When it comes to teaching my kids about social skills and graces, I know I could do with a little help! It can seem like a daunting task, but remember what the wise and famous Mary Poppins said: “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and - SNAP - the job's a [...]Continue Reading
dealing with anger
Two Activities to Teach Basics of Emotional Regulation to Kids
Teach these two activities to kids and give them essential tools for self regulation and emotional control. This post contains Amazon affiliate links - if you purchase through I receive compensation at no extra cost to yourself. October is Emotional Intelligence Awareness Month and Bounceback [...]Continue Reading
Gratitude Sprinkler Experiment – can we change complaints to gratitude?
I started an experiment a couple weeks ago: whenever one of my kids starts randomly complaining to me, I am randomly making gratitude statements. Just spewing them out. I'm grateful this! I'm grateful that! I become like a gratitude sprinkler. So yesterday my daughter was complaining about an [...]Continue Reading
How to Stay Calm and Get Your Child to Stop Yelling at You
As I mentioned before, loud noise is definitely one of my anger triggers. My kids know this anger trigger well, and inadvertently I taught them that yelling, or complaining really loudly for a long time is a great way to hit my buttons. Since I had few tools in the past to handle yelling, [...]Continue Reading
Top 10 Posts of 2016 – anger calming skills, gifts for dads, books we love and more
word cloud of top 2016 posts Whether we were learning to calm down or trying to figure out how to get parenting back on track, one theme that remained constant this year was a desire for simplicity. We have so many resources out there, but how can we make sense of them when our days are often [...]Continue Reading
Gifts of a Bike Crash – Healing the Scrapes on your Soul
This week I had an experience that gave me a physical reminder about how important it is to care for myself if I want to be a connected, positive parent. I took a fall on my bike and managed to very badly scrape my forearm. It was gross. I won't go into it more, but it's the kind of wound that [...]Continue Reading
