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.
Guilt-Free Parenting: Embracing Mistakes with Grace
Parenting can often feel like uncharted territory, where each day presents new challenges and opportunities for growth. Just like gardening, nurturing our children requires patience, learning, and a generous dose of self-compassion. Introducing Yacón: A Lesson in...
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...
Navigating Intense Emotions: A Guide for Parents
Parenting can often feel overwhelming, especially when our children experience intense emotions. To effectively support them, we must first process our own feelings. This guide offers practical journal prompts that you can use after a meltdown or before the next one,...
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...
Imperfect Parenting is Better for Kids: Here’s What It Teaches About Love
If you’ve been following Happily Family because you thought Jason and I have it “all” figured out, let me be the first person to tell you—we don’t. Even though we’ve read many books, interviewed over 250 parenting experts, and worked professionally with kids and...