Tag Archives: connective parenting

Embracing Gratitude With A Little Help From Mr. Rogers

An Article on Gratitude by Shannon McNamara, Associate Director

In a world that can often feel overwhelming, filled with the demands and surprises of daily life, taking a step back to appreciate the small and often overlooked moments can bring a renewed sense of connection and joy. In the words of Fred Rogers, “The best gift you can give somebody is your honest self.” Mr. Rogers, known for his gentle and wise approach to the emotional lives of children, offers parents today a powerful reminder: gratitude begins with seeing, honoring, and connecting deeply with ourselves and our children.

Parenting offers us countless opportunities to practice gratitude. Each time we pause to truly see our children—to listen to their thoughts, questions, or even their frustrations—we build a bridge of connection. Moments when your child curls up next to you, shares a piece of their world, or laughs at something silly are windows into their hearts. By slowing down to appreciate these moments, we can practice gratitude not as an ideal but as a way of being. As the old saying goes, Read more…

Announcing Shannon McNamara as Associate Director: New Initiatives at Connective Parenting

We are thrilled to announce that Shannon McNamara, LICSW, has joined Connective Parenting as Associate Director. With over 20 years of experience in clinical social work and a deep commitment to helping families, Shannon is well-prepared to lead several key initiatives that will expand our programs and reach even more parents and professionals.

Shannon’s Journey to Connective Parenting

Before joining Connective Parenting, Shannon spent 8 years working in child and family social work. She discovered Connective Parenting through the When Your Kids Push Your Buttons program and was drawn to its focus on helping parents understand their own reactions, rather than simply trying to “fix” the child. Over the past 12 years, Shannon has seen this approach transform her own relationship with her three children. As an instructor for 8 years, she has helped countless families do the same. Now, as Associate Director, she is excited to work alongside her mentor, Bonnie Harris, to expand the impact of Connective Parenting.

What’s Next: New Initiatives and Expanded Reach

In her new role, Shannon will expand several key areas:

Train-the-Trainer Professional

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…

Empathy in Action: Nurturing Growth in Your Child

When parents direct their kids and tell them what they should do to improve themselves, it lands on the child as I’m not okay the way I am, instead of empathy in action.

Q. “How can I help my 8 year old son understand that I love him just the way he is AND I want him to grow, learn and improve? He says he feels humiliated and ashamed every time I ask him to learn something new because he feels like I’m saying he needs to be better than he already is.”

A. How wonderful that your son can tell you how your requests feel to him. So many kids just cram their feelings inside, and so many parents dismiss and deny their remarks with comments like, “That’s not true. I love you just the way you are. I just want you to learn to do new things.”

That sounds logical—to the mind of an adult. But an eight year old doesn’t read it that way.

The hard part for the parent is to listen and learn from the Read more…

Why Kids Lie and How To Handle It to Motivate Honesty and Trust

Why DO kids lie? It’s pretty straightforward but anything but obvious. Here’s the break down on why kids lie and what you can do about it.

Q. My eight-year-old daughter has taken to lying and I don’t know what to do. The other day I was driving her home from a friend’s house. I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw her playing with legos that were not hers. Her friend has quite a collection. I asked her where she got them, and she told me that a friend at school had given them to her. I said that we had not brought them to her friend’s. She said she had put them in the car earlier to play with on the way home. Her brother told me later that she had taken them from her friend’s house. What is my next step?

A. Let’s start with understanding how badly she wanted the legos. To influence her with the right way of handling the situation, you will make better progress by connecting with her first. Try:

“I see you have 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

Gratitude from Your Child’s Perspective

“My child is so ungrateful.”

“Why can’t he ever appreciate anything?”

“She has no consideration for anyone but herself.”

Gratitude isn’t something to be taught but to be experienced. I’m coming to understand that gratitude is hard to come by without love. It’s hard to feel gratitude or consideration for others when one feels unloved or unlovable. As Mr. Rogers said, “All anyone wants is to feel loved and know they are capable of loving.”

Love must involve feeling unconditionally accepted for who you are. That is the work for all parents. Once you can accept your child for who he is—that means not sending the message you wish he were different, she was more like her sister, he can’t meet up to your expectations, there’s something wrong with her—you never need worry about whether this child will be grateful or considerate of others. It doesn’t mean accepting behavior. It does mean accepting that this child at this moment in time is behaving this way because she can’t help it—because she is having a problem.

I learned this a long Read more…

The Difference Between Limits and Boundaries and Why It’s so Important

If you want your children to become respectful, responsible people, you must model that behavior. With poor boundaries, this is hard to do.

Contrary to popular opinion, boundaries and limits are very different from one another, although many use the words interchangeably. The word boundary is often used to refer to setting limits. Kids “push boundaries” or they won’t “listen to the boundaries”. It is the rare parent who understands the true meaning of boundaries. And it’s no wonder. Many of us were not brought up with them.

When we say someone doesn’t have good boundaries, we are talking about a dividing line between two people and their personal space and responsibilities.

When people blame others or situations for how they feel or for their life circumstances, they have crossed that line, taking no responsibility for themselves. They have poor boundaries.

Good boundaries are essential for a family to work cooperatively as a team.

Limits

Limits are what you impose to keep your children safe and behaving appropriately. Limits are parameters you set around your children’s behavior using your parental Read more…