A mom during a coaching call described her nightly dinner battle: "If my 5-year-old son doesn't eat enough lunch at school, I make him finish dinner before dessert. He just refuses, gets upset, and hits me."
The problem was that she was fighting a battle she could never win.
You cannot force fo...
I could hear the exhaustion in a dad's voice during our coaching call:
"My 4-year-old hits us more now when she doesn't agree with something or wants to say no to a request. If she doesn't get the treat she wants, she immediately goes to smack me. If I give her choices and she doesn't want eith...
I've been thinking a lot about my kids this holiday season.
About how much STUFF they have. How different their childhood is from mine. How they've never known what it's like to worry about money or food or keeping the heat or lights on.
I have vivid memories of playing Jenga in the dark next t...
Last Saturday, I started my toddler's bedtime routine around 4 PM. We went upstairs for bath time. At first, he didn't want to take a bath.
"NO BATH!" he screamed.
So I leaned into what he loves: CARS. "What cars need a car wash today?" I asked. Immediately, he grabbed his blue airplane (yes, t...
It happened on the walk into school.
Your 5-year-old spotted another child and said, loudly, "Why doesn't she have hair??"
You froze. Your face got hot. You wanted to disappear.
Did the other parent hear? Did the child hear? What do you even say right now?
You feel conflicted because on one end...
Last week, I gave you the scripts to handle hitting in the moment.
But here's the truth: In-the-moment responses manage the behavior. They don't eliminate it.
If you want hitting to actually decrease over time and if you want your child to start using words instead of hands, you need a proactiv...
I just lived through this last week with my 2-year-old son.
We were at the end of our bedtime routine, already past the point of exhaustion, and he melted down over stickers. Not because the stickers mattered, but because his little brain was maxed out and had nothing left to give. When I final...
“Your brain is going to tell you you’re being mean. That doesn’t make the boundary wrong.”
That’s what I told two parents on a recent group coaching call. And I want you to hear it too.
Because right now, the parenting world is caught in a tug-of-war between two camps: gentle parenting and FAFO...
I don’t usually talk about my weight. But today I’m going to.
After my son was born in December 2022, I hit rock bottom.
He was a week overdue. By that point I was so sick and miserable I could barely walk. I remember going to the hospital for the induction and feeling like my body was giving o...
Maria thought she had cracked the code on parenting. Her 3-year-old son, Kai, was thriving at his new preschool. His teacher raved about his behavior during pickup. "He's such a sweet boy," she'd say. "Never any problems here." Even Maria's husband could breeze through bedtime routines without ...
"Every morning, it's the same thing," Priya told me during our coaching call, and I could hear that familiar exhaustion in her voice that so many parents carry. "Zara stands in the preschool line, looks at me with this little smirk, and says 'I don't want to go to school today' in this sad voic...
Mike was trying to get his 5-year-old daughter ready for bed when she completely lost it. She didn't want to brush her teeth, didn't want to put on pajamas, and was melting down about everything. When he gently but firmly guided her toward the bathroom, she spun around and hit him in the chest ...
