Bonnie Harris | Connective Parenting | Parent-Child Relationship

Finding the Middle Ground: It’s Where Connection is Found

Why is it so hard for most of us to find the middle ground in communication? We want to be right. We want to get our point across, to be understood and seen. Our egos are very strong. We want what we want. It’s hard to find a balance where everyone feels seen and heard and no one is out to win. Why? I believe it’s because we are naturally pendulum thinkers.

A pendulum swings back and forth from one end of the continuum (of anything) to the other end where extremes are quite distinct from one another. On a given day, any of us can feel both elated and disconsolate. On a large scale, trends, societal norms often swing back and forth. Finding the middle ground takes patience to wait for the pendulum to rest. Let’s look at the pendulum swing of everyday parenting.

One end of the spectrum is permissive parenting: it’s easier to say yes than no. It’s hard for you to be firm. You believe your child’s needs are always more important than yours. You Read more…

Communicating With Your Child: Obstacles and Opportunities for Connection

At the core of every relationship lies communication. It’s the bridge through which we offer guidance, support boundaries, and love. And yet, even with the best intentions, communication between parents and children can easily become strained, confusing, or disconnected. This is true across all ages and stages of development — from toddlerhood to the teenage years — because communication isn’t just about words; it’s also about emotions, perceptions, and unmet needs on both sides.

I was reminded of this recently when my 18-year-old and I were chatting one evening. He brought up something that made me very sad. When he was about 8 years, old he and I were in a disagreement about something mundane. In the course of the argument, he said something to me that felt disrespectful. I stopped for a moment, looked at him intensely and replied, “Are you being a smart aleck?” He looked back at me a little confused but with a half grin and said “Yes.”

This blatant response of talking back triggered something in me, and I screamed at him to get up Read more…

A View from the Other Side: Creating relationships that last a lifetime

Being on the “other side” of parenting, I have a perspective I believe is important to understand. Most of you are in the thick of it, and when your day to day is mostly conducted in survival mode—”How do I get through this day? I’m so exhausted. What do you mean pay attention to how my child is feeling?”—the last thing you think about or plan for is what your relationships may be like when your children are grown.

This is a big birthday year for me. I decided what I wanted for my birthday was to spend one on one time with each of my two children—both parents of young children and very, very busy people. They both responded with “Great. Let’s do it.”

I just returned from several days on Block Island with my daughter. Earlier this year, I spent several days in Jamaica with my son. We never lacked for things to talk and laugh about. We had meaningful, heartfelt discussions that took us into deep places. And they each expressed having a wonderful time. I feel Read more…

What Dads Teach Boys About Women

It’s a hot conversation right now, one that seems silly to need to address, but here we are regardless. How do we teach boys to be respectful of girls, and whose job is it? There’s a version of this conversation that centers on rules: don’t speak to girls that way, don’t touch someone who doesn’t want to be touched, respect your mother. These are good rules to have, and rules have their place. But rules are architecture without a foundation. A person who follows rules because they are told to will look for the edges. Someone who has internalized the value of the people around them doesn’t need to be reminded.

That understanding doesn’t come from a single talk. It comes from watching. And the primary person most boys are watching, whether or not their father, stepfather, or grandfather knows it, is the other men in their lives. This isn’t new information, but we often forget that little eyes are everywhere, all the time.

Fathers carry a quiet and continuous influence simply by being present and engaged. The way a Read more…

Setting Healthy Summer Screen Boundaries

It’s summer vacation and screens are everywhere. Our children are growing up in a digital world, and summer, with its open schedule and unstructured hours, is when screen time tends to spike the most. A 2025 national survey found that nearly half of parents rely on screens every day to help manage parenting responsibilities. That’s understandable. But summer is also one of the most important windows for children’s physical growth, social development, and brain-building play. But common sense, backed by research, tells us that too much screen time can quietly erode all three.

So, let’s talk about it. This isn’t about fear or restriction. It’s about using summer intentionally so our children get what they actually need.

Why It Matters More in Summer

When school is in session, structure naturally limits screen exposure. Summer removes that structure. A major 2025 review of 46 studies found consistent links between high screen use and reduced physical activity, poorer sleep, attention difficulties, and challenges in emotional and social functioning. For children already trending toward more screen time, a long unstructured summer can accelerate Read more…

A Beautiful Sadness: The Grief of Watching Your Child Grow Away

I’ve been realizing something lately. Parenting is painful. It is not the exhaustion of infancy, or the frustration of toddlerhood, or even the eye-rolling theater of adolescence. It is the quiet, cumulative grief of watching someone you love steadily and necessarily move away from you. It’s come to me as a kind of creeping grief that doesn’t arrive all at once. It comes in waves, at thresholds that we are supposed to celebrate.

The First Letting Go: Early Childhood

Even before the dramatic departures, the letting go begins small. The first sleepover. The first time my child didn’t reach for my hand crossing the street. The tiny acts of defiance that set the stage for individualization.

Each of these micro-separations was a rehearsal. My child was practicing independence, and I was practicing release. What mattered was that I cheered their growing autonomy even as I privately felt the shift. Connection wasn’t disappearing. It was transforming. I was proud of my ability to accept my children’s growing autonomy. Their comfort in separation was a sign that I was doing parenting well. Read more…

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…