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How to Get Your Kids to Open Up to You About Their Fears and Worries

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(This article is part of the Fear and Worry series. Get free article updates here.)

Getting Kids to Talk -- Expert AdviceDo your kids always tell you what’s going on in their impenetrable little worlds?

My daughter is a certified chatterbox. She’ll tell me about the space-camera-binocular-thingie she is building with Legos until I’m blue in the face from listening. Or about a fancy new restaurant she is going to open. Or the new obstacle course she’s designing.

But ask her what she did in school today, and I get nothing. Zilch. Nada.

She doesn’t get past two sentences about her day before getting sidetracked about something in her imagination that is too fantastic to ignore.

At times, it can be a bit frustrating not knowing what’s going on in her real world.

If you have kids who don’t tell you what they’re up to, for one reason or another, you know that feeling!

I sometimes wonder, if something ever really goes wrong or bothers her, will she tell me? Is there something I can do to make sure that she will?

So, I did what I’ve been doing lately… I reached out to 6 amazing experts in the parenting field and asked them –

How can we get our kids to open up to us about their fears and worries?

The answers they gave me were every bit as insightful and helpful as I’d hoped.

Here’s what I learnt about what we can do to get our kids to open up to us about their fears and worries –

[Read more…]

7 Common Mistakes That Keep Most Parents Unproductive (#3 is the One I’m Most Guilty Of)

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(This article is part of the Productivity series. Get free article updates here.)

(This article is part of the Productivity series. Get free article updates here.)

Let’s face it. No matter how productive we wish and vow to be, as parents, a lot of those good intentions end up down the drains…

Productivity Tips for Parents - Confused MomCooking gets done, but laundry piles up. Kids get dropped off and picked up, but the grocery trip gets nixed. You manage to prepare for that all-important meeting, but just can’t find the time to file that expense report.

I bet you’ve been there at some point or the other.

Have you ever wondered why this happens though? Why is it that we parents seem prone to being unproductive in spite of the desperate need to be as efficient and effective as possible?

Here are some of the common mistakes I believe are the culprits, and some possible fixes. Check it out and see if any of them are bringing you down. And if you have other reasons for your productivity slumps, do let us know in the comments below –

#1 Trying to be a super parent

There are so many times when I’m going about my day that I wonder “What did I do with all my time before having my daughter?”

There seems to be an exponential relationship between the size of your family, and the size of your to-do list – for every new addition to your family, the to-do list multiplies a hundred fold.

Add to that the unreasonable expectations that are placed on parents, either by the world around us, or our own aspirations to be awesome parents, and we trap ourselves in the unattainable goal of becoming super parents. And that doesn’t bode too well for our productivity.

The fix:

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Why We Give Up, And 3 Simple Tricks to Change Behavior (Backed by Science)

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(This article is part of the Community Challenge series. Get free article updates here.)

Have you ever gotten totally pumped about changing some behavior, got started with a lot of enthusiasm and then pffffffffft… the whole thing just quietly fizzled out?

How to Change BehaviorMaybe it was a health/fitness goal.

Maybe it was a career objective.

Maybe it was the way you want to parent.

Whatever it was, it started with a bang, but like a balloon that is not knotted up tight enough, it slowly lost wind and went limp.

Well, you’re not alone. As it turns out, there’s a scientifically proven reason for why we give up. By becoming aware of it, we can trick ourselves into changing any behavior rather effortlessly.

But First, a Little Bit of the Back Story…

About 5 weeks back we started the Discipline Without Drama community challenge on this blog. It started with a bang. So many of you enthusiastically dived into it that my whole month’s video bandwidth was blown away in just 1 day and I had to scramble to keep streaming the videos uninterrupted!

As we progressed through the challenge though, I noticed the ‘balloon losing wind’ effect.

It gave me an eerie feeling of New Years Day in June… research shows that 88% of the New Year’s Resolutions end in failure.

I started digging into psychology studies to understand what causes us to give up even though we really want to change something. Why do we dive into something with so much enthusiasm, only to abandon it in a few days? (I have a few other reasons to be so interested in this question, but that’s a whole other blog post… 😉 )

What I found out is very intriguing. At the core of all failed attempts to change behavior is [Read more…]

Frustrated About Discipline? It’s Time to Fix It, Once and For All…

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(This article is part of the Community Challenge series. Get free article updates here.)

Love kids, hate discipline?You know, every parent I know loves good behavior, but hates discipline.

How about you?

Do you love your little angels, but hate the drama and the stress that inevitably bubbles up when they misbehave and you are the one with the unenviable task of setting them straight?

What if we could keep the good behavior, but eliminate the stress and drama associated with discipline?

It’s not a wild-eyed fantasy or a pipe dream. If you are a part of our A Fine Parent Community for long enough, you know we’re all about research-backed, practical action-taking.

What say, we apply that same spirit to discipline?

Feel up for a little challenge?

Introducing Project: Discipline Without Drama

[Read more…]

The Orphan, the Millionaire and the Secret to Becoming a Great Parent

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(This article is part of the Inspiring Stories series. Get free article updates here.)

(This article is a part of our series on Inspiring Stories)

She lay in the hospital bed exhausted. She was 17 years old and had just given birth to a baby.

Normally, the delivery rooms of Mercy Hospital are filled with joy and celebration. On the day that Josh Shipp was born however, the tears streaming down his mother’s cheeks weren’t those of joy.

Josh_baby_picWhat had started out as an exciting prom night had turned into a sobering ordeal of teen-pregnancy, and lying there on that hospital bed, Josh’s mother had a critical decision to make.

She decided she wasn’t ready to take on the responsibility of raising a baby.

And just like that, Josh became an Orphan.

At the tender age of a newborn infant, he entered the foster care system – one of the 115,000 children in America waiting for adoption.

Except, in Josh’s case, adoption never quite happened.
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