For many children with special needs, social skills are a struggle. They can come across as mean and anti-social at their worst and awkward at their best. Family nurture groups are good times for children and youth to learn and practice social and emotional skills. Practicing at home is best because it’s where we have...
No one likes to fail. But kids with learning differences feel like they’re failing a lot. They always feel like they’re running to catch up with their same-aged peers. Over time, they’re self-esteem sinks lower and lower. I’m not proud to admit it, but I’m guilty of contributing to this feeling of failure with our...
You’re trying to be an awesome, mindful parent. You offer two choices, just like the nice lady in the video demonstrated. But your child screams in your face and demands a third choice. Or maybe you asked what he needed, and he told you to go to hell? Having a list of trust-based parenting tools...
One of the most common factors behind challenging behavior is anxiety. According to the Oxford Dictionary, anxiety is defined as, “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome.”[1] The tricky thing is that anxiety isn’t always obvious. Sometimes anxiety in kids comes out in behaviors that may look disrespectful without...
Being a kid can feel hard! Our kids have BIG feelings but don’t understand them. These big feelings often come out in challenging behaviors because they haven’t developed emotional intelligence. If your child came through adoption or foster care, he may have missed out on developing an emotions vocabulary. Whether your children came by birth...
It’s easy when parenting to be controlled by the urgent. Tantruming toddlers, teacher conferences, markers on the wall, mouthy teenagers. It all feels like it needs our attention…pronto! We figure once we put out the fire, meet our kids’ needs, and correct them until we’re sure they’re not going to jail, THEN we can take care...
When parents feel like they are constantly butting heads with their child, we often talk about using parenting tools that help our kids feel like we’re on their team. One popular way is to collaborate with our kids using a compromise. We’ve told our kids repeatedly, “When we tell you to do something, you may...
One of the biggest misnomers for parents when they first encounter trust-based or connected parenting is that it seems like there are no consequences. It feels too permissive. This is actually the reason I tossed the Connected Child aside after reading it pre-placement. Honestly? It made me want to gag. Then we attempted to parent...