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Meditations For Busy Parents

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Meditations For Busy Parents

Many of us have the intention to parent mindfully, but our lives are busy and we get swept along with the tide of action and doing. Meditation helps remind a parent to slow down, to notice the world around her, as well as to notice what is going on in her own mind, heart, and body. Perhaps meditation’s finest gift though is the ability to learn about yourself—what agitates you, inspires you, soothes you? You can then take these lessons into your daily life, helping to enrich your relationships in the process. My intent with this article is to give parents some simple ways to introduce a meditation practice into their daily lives.

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Audio: Kids & Restaurants

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Audio: Kids & Restaurants

If you tuned in to the news this week, you likely heard about the cry heard around the world. In case you missed it, I am referring to the little one at a restaurant in Maine who cried for forty minutes. I think we can agree crying, is a pretty normal behavior for children. Unfortunately, the restaurant owner had a meltdown of her own and yelled at the baby, causing an international uproar from parents and a rally cry for every person who has ever been annoyed by a crying child disrupting their fun.

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Building Your Relationship With Your Child: Attachment & Communication

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Building Your Relationship With Your Child: Attachment & Communication

Another factor in a strong, healthy parent-child relationship is attachment. Attachment is the ability for a parent to help ensure that a child feels safe, secure, and protected. A child is able to use the parent as a secure base from which they are comfortable exploring the larger world, knowing that he can come back to the parent as he needs her. 

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Grin & Ignore It: Why Letting Go Can Help Your Child Do The Same

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Grin & Ignore It: Why Letting Go Can Help Your Child Do The Same

Think for a moment about how many times a day do you notice what your child is doing “right”? Now think about how many times a day you notice what they are doing “wrong”? If you are like many parents, the negatives we notice far outweigh the positives. Why do we do this? Because we love our children. We know it is our job to teach them the skills they need to succeed in life, and we feel intense pressure not to miss a teaching moment. So, we remind and coax, we correct them and bribe them, we do whatever we can to make sure the lesson gets through. While this seems like the right thing to do, we need to be careful where we direct our attention.

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Quit Whining & Do Your Chores!

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Quit Whining & Do Your Chores!

Can you believe the kids today? Whining and complaining about chores, I just don’t get it. When we were kids, we did all our chores to perfection with a smile on our face and begged our parents to nag just a little bit more, right? I think not. Why then do we expect our kids to be so different from us?

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Developing Your Parenting Roadmap

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Developing Your Parenting Roadmap

A Tale of Two New Moms

I’ve been thinking recently about two types of moms I encounter in my work as a parent educator and parent coach. The first is well-aware that she has been lucky in life. She has been raised by loving, supportive (though, of course, imperfect) parents who continue to support her as she herself becomes a parent. When she becomes a mom though she is still shocked by how hard it is and how challenging the needs of her newborn can feel.