Quotes About Parenting

As parents become more aware and emotionally healthy, their children reap the rewards and move toward health as well. That means that integrating and cultivating your own brain is one of the most loving and generous gifts you can give your children. Another

You don't have to try too hard to have fun with your preschooler. Just being with you is paradise for him.

As children develop, their brains "mirror" their parent's brain. In other words, the parent's own growth and development, or lack of those, impact the child's brain. As parents become more aware and emotionally healthy, their children reap the rewards and move toward health as well. That means that integrating and cultivating your own brain is one of the most loving and generous gifts you can give your children.

What do you really want for your children? What qualities do you hope they develop and take into their adult lives?

The key here is that when your child is drowning in a right-brain emotional flood, you'll do yourself (and your child) a big favor if you connect before you redirect.

Rather than trying to shelter our children from life's inevitable difficulties, we can help them integrate those experiences into their understanding of the world and learn from them. How our kids make sense of their young lives is not only about what happens to them but also about how their parents, teachers, and other caregivers respond.

Sometimes parents avoid talking about upsetting experiences, thinking that doing so will reinforce their children's pain or make things worse. Actually, telling the story is often exactly what children need, both to make sense of the event and to move on to a place where they can feel better about what happened.

Many parents these days, however, are learning that discipline will be much more respectful—and, yes, effective—if they initiate a collaborative, reciprocal, bidirectional dialogue, rather than delivering a monologue.

Reduce words Embrace emotions Describe, don't preach Involve your child in the discipline Reframe a no into a conditional yes Emphasize the positive Creatively approach the situation Teach mindsight tools

There's no question about it: consistency is crucial when it comes to raising and disciplining our children.

Part of truly loving our kids, and giving them what they need, means offering them clear and consistent boundaries, creating predictable structure in their lives, as well as having high expectations for them.

When your children are feeling upset, a loving touch can calm things down and help you connect, even during moments of high stress.

We want our kids to expect that their needs can be understood and consistently met. But we don't want our kids to expect that their desires and whims will always be met.

For example, one of the most powerful ways we connect with our children is simply by physically touching them.

Remember, there are plenty of ways to spoil children—by giving them too many things, by rescuing them from every challenge, by never allowing them to deal with defeat and disappointment—but we can never spoil them by giving them too much of our love and attention. That's what the connection

The absence of limits and boundaries is actually quite stressful, and stressed kids are more reactive.

That might mean giving a warning five minutes before having to leave the park, or enforcing a consistent bedtime so your kids don't get too tired and grumpy.

But at the same time, they are opportunities—even gifts—because a survive moment is also a thrive moment, where the important, meaningful work of parenting takes place.

instead of a time-out, you might ask her to practice handling a situation differently. If she's being disrespectful in her tone or words, you can have her try it again and communicate what she's saying respectfully. If she's been mean to her brother, you might ask her to find three kind things to do for him before bedtime. That way, the repeated experience of positive behavior begins to get wired in her brain. (Again,

It is, ironically, "safer" to believe that the reason your needs are not being met is because there is something wrong with you, rather than that your parents—whom you depend on for your very survival—are actually not dependable.

when a child is upset, logic often won't work until we have responded to the right brain's emotional needs.

As children develop, their brains "mirror" their parent's brain. In other words, the parent's own growth and development, or lack of those, impact the child's brain. As parents become more aware and emotionally healthy, their children reap the rewards and move toward health as well.

Connection is about walking through the hard times with our children and being there for them when they're emotionally suffering, just like we would if they scraped their knee and were physically suffering.

children whose parents talk with them about their experiences tend to have better access to the memories of those experiences. Parents who speak with their children about their feelings have children who develop emotional intelligence and can understand their own and other people's feelings more fully. Shy children whose parents nurture a sense of courage by offering supportive explorations of the world tend to lose their behavioral inhibition,