to a comfort person while I assessed the situation and in large groups, I would rather listen than be the one to chime in. I can still be like that now as an adult (although I have, thankfully, long stopped clinging to my parents’ legs).

I still remember situations throughout childhood in which I would overhear other parents say, “Ohh, is she shy?” their voices dripping with sympathy or pity. Every part of my insides would cringe and I would want to disappear.

Fast forward to the present and I now have a two-and-a-half-year-old son who reminds me of the same child I was, clinging to my parent’s leg. He hangs out by my side at birthday parties to assess the situation before jumping in to play with the other kids. As he navigates a playground, I can see him assessing the ins and outs of each slide before taking the dive down. 

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Little kids are naturally creative in ways that we may all wish we still were as adults. The young imagination can create games out of thin air: toys come alive to perform rescue operations of the downtrodden or to live their best life in Malibu.

When my son and daughter were little, I loved to watch them explore how his action figures could go on adventures with her Barbies. Their toys would be swimming in a pool one minute, then saving the world the next, each adventure building upon the one before.

A whole new world of creative play opened up for them as their toys became not only a door to the pretend world, but also a tool to interact with each other in a way that challenged their imaginations. Watching them create story lines and themes almost felt like having a front-row viewing of the exploding growth of their young brains.

But as my kids got older, I witnessed self-doubt make its inevitable invasion as they began to compare themselves to other kids and formulate ideas about what is “normal.” Free play and unrestricted creativity gave way to self-consciousness and wanting to do things the “right way.”

Here’s the thing about creativity and children: as parents, we have the ability to encourage a free-spirited nature even as our children mature and learn more about the world around them. Creativity is important because it opens the door for so many other skills that will benefit our kids as they get older. [Read more…]