Tag Archives: confidence

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…

Healing You To Connect With Them: Childhood Wounds and Not Passing Them On

By Shannon McNamara, Connective Parenting Associate Director

Parenting is one of the most rewarding, yet hardest, things you’ll ever do. Not only are you responsible for guiding your children through their journey, but many of us find ourselves facing unresolved themes from our childhoods. These past experiences influence how we interact with our children, often in ways we don’t even realize.

Understanding Childhood Trauma

What do we mean by childhood trauma? Childhood trauma is any harmful or upsetting experience from childhood that leaves a lasting impact on your emotions and behavior. These can be big things like abuse and neglect, or less obvious events like losing a loved one, growing up in a stressful or unstable home, bullying, simply feeling unheard, etc.. Even when we work through the major events, leftover emotions or beliefs can pop up unexpectedly and disrupt our current life.

When we become parents, these old wounds can reappear, making us overly sensitive to our child’s behavior or unsure how to react. This is especially true if our own needs were unmet as children. If we were Read more…

The “Wait until 8th” Pledge

Q. As I navigate my way through the influence of technology my fears are around knowing that I have a certain amount of control right now while my kids are 5 and 7, but what about later? I’ve taken the “Wait Until 8th” pledge, committing to not giving my kids phones until at least 8th grade. And even then, I would lean toward “dumb” phones. But perhaps what scares me most is how being on social media will affect them when they reach that stage. It’s something I never had to experience myself. The bullying, anxiety, eating disorders, and everything else that stems from the weight of that world frightens me. And what I hear from others and read in The Anxious Generation, is that kids find a way to be on those platforms, even when devices are limited at home. What can I do now to set them up for the healthiest possible choices since they’ll likely “find a way” once they reach teenagehood.

A. Good for you. I am hoping that by the time your children are Read more…

Focus on Trust to Encourage Your Child’s Potential

How do you think your kids experience you? Do they expect loving, positive attention and trust or criticism and judgement? Or no attention at all until they cause a problem? Watch yourself and see what they respond to.

Whenever you yell, threaten, punish, or use that blaming tone that turns your child “parent deaf”, you are teaching your children that they are a problem—because you see them as a problem. What you want is the problem to end, but what you are focusing on—what your child is doing wrong—makes the problem worse.

What you want to grow is your child’s capability.

So trust your child’s capability to overcome problems. This requires a mindset shift and understanding what trust really means. Your trust is needed 24/7, especially if your child is behaving in untrustworthy ways.

It’s not about trusting behavior or even your child’s current motivations. It’s about trusting who your child is and that he wants to do things right. The fact that things are going wrong can be corrected by your change in focus.

Focus on what you

A Connective Parent asked about how toddlers learn self-control. Every parent needs real-life solutions to tantrums.

Q. My two and a half year old is in the heart of his terrible twos with lots of tantrums especially when he’s had it by the end of the daycare week. But what I don’t understand is when he seems fine, eating his yogurt and berries that he loves in his highchair, and suddenly, with no apparent emotion, he flings his bowl across the room making a horrible mess. What am I supposed to do then? Other times, he runs away from me and doesn’t listen when I yell to him to stop. What do I do to get him to listen? Am I’m allowing this behavior by not punishing him?

A. Impulses are a strange thing. We don’t know where they come from (maybe a brain scientist does) and certainly can’t see them coming. There is no way to prepare yourself or to head them off at the pass. They come from deep inside and often don’t seem to have any connection Read more…

How to Raise a Child with Self-Confidence, Not Entitlement

As far as I can tell, most parents want their children to reach launch-age fully capable of conducting their lives with responsibility and respect. When they leave the safety of their nests with self-confidence, feeling competent and resilient, with the drive to contribute positively to the world, they are ready to greet whatever comes at them. We want our children to go out into the world capable of finding success yet able to weather the bumps and storms with a strong sense of self.

Most of all we want our children to feel inspired and fulfilled in their lives, doing what they love, able to reach their potential, and in mutually respectful relationships with others.

Does this sound fairy-tale-ish?

Especially when right now you struggle with demanding kids who seem oblivious to your requests and inconsiderate of other’s needs?

Even though your struggles today are very real and very exhausting, this is the time, no matter how young your child is, to focus on the journey of reaching the goal of 100% authority over themselves instead of being the entitled Read more…

What Are the Secrets that Make Children Successful?

As far as I can tell, most parents want to raise successful children to reach launch-age fully capable of conducting their lives with responsibility and respect. When they leave the safety of their nests feeling self-confident, competent, resilient, and have the drive to contribute positively to the world, they are ready to greet whatever comes at them. We want our children to go out into the world capable of finding success yet able to weather the bumps and storms with a strong sense of self. But, what are the secrets that make children successful?

We do not want our kids to launch with the attitude that the world owes them, they are separate from the rules others must follow, and they shouldn’t have to work hard for what they want. We want them to create interdependent relationships with others and not use their individual power to push others out of their way.

Most of all we want our children to feel inspired and fulfilled in their lives, doing what they love, satisfied with most of their choices and in mutually Read more…

5 Step Guide to Setting Successful Family Values

Your goal for your children is to raise strong, self-confident, resilient, independent humans who contribute to society, right? This doesn’t just happen somewhere in the teen years. It starts from setting family values that begin with love, acceptance, support, and security from which they launch into their adult lives. This is their foundation.

Your family values may need some intentional focus and repair to find the peace and cooperation you are looking for. Things don’t change by simply hoping they will. Raising a happy family takes intentional planning and work.

Look at the following elements of parenting to see where your focus needs to be now. Family values can change. Don’t take the whole job on at once.

A. The Foundation: You, the parent.

Your modeling is the most important teacher for your child. It’s not what you say but what you do, who you are that teaches children how to be. You must behave in the way you hope your children to behave.
Your self-control ultimately determines your child’s self-control. If you are a yeller, take your child’s behavior

Here’s a parenting question I get often: Should I condemn or condone quitting an activity? I was fortunate enough to have this exact conversation with Jen Zamzow, PhD for her Good Housekeeping article “It’s Okay to Let Kids Quit Things.” And this is what we discussed…

It’s Okay to Let Kids Quit Things

“Q: When one of my kids was in kindergarten, he spent months begging to learn karate. When we finally signed him up, he wanted to quit after two classes. My husband and I were at a loss. Do we let him give up or push him to keep trying? we asked ourselves. And how will our decision affect him in the future?

A: In an age of intensive parenting with an emphasis on building resilience and antifragility in kids, it’s easy to panic when they want to quit something. If we let them start and stop on a whim, how will they ever learn to see things through, especially when the going gets hard?”

Good question. Read the full article HERE.

The Power of Read more…

8 Steps of a True Apology

It’s really easy to get down on yourself for behaving regretfully toward your child. What’s hard is forgiving yourself because you’re human and making amends.

Repairing mistakes is one of the best skills you can teach your child. Isn’t this what we want them to be able to do? Repairing, apologizing, owning up and being accountable for your behavior is the sign of a strong, responsible person—exactly what you want your child to become.

But it’s hard for many parents to own mistakes and make repairs. When you have learned through your childhood that apologizing, showing vulnerability by admitting mistakes is a sign of weakness, it is hard to do it with your child. It can feel like admitting defeat, losing authority, giving in. But the opposite is true.

Coming down off a righteous pedestal to apologize, to say I see it differently now and wish I hadn’t said what I did, to admit wrong-doing, is not backing down or being inconsistent and wishy-washy. On the contrary, it is the powerful thing to do.

Vulnerability does not equal weakness. Vulnerability Read more…