Parenting

• How are Your Family Rituals?

  Whether your kids are toddlers or teens, make sure you’re holding and creating rituals which have meaning for your family. Family dinners, weekend trips, or family laundry day on Sunday can all have an important impact on your family.

• Encourage Positive Connections Between Siblings

  From the start, treat each of your children in a special way. With new additions to the family, continue to make your other children feel special and give them extra time and attention.

• How to Help Your Child be Successful in Kindergarten

  Your child’s first year of school should be a fun and exciting time. Children who are comfortable with and prepared for this first school experience are more likely to have rewarding and productive years, and therefore associate positive feelings with education. Since parents are children’s first and most important teachers, you can play a key role in preparing your children for a successful school experience by pre-exposing them to key concepts they will experience in school. This can be done in a fun, enjoyable manner by making everyday play experiences learning experiences as well.

• Low Carbs for Mothers

  The key is the low-carb diet that is so often in the news these days. It’s the diet we’re designed for through millions of years of evolution. During almost all that time, there was no consumption of grains, milk products, or refined sugar. People very similar to us ate mostly animal proteins, vegetables, and nuts. Basically, that’s the low carb diet. Here’s how to do it…

• Keeping Kids Healthy in a Land of Plenty

  We live in a country of unprecedented wealth and prosperity; a land also filled with parents worried about how such abundance will negatively impact their children. Will it sap their motivation, twist their values, or turn them into spoiled brats? In my twenty-five years counseling families Ive witnessed the difficult challenges parents face around their kids and money. And what Ive learned Ive put into The Five Immutable Laws of Financial Parenting.

• STAR Testing for Character

  At some point, kids need to learn to stand up for themselves and to be assertive. However, society is now pushing kids in the direction of aggression, not assertiveness. They want their kids to win at almost any cost. We are in the middle of a national crisis on character and its time we stop and think about the standards we are truly setting up for our kids.

• A Moment to Reflect: Do You Like Your Kids?

  As parents we need to make a decision when our kids our young. How much effort are we willing to expend to really help them learn to behave, to make sure they are not over stimulated, and that they understand right from wrong and that “no” means “no”. Ultimately, there is a reality all parents need to face up to. Here are a few of the new rules parents need to accept, or they will have to accept that raising their kids is going to be far more difficult then they could ever have bargained for, and that “liking” their kids will not be an option the majority of the time.

• Have You Prepared Your Child For The School Bully?

  As subtle as it may seem, bullying is a form of violence. Experts estimate that almost 75% of today’s youth will be involved in some aspect of bullying before they enter high school. And the chances are, your child will be one of the statistics. Long gone is the idea that bullying is a natural process of youth, a coming of age. It is unacceptable behavior and the long lasting ramifications are far too great to ignore.