Positive Parenting can help toddlers feel safe, loved, capable and cooperative. Toddlers love to test limits and say no. Sometimes toddlers may cry a lot. For that reason, toddlers get quite the reputation for being terrible… But the toddler years don’t have to be terrible. The so called terrible two’s can be in fact quite terrific.… Continue Reading
Using Empathy to Connect with Your Kids
Positive parenting educators and mental health therapists talk a lot about empathy. When when parents want to know how to respond when their kids are angry or anxious, I suggest responding with empathy first. I tell parents to think of empathy as “finding the feeling” in what their child is saying or experiencing. If your…
How To Transform Criticism And Bring Out the Best in Your Child
The best praise is focused on your child’s effort, not your child’s traits. The same is true of criticism. In one study by Columbia University researchers, kindergarteners were given a scenario: a teacher asks them to create a house out of Legos, and they forget to put in windows. Then the teacher and child role-play…
Encouraging Children to Listen: 3 Steps to Avoid Yelling
When children don’t listen, being calm and confident can take extra effort, but really it is the key to getting kids to listen. To encourage children to listen more, and stop yelling you can try these three steps.
Six Super Helpful Ways To Keep Calm and Deal With Defiance
These Six Positive Parenting strategies can help you respond to your child when they are behaving in defiant, disrespectful or unhelpful ways. Children often act out when they are lost, fearful and in need of guidance. A child that is being defiant needs to reconnect with you and find his way back to calm. And until…
When To Worry About Tantrums & Meltdowns in the Toddler Years
Tantrums are typically the way your child releases big feelings. This can be frustration, sadness, tiredness or hunger. While sometimes avoidable, often tantrums just really happen in a blink of the eye. Your toddler can’t keep it together, whines, cries and screams for a bit. This can be a completely normal part of child development.
You can expect that most children will have a tantrum at some point, if not many, as tantrums are just expressions of overwhelm, frustration and other big emotions.
How to Discipline when your Child Tells Tall-Tales, Fibs and Lies
Understanding why children tell lies and how to discipline in a way that fosters honesty and healthy development. “My room was full of flying dragons last night, they knocked over the books, not me!” Children often tell fibs, stretch a tale and blame mysterious creatures for misbehaviour. Lying, is actually a sign of intelligence. While…
What To Do When Consequences Don’t Work
Three Parenting Strategies To Try when Consequences Stop Working and your Child is Misbehaving Does this scenario feel familiar? It’s getting close to the end of the day, and you are expecting your child to clean up toys, wash up, help set the table, get ready for bed and go to sleep. Only problem is,…
The Benefits of Messy Play And How To Make it Slightly Less Messy
Messy play gives children an opportunity to tap into their creativity, explore all sorts of possibilities, enhance and experience their senses, practice cooperation and of course…get messy. Glitter, play dough, paint, slime, goop, glue, mud, muck, water and more… Children just love it and well, some parents really just don’t like it all that much. It’s…
Positive Parenting: Rethinking “You Have To Share That!”
Sharing requires understanding of another person’s feelings and desires. Sharing is about being creative with another as you use something together, it is about being compassionate and giving, it is about being respectful. How do our young one’s grow into the sharing mode? By our understanding of THEIR feelings and desires, our compassion, our giving, our being respectful of them. It also begins with complete ownership over something.
Positive Parenting: Siblings & Teasing
Siblings teasing can be a huge source of annoyance and conflict for the whole family. If you find yourself wishing the teasing would just go away here are some tried and true ideas for reducing teasing between siblings: 1. Be wary of choosing sides: Even if you know which sibling started the teasing, pointing it…
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