Do you feel like parenting is harder than ever right now?  That’s what I’m hearing — Parents are telling me that it’s HARD with a capital H, and they are floundering.  Parents desperately want to be able to help their kids, but they don’t know how.

Here’s what I’m hearing:

I don’t know what to do
I don’t know where to start
I don’t know what questions...

As a parent, do you feel like your emotions can sometimes drive you to react in a way that you later regret?  When your kids are fighting and emotions are high, do you get sucked into their emotional vortex?  Alternatively, if they are super excited or happy, can they help lift your mood too?  This is no surprise — because as it turns out, emotions are more contagious than a cold or the flu....

Do you have questions about how to best support your child —  About challenges they are experiencing, behavior issues, a decision or situation concerning school or other activities, or through these challenging times in general?

This past week I ran an Anxiety Workshop that was sponsored by the Parent Teacher’s Association in Georgetown, and there were a lot of questions from the parents.  With...

I’ve been talking about Parenting From Neutral a lot lately, but do you really know what it means and why it matters?  I’ve mostly talked about how when you learn to Parent From Neutral, you take the heightened emotions of frustration, anxiety, and overwhelm out of your parenting process so you can calmly and effectively parent your best when your kids need you most.

But there is another factor to...

Have you ever wondered how to increase your child’s resilience?  Most parents would agree that they want to raise resilient kids, but they never really stop to think about what it is and how they might help their child develop this trait.  It’s typically not top-of-mind until they are in the midst of a challenge.  Given that we’ve been living through challenges on a global basis, the...

Do you ever give your kids a High Five as a way to celebrate an achievement or encourage them to keep going?  The power of high fives has been well documented in a number of studies, and since April 22nd is National High Five Day, I wanted to highlight the power of this great tool you can use with your kids.

In a study titled “High Fives Motivate”, published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers...

Do you find that as a parent you go from zero to sixty easily, and find yourself snapping or yelling more than you would like?  Emotions are running high as a collective, and our nervous systems are already on edge.  Many parents are feeling like they’re hanging on by a thread, and any proverbial straw can break the camel’s back these days.  

When I first start working with clients, I...

If I asked you how you would describe your child, what would you tell me?  Would you use words like quiet, shy, very social, smart, easy, challenging, anxious or disorganized?  How we think about our child and the words that we use to describe them have more importance than most parents are aware of.

The words that we use to describe our children — how we think about them and what we tell them —...

Are your kids struggling with anxiety?  With everything that’s going on in the world, many people are experiencing heightened emotions.  Our kids easily pick up on the emotions around them, so it’s not surprising that your kids might be experiencing more anxiety right now too.

And, you might be finding that it’s coming up in completely unexpected areas — which is completely normal...

As parents, do you want your kids to think that the world is safe and that bad things don’t happen?  Most parents want to protect their children for as long as possible and for babies and toddlers that is absolutely true.  With the war between Russia and Ukraine featured in every news channel, all over social media, and as the topic of many adult discussions, if your kids leave the house they are...

As parents, we typically have an expectation of how things will go for our kids.  But what happens when they don’t turn out as we expected?  When this happens, do you think that something has gone wrong?  

I invite you to take a minute and think about how you react and how you parent from a place of “something has gone wrong”.  For most of my clients, when they believe...

Are you raising a “difficult” kid?  As a parent we tend to label our kids “easy” or “difficult” based on how they are for us to parent.  Unfortunately, the labels we place on our kids can become self-fulfilling so I’m hoping to introduce a new perspective.  

Characteristics to describe “difficult” children can include easily frustrated, consistently...