What’s a Thanksgiving Walk and how can it help your relationship with your kids? To answer that question, I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine who does Thanksgiving walks almost every school morning with his three boys. Meet Phil Cooper, and his boys Tyson, 13, Paxton, 11, and Gavin,9. Since July 2019,…
Three Enemies of Great Parenting
Great parenting–is it even possible these days? Sometimes it feels like the odds are stacked against parents. Kids are hard! And trying to raise decent human beings in a world where there is so much negativity, so much evil, so many reasons to fear for their safety, and so much pressure on moms and dads…
How Parents Get Lost in Their Kids’ Lives
As parents, do you ever feel as if your life is not your own? No one fully prepared me for the fact that becoming a parent would be so all-consuming. I was the youngest of six children; I didn’t have any little brothers or sisters to take care of and so when my husband and…
5 Ways We Make Parenting Harder Than it Has to Be
Perhaps this is an oversimplification about parenting, but I believe the following statement is true: If parents parented with the bigger picture in mind, many of our problems would not be so big. Each day you find that it’s easy to get caught up in just getting through today, and parenting for tomorrow seems like…
CHOOSE Patience With Your Kids: 3 Steps to Help You
Do you know how to choose patience? Patience: the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, difficulty, or annoyance without getting angry or upset.” I don’t know any parent whose life is free of delays, difficulties or annoyances. In fact, I’m pretty sure most moms and dads experience them on a regulary, probably daily, basis. Your child…
How You Can Avoid Failure to Launch for Your Kids
Remember the movie Failure to Launch, starring Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker? The 2006 film is a story about a 35-year-old man living with his parents who shows no interest in leaving the comfortable life that they have made for him. Although it’s a romantic comedy, there is truth to this fictional story. Failure to…
4 Immunities Parents Need to Build Up
Immunities: The ability to resist infections or toxins. There’s a lot of talk these days about the importance of having a good immune system and how to build up one’s immunities so that they can resist illness. Our family has strived, through vitamins, good food, natural supplements, and exercise. to make our immune systems as…
When Your Parenting Move Ends in a Face Plant
Let’s all be honest. Parenting is full of opportunities for failure. Every parent fails at one time or another. Every parent–some more frequently than others– regrets their behavior or wishes they could take back their words. Every parent makes a choice or moves in a direction that ultimately ends in them feeling like they’ve fallen…
How to Be Loving AND Show Parental Authority at the Same Time
Do you ever struggle to show parental authority without going all commando-like on your kids? Do you find that you can’t strike the balance between being firm or even being strict and showing love to your kids at the same time? Do you feel like you either have to be the good cop OR the…
What Scared Me as a Parent and How I am Still Conquering Parental Fears
Do parental fears take up way too much space in your head? Before I had my first child over 33 years ago, I had no idea there were so many things to be afraid of in life. Parenting opened up a whole new world of things that could go wrong, things that gave me a…