School can be very stressful for a parent and for a child. This is especially true if your child is having behavior problems or not doing their school work. It can be a vicious cycle: the child is having a hard time at school, the teacher expresses these concerns to the parent, the parent gets frustrated reacting in a punitive …
Junior high can be both scary and exciting for students getting ready to attend for the first time. As a parent, you wish you could be there every step of the way, but you know that growing up means your children have to learn how to do some things by themselves. You can always give advice, however. Here are four …
Halloween is an interesting holiday to say the least. Kids dress up in costumes anywhere from witches to princesses and from superman to zombies. Then, we as parents encourage them to do something that we are opposed to them doing the rest of the 364 days a year – accept candy from strangers. Nonetheless, it is fun to see our …
I don’t remember the last time I saw a 12-year-old delivering newspapers on a bike. Nowadays, it seems like newspapers are delivered either by an adult in a car or by a kid being driven by an adult in a car. I don’t mean to criticize. I just miss the days when kids would deliver the newspaper on their bikes, …
I had a fun time getting to use some Love and Logic parenting skills with my five year-old son, Ezra, the other morning. Ezra is part of a carpool that leaves at 7AM each morning. In order to give him and his sister, Eliza, enough time to get ready, clean their rooms, make their beds, and eat breakfast, I wake …
Dirty Boy Won’t Shower. One of the couples in the Becoming a Love and Logic Parent class gave a great example of how they set a limit with their 13 year-old son. The mother shared that she and her husband had been asking their son for a few days to take a shower. He would tell them that he would …
There we were, at WalMart on a Saturday afternoon. Eliza and her brother Ezra each had two weeks of allowance and they were trying to stretch it as far as possible (which isn’t easy since they only had four dollars each). I was working on my skill of patience as each of them pointed out the things that they wanted …
Do you ever feel torn between wanting your step-children to like you and knowing that you still need to have rules and discipline? Have you found that letting the biological parent handle all the discipline doesn’t work really well all the time. Blended families are becoming more and more common in today’s world. Consequently, more kids are being raised partially …
Mothers, do you sometimes feel like you have the Burger King logo around your neck because your kids expect you to make it their way; right away? Do you ever feel more like a cab driver and a short order cook then the queen of the castle? Is that the way it should be? So many kids nowadays grow up …
A comment was posted in the forum last week on using the distraction method to combat tantrums. I have used this method a few times before on my own children; mostly when disciplining would make matters worse for everyone around such as on an airplane. While flying thousands of feet up in the air in a confined area with no …
Why is it that two set of parents can apply the same consequence but yet get very different results? Is it because the child that learns from the consequence is good-natured while the other child who becomes resentful is just a bad egg? Does it all depend on the temperament of the child or does the way the parents apply …
Have you ever had to hold down your child, pry open his mouth, and insert a tooth brush just to make sure your child’s teeth get clean? I have. And I have also seen how ineffective it is, especially when the child just bits down on the brush and stops any cleaning action. Would you like a few ideas that …
“Mom…Mom…Mom…Mom…” Do you ever hear this coming from your kids while you are in the middle of a conversation with someone else? Have you ever responded by turning and yelling, “WHAT!” and then felt just a little embarrassed (or maybe not) for yourself or for your kids’ rude behavior? Would you like a simple technique that will make you look …
Many parents complain about how their children leave stuff all over the house. Parents either feel like unpaid servants or like broken records constantly nagging their kids to clean up after themselves. Some parents say that it takes less energy to clean up after their children then to get their children to clean up after themselves. Other parents complain that …
Picture your precious child in your arms for the first time. So sweet… So little… So innocent. “This child,” you think, “was meant to bring happiness into my life.” Now fast forward ten years. You have just spent an hour in the kitchen on a new recipe trying to include more nutritious foods into your family’s diet when the same …
Take a minute to think about someone who had a wonderful influence on you in your life. As soon as you have that person in your mind think about how you would describe that person? Would you use words like kind, patient, loving, or empathetic? Could you say that person was caring or that he or she treated you with …