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Teaching boundary setting and repair conversations
As educators, we teach so much more than algebra and spelling to our students. Crucial life skills, such as self-regulation, repairing harm, and setting healthy boundaries to prevent harm, are just a few of the life lessons we can provide for our students. Teaching the importance of boundaries, how to communicate your needs, and how…
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Talking and Teaching about Truth
In the milieu in which our children live – social media, the internet, television and movies – it is often hard to sort fact from fiction. Our children get mixed messages about honesty. While they are told it is an important value, they are surrounded by messaging that implies you can say anything you want,…
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Fact and Fiction for the Growing Brain
Children experience the world through a different lens than adults and are learning to tell the difference between what is “real” in their imagination, and what is real in the world. Often children lie for very similar reasons as adults – they feel trapped, are afraid of being punished or rejected, or sometimes just because…
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Teaching Kids About Money
It’s pretty hard to learn about money if you don’t have any. Consider using an allowance to teach your kids about financial responsibility. And if what you really want is to teach about money – do not tie that allowance to chores it will distract from the lessons of money.
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Parents: Trapped by Our Fears
The real question for all of us is: What invites us to respond in drastic ways to our childrens’ misbehavior and mistakes? My hunch is that is fear. Many of the parents I work with are afraid when their children lie, steal, are mean to their siblings, swear, wear sexually provocative clothing, investigate pornography online,…
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What Kind of Bystander are You?
Imagine that your daughter and her friends are sitting hanging out in the family room – talking and texting and you hear, “Oh that is so gay!” Do you feel uncomfortable but remain silent because you don’t want to embarrass your daughter? Do you wait and talk about it in private afterwards? What do you…
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Non-stop Negotiation Getting You Down?
As the parent it doesn’t always feel so great when all of your positions get shaved away by your budding courtroom lawyer. It is exhausting. Setting limits firmly and still honoring the dignity of your child isn’t really hard, but it takes practice.
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Time Out? Time In?
The idea that a grumpy child is going to go sit somewhere and calmly think about what they “should have done” is quite preposterous. Did you? I didn’t. When I was sent to my room I spent the whole time thinking about how unfair the situation was or plotting how I was either going to…
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Family Work: Whose Job is It?
Contributed by Jody McVittie, MD When I grew up everyone in our family had jobs to do. Many of them were centered around our family dinners (setting the table, clearing the table, washing the dishes, sweeping the floor). Other family jobs included feeding pets and taking care of the garbage (this was in the days…
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