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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…]

Our children all have days when their whole world seems to be falling apart. Is the universe really going up in smoke? Probably not, but our children may need a lot of help to see that.

When my daughter was in kindergarten, she suddenly began to make negative comments about herself and her abilities. She would often say, “I’m not good at coloring” and “sports are hard for me,” indicating that she had low self-esteem.

The overwhelming transition into the world of elementary school left her struggling to make friends and made her quick to compare her abilities to those of her peers. I noticed she would make comments about how other students performed on tasks as compared to herself, and as time moved on, these comments spiraled into negative self-talk.

At a young age, she was already feeling insecure. This saddened me but I was eager to do everything I could to help her. I knew that her skills were not inadequate, yet her brain was tricking her with suggestions of inferiority and inadequacy. To my daughter, it felt like her inferiority was very real!

What is negative self-talk and why does it happen? We ALL experience self-talk or the inner monologue of that internal voice that tells us to eat the cookie or to go out for a run. Self-talk is most often constructive to our well-being and can be a positive way to process what is happening around us and to guide us through a task.

At times, however, self-talk can become critical. While intermittent critical self-talk is not necessarily cause for concern, when we observe our children engage in frequent negative self-talk we may feel some worry creep in. [Read more…]

Not too long ago I realized that I had to do something differently when dealing with my child’s limit breaking. After one particularly intense “episode,” I could no longer ignore the fact that I was in a pattern of caving to my daughter’s demands, simply as a means of avoiding the full-blown tantrum.

These behavior episodes would occur every time I tried to enforce limits. If I attempted to follow through with the limit that had been set, the entire family would pay for hours. What had begun with the occasional rule breaking had quickly spun out of control and become a repeated, every day occurrence.

All children break limits occasionally; after all, testing limits is a way to experiment with independence. And while frustrating, it can actually be healthy for children to test boundaries, as the brain develops and a child begins to recognize the cause and effect their actions can have on the world around them.

It is when our children argue with everything we say or break the same limit repeatedly (such as with my daughter), that we can really begin to question what we could do differently. We may begin to feel like our children are making intentional, irresponsible choices, especially when they ignore our guidance over and over again. While we can celebrate their independence in decision making, we also want them to make the “right” choices!

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