The Blog
Our best advice when it’s tough with kids:breathe, laugh, dance, sing, hug, call a friend. Be gentle with yourself, you’re not done growing up yet. This won’t last and you are not alone.
Secure Attachment: It's Different Than What You Think
When most parents think of “secure attachment”, we focus on the connection between a parent (usually the mother) and a child. We recently had a conversation with Dr. Dan Siegel, and the way he described attachment blew our minds. He explained that, because humans have...
Guilt-free Parenting: How to stop beating yourself up
Even though I’m a novice gardener, I like to grow unusual things. I’ll show you one of them in the video below. (It is a root vegetable that I didn’t know existed until a couple of years ago! Can you guess which?) Sometimes gardening feels like a bit of a mystery to...
When Your Child Doesn’t Do What You Want
When it comes to growing vegetables, I’m a novice, but I’m enthusiastic, which makes up for something. Today, the tomatoes are teaching me about parenting and how to respond when our child does something that we didn’t plan for, or didn’t even want them to do. In...
My Teen is Struggling But I Can’t Afford Help – Best No-Cost and Low-Cost Ways to Help Teens
Recently I’ve been telling the story about how one of our teens was struggling, then bounced back, and what we did for our teen and for ourselves to find support. Sharing about that difficult period got me thinking about how ridiculously hard it was for us to find...
Four Steps for Managing Meltdowns
Once when our kids were young, I found myself sitting on the grass in front of a grocery store while one of them had a full-on meltdown. If you have a child with big feelings or explosive emotions, you know the feeling. Here’s what happened… The kids wanted to go in...
How Parents Can Process Their Own Intense Emotions
Last week, we asked you to send in questions about your biggest parenting struggles. Thank you for writing to us. ❣️ Many of the responses we received were centered around one main topic: how to help our children cope with their emotions. “When I say ‘no’, he finds it...
When your child calls you names
Do you have a child who gets frustrated and resorts to name-calling? Maybe you’ve tried everything… telling them “we don’t use those words”, talking about how “those words hurt people's feelings”, practicing calming techniques, ignoring it, taking them for a break,...
3 Steps for Kids to Have Hope in Uncertain Times
If you’re a young person–or trying to raise one–several things about the future could get you worried. Parents have asked me, “With ‘x’ happening in the [government, economy, climate, society], how can I be authentically hopeful for my kids’ future?” I recently...
Teens arguing with parents? Good news!
Our kids turned into “typical teens” sooner than I had expected. I first started noticing a shift when they were 10 or 11 years old. All of a sudden, there were eye rolls and “duh” and “You don’t get it, Mom”. Even though we had a great relationship with our kids and...