Category Archives: Holidays

New Year’s Resolutions for Building Better Connections with Your Children

As the calendar turns to a new year, many of us reflect on the past and set resolutions for the months ahead. While goals like exercising more or saving money are common, the start of a new year is also the perfect time to focus on family relationships, especially the ones with your children.

Parenting can be overwhelming, and it’s easy to feel caught up in the daily grind. But this year, let’s aim to build better connections with our kids, deepen curiosity about who they are, practice patience in the tough moments, and commit to self-care so we can parent from a place of balance and strength.

These resolutions aren’t about perfection; they’re about being intentional and creating opportunities for growth, connection, and love. Let’s explore how to make these goals part of your parenting journey.

1. Build Stronger Connections

At the heart of parenting is connection. When kids feel connected to their parents, they are more likely to feel secure, valued, and loved. Strengthening this bond doesn’t require grand gestures. It’s the small, everyday moments that matter most. Read more…

‘Tis the Season for Compassion

Expectations are always high at this time of year. It’s the season for joy, friendly people wishing each other cheer, generosity of spirit, and family gatherings. But just as often, it’s not for so many.

The stress and tension of buying gifts, satisfying expectant children, and anticipating family gatherings fraught with anxiety and judgement are also heightened at this time of year. Loneliness, grief, and loss feel heavier now than at any other time. Suicide statistics peak. And on top of all the usual stress, we are in our second holiday season marred by a world-wide pandemic with a new and possibly scarier variant at our doorstep. The unhappy and the sick feel more isolated, rejected, and angry at this time of year.

Now that I have fully depressed all of you, I do not mean to be a downer. What I want is to prod your compassion and empathy to understand that this season is just as hard for many as it can be joyful for others.

Can you allow a family member’s, even your child’s, sadness, depression, anger, Read more…

Simple Ways to Get Your Child in the Mindset of Gift Giving

Q. I have four children ranging from 7 to 14. I have struggled with teaching generosity to each. Do you have any advice for developing a gift-giving guideline?

A. Developing a generous spirit in children is a process that can’t exactly be taught, but experienced. So much of becoming generous, appreciative, and respectful is how it is modeled and what is important to you. Are you generous (that doesn’t mean buying presents), grateful, appreciative, and respectful of your children and of others? If not, this is where to start. We think we can just tell our children to be grateful and to think more of others. We even try to demand it with yelling and disrespectful threats. It doesn’t work that way.

Children naturally love to give things to others and watch faces light up. It is quite empowering when children take an active role in giving. But don’t mistakenly expect that young children will naturally want to be generous with and considerate of others. That expectation will lead to anger and reprimands when you see natural egocentricity, and it Read more…

Finding the “I” in Motherhood

Our second Covid Mother’s Day is upon us. How will you spend it? Will your children bring you breakfast in bed and give you loving cards? Or will you be on duty once again, feeling resentful of the mothers who get breakfast in bed?

Q. I have a very strong-willed, acting out 8-year-old boy. I only recently read and started implementing your 8 principles book and watched your YouTube videos and am trying to implement your “connective parenting” approach which has already been very helpful. But I have struggled with this for so long, and I have a hard time handling friends, family, anyone in public not getting what I am doing. I get lookers, judgments, and even comments of how “bad” he is. They tell me how he needs a smack or more punishment, that he’s disrespectful, etc. I am trying to find confidence in my parenting, but this is a real brick wall. Do you smile politely and say, “My son is having a hard time”? Do you tell them to mind their own business and that you are working on it! Do you just ignore them? It makes me want to wear a t-shirt that states, “I am doing the best I can and so is my son”.

A. I love the tee-shirt idea! You’ll need several so you don’t run Read more…

Less is More in the New Year

The key to becoming a better and happier parent is NOT to add on more to-dos. Especially expectations of yourself and your kids none of you can be successful meeting. You’ll all feel worse. You may want to do things better, but I promise that most likely means doing less—worrying less, fearing less, nagging and shouting less.

We are doing so much more “parenting” than in past generations, and then giving ourselves grief about all we’re not doing. Think about all that stuff in your head telling you what is going wrong, why your child is a rotten monster, and why you are a terrible parent. That’s the stuff I’m talking about. This is what exhausts you and what you would do better leaving behind. Easier said than done, I know.

Here are some of the things my Facebook followers want to drop:

~ feeling less anxious

~ hovering

~ always being in control

~ worrying about what I’m doing wrong

~ impatience

~ trying to get him to be the person I want him to be

~ yelling, dictating, Read more…

Managing Family Disapproval at Holiday Time

Q. I have worked hard to raise my boys, 5 and 8, very differently from how I was raised. I have followed your principles of Connective Parenting and want to stick with them. One of my boys is very strong-willed and, as you say, “won’t take no for an answer”. The other is a gem, so easy to get along with. With holiday gatherings coming up with old-school parents and in-laws, do you have advice on how to handle unwanted, critical remarks that leave my 5 yr. old feeling angry and reactive whenever they are around—not to mention what a failure I feel like.

A. When you choose to parent differently from the methods of your parents, you are always at risk for being criticized. Your parents and in-laws likely feel threatened by how you are raising your boys and assume you disapprove of how you were raised (this may be very true). If you are not asking their advice and following their traditions, you are clearly going your own way, and they may feel discarded and even wronged. The Read more…

New Year’s Resolutions: 10 Exhausting Things to Give Up

If you’re making New Year’s resolutions this year, remember less is more. The key to becoming a better and happier parent in the new year is NOT to add on any expectations of yourself that you can’t be successful meeting. You’ll just feel worse. That does no one any good.

Some parents need to spend more time with their kids and actually do more at home so their kids can have a childhood instead of being expected to run the household. My guess is that most parents reading this blog would do better to subtract from what they are presently doing, let go of some of their assumed obligations, know what they are responsible for and drop the rest, and let their children fight or play more on their own with less parental supervision.

Here are some of the things my Facebook followers would like to drop:

~ feeling less anxious

~ hovering

~ always being in control

~ worrying about what I’m doing wrong

~ impatience

~ trying to get him to be the person I want him to Read more…

Childhood Beliefs: The Keepers of the Secrets

When long-held childhood beliefs are dashed, parents need to pick up the pieces and initiate children into the keepers of the secrets.

“Mom, you’re the tooth fairy, aren’t you?” accused my nine year old daughter out of the blue one morning holding the evidence in her fingers. Molly had conducted a private test after finding an old tooth (who knows where). She put her tooth in the appointed spot. But this time the tooth fairy had not taken it, nor left money in it’s place.

Busted. “Yeah, it’s true,” I said smiling to myself. This was not hard. She was clearly old enough to know that there was no fairy who flew in her window to leave her money for a tooth. She was disappointed but her disappointment was tempered by her pride in her detective skills.

Molly followed me into the bedroom while I was making my bed. From the opposite side of the bed, she said, “Mom, if I ask you a question will you tell me the truth?” Here it comes, I thought. Amazing. This was exactly Read more…