Phase 1: See It Differently: Asking Before Deciding My daughter wakes up around 5am most mornings, before anyone else in the house is up. So by the time I get downstairs, she's usually already there, waiting for a hug. This particular morning, my arms were full with coffee, my laptop bag, and s...

She grabbed her daughter's body and pulled her back into the car seat, hard enough that her head bonked against the car frame. Her daughter protested, "You're being rude to me," and inside, this mom agreed. For this mom, it had been one of those days. It was actually the first day back at schoo...

The wrong snack was all it took. One minute she was fine, and the next, she wasn’t. She was yelling, shoving her brother, and deaf to anything either parent said to her. A TMP Times member described this exact afternoon to me a while back, her sweet, easygoing 7-year-old turning into someone sh...

My son is currently going through a phase where snakes, sharks, and owls are all the first things he says when he meets new people. “Snakes are hunters. Owls are predators.” Not "I like sharks" but they are predators, and “snakes bite with venom and squeeze.” He loves to act it out, too. Open h...

It's an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, just me and my 3-year-old. We had the playroom all to ourselves (which almost never happens!). He's got his marble maze tower out. It’s the one where you snap plastic pieces together into these winding paths so a marble can drop, loop, and land somewhere at t...