Bonnie Harris | Connective Parenting | Parent-Child Relationship

Deconstruct Your Kid’s Defensive Behavior One Brick at a Time

Does this sound familiar? (read with a tone of frustration and blame)

Don’t do that! You know you’re not supposed to….
What do I have to do to get you to listen to me?
Stop hitting. Cut it out.
How many times do I have to tell you?!
Quiet down, you’re just too much!

Imagine being the child on the receiving end of this. What happens to you when you hear “Why can’t you just listen?!”

Do you tense up, look away, run off, shut down? Where does your focus go?

As a child, depending on your temperament and how you have learned to avoid trouble, you choose a defense mechanism that keeps you safe. When you hear that familiar tone of frustration in the adults around you, you immediately hide behind your wall—your defense of choice. This could be yelling, crying, avoidance, laughing, people pleasing, becoming invisible, or anything else that shifts attention away from you.

Children don’t focus on the effects of their behavior when called out; they focus on themselves and strategize how to keep from getting Read more…

A Mother’s Day Letter

Dear Mom/ Step Mom/ Grandmother/ Surrogate Mother

You know that thing you did last Tuesday? The thing that took about four minutes and that no one acknowledged, maybe no one even noticed? You tracked the unsigned permission slip with several phone calls to make sure your child got to go on the trip. You reschedule a doctor’s appointment so your child could go to the birthday party. You organized drivers for all your kids so all their activities could happen. You remembered that your child had been quieter than usual at breakfast and held that in the back of your mind all day. You rearranged a small part of your afternoon, without fanfare to check in.

You do dozens of these things every week—every day. Most of them will never be named. Many of them are things no one else would have thought to do at all, because you are the one whose mind is organized around the people in your family, constantly running a background check that keeps things from falling through the cracks.

Thank you! We see you. Read more…

A Letter to the Caregivers of New Graduates No One Thinks to Check On

Dear fellow loved ones of high school seniors — this one’s for you.

If you are like me, with a high school senior soon to be off on their own, this season is really exciting. It’s also quietly breaking my heart. And nobody’s talking about that enough.

Your senior barely glances up when you walk in. Their weekends are full, but none of it includes you. They’re sprinting toward a future that needs you less with every passing week. And underneath all that pride you absolutely feel, something else has moved in. Something that sits in your chest at night when the house gets quiet.

Grief, maybe. A loneliness you weren’t prepared for. A resentment you feel ashamed to even whisper, because aren’t you supposed to just be happy for them?

We are happy for them. Of course we are. But we’re also losing something. Something real, something irreplaceable, something that doesn’t have a clean name yet.

Both things are true. Both things deserve to be felt.

The Feelings Nobody Talks About

There’s a lot of cultural permission to be Read more…

When Your Child Embarrasses You: A Connective Parenting Perspective

Your three-year-old throws herself on the ground at the playground right as you try to leave. Your seven-year-old has a complete meltdown at a birthday party, in front of every parent you know. Your teen yells quite loudly in the restaurant, “Would you just leave me alone. You don’t know anything!”

Few parenting moments sting quite like being embarrassed by your child in public. And that sting can send us straight into reactive mode before we’ve even had a chance to think.

These moments are frustrating and embarrassing, but how we respond in those moments matters far more than the embarrassing behavior itself.

Your Child Isn’t Trying to Humiliate You

When a young child does something mortifying, our instinct is to make it stop…fast. We hush, threaten, and apologize to everyone around us while shooting our child a look that says we will be discussing this later.

But before we react, it’s worth asking a different question: what is this behavior telling me?

If you have been following the Connective Parenting work for a while you already know that a Read more…

Why Your Child May Feel Unseen Even When You’re Always There

Most of us believe we see our children clearly. We know their faces, their moods, the particular way they go quiet when something is wrong. We show up. We ask questions. We pay attention. And still, we can look right at them and miss them entirely.

Not because we aren’t trying. Because we are trying too hard to fix, to reassure, to move them toward okay. In that effort, we stop making room for where they actually are.

This is the quiet failure of attunement. It looks like love. It sounds like encouragement. But it can leave a child feeling profoundly alone in a room full of people who adore them.

Missing the Signals Through the Hope

My daughter spent several years navigating a significant medical experience. There were procedures, hospital visits, tests, and all of the uncertainty and disruption that comes with something like that landing in the middle of your adolescence. When it was finally over, we walked out of the doctor’s office and went to celebrate.

My daughter seemed off though. I questioned what was happening for Read more…

Can Connective Parenting Work With Difficult Kids?

There is a common question that we get in our work in Connective Parenting all the time. “Can Connective Parenting work with difficult or aggressive kids?” Parents of kids who hit, explode, shut down, or cycle through meltdowns on a daily basis often arrive at Connective Parenting with one burning question: “Does this actually work for kids like mine?” The answer is yes.

Aggression Is a Signal, Not a Character Flaw

The first and most important shift that Connective Parenting asks of us is this: stop reading your child’s behavior as a message about who they are, and start reading it as a message about what’s happening inside them.

When a child reacts in ways that seem wildly disproportionate to the moment, they are telling you that they are in a spiral of internal crisis. They are not scheming, manipulating, or choosing to be difficult. They are actually overwhelmed, and they are communicating that overwhelm in the only language available to them in that moment.

When we stop asking “How do I make this behavior stop?” and start asking “What Read more…

Helping Children Push Through Discomfort

There is a question that we ask again and again in our parenting classes, especially as our kids grow and push against their comfort zones:

Is this unsafe, or just uncomfortable?

In a world that is increasingly aware of emotional and physical safety, many parents find themselves unsure where protection ends and growth begins. We want our children to feel secure, respected, and supported. At the same time, we want them to develop confidence, resilience, and the ability to navigate the world without us clearing every obstacle in their path.

The tension is real, and it’s exhausting.

Part of what makes this so difficult is that discomfort can feel a lot like danger, especially through a child’s nervous system. When a child’s body reacts with fear, tears, resistance, or shutdown, it triggers something deep in us. Our instincts tell us to stop the experience, remove the stressor, or intervene immediately.

We can feel all the parts of their anxiety, helplessness, and fear as if it were happening to us, or reminding us of a time when we were left helpless Read more…

Resisting the Urge to Help

One of the hardest parts of parenting (especially for thoughtful, attuned parents) is resisting the urge to help.

Not the neglectful kind of stepping back, but the very human impulse to jump in, fix, remind, rescue, explain, or smooth the path when our children are struggling. When we see them frustrated, overwhelmed, disappointed, or headed toward a mistake, something tightens in our chest. Our minds race ahead to the outcome. And before we even realize what’s happening, we’re already intervening.

“Did you email your teacher?”
“Here, let me show you how to do it.”
“Just do it this way—it’ll be easier.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

We help because we care, because we’re afraid, because watching our kids struggle can feel unbearable.

But sometimes, our helping gets in the way of their development.

When Helping Is Really About Our Own Discomfort

In Connective Parenting, we talk a lot about buttons, those internal places that get pushed when our children are distressed. The urge to help is often one of those buttons.

When our kids are struggling, what stirs inside Read more…

When Your Child Refuses School

School refusal is one of the most frustrating experiences a parent handles. One day your child is getting ready and heading out the door, and the next, they’re clinging to you, melting down, shutting down, or flat-out refusing to go. You find yourself cycling through frustration, fear, guilt, and even anger. I get it. I’ve been there. I’ve seen this behavior both clinically and in my own home. You think, “what’s happening? what have I missed?”. It can start slow or come out of the blue, but, regardless, it’s scary.

It’s important to remember that school refusal isn’t a sign of bad parenting or a “defiant” child. It’s a sign of overwhelm. It’s communication, and when we ask, “What’s happening inside my child that makes school feel impossible right now?” instead of, “My child is being stubborn,” it shifts everything.

School Refusal Is Not About Motivation. It’s About Safety

We tend to think of school refusal as a motivation problem:
“They just don’t want to go.”
“They’re being dramatic.”
“They’re manipulative.”

But kids don’t refuse school because they don’t care. Read more…

Parenting Your Kid When Fear Takes Over: Breaking Cycles Without Breaking Connection

Parenting has a way of touching places inside us we thought had long since healed over. Sometimes it brings joy, sometimes tenderness—and sometimes it brushes against old wounds we haven’t dared revisit. Lately, I’ve been sitting with one of those moments. My fifteen-year-old is moving through a stormy season: tears, defiance, pulling away from friends, and slipping into behaviors that seem reckless or self-sabotaging. None of it is extreme, but it’s enough to keep me up at night. And what makes it harder is that it echoes someone else from my past… my sister.

My sister’s adolescence was marked by choices so destructive that they changed the entire direction of her life. Watching her self-destruct was heartbreaking, frightening, and destabilizing for my family. The grief of watching someone I loved drift into a world I couldn’t reach, still lives in me. And when I see a flicker of those patterns appear in my child, even just a shadow, it’s like the air leaves the room. My heart rushes to panic before my mind can catch up.

This is one of Read more…