The Best Advice for Increasing Your Patience

On a scale of 1 to 10. How much patience do you typically have? One means you’re completely depleted and wake up annoyed at your kids even though they actually haven’t done anything that day. Ten means you’re a saint. I started off as a pretty patient mom. With each additional child we added to […]

4 Things Your Teen Needs From You To Be Successful

I know I’m probably in the minority, but I love parenting and hanging out with teens and young adults. I guess that’s a good thing since we have six kids between the ages of  14 and 23. But parenting teens especially teens who are one age chronologically and entirely different ages social-emotionally, academically, etc can […]

4 Simple Meals that Even Picky Eaters Will Eat

You probably know that your child’s nutrition is important, but you also are tired of fighting food battles with picky eaters. I’ve heard countless parents say, “I refuse to be a short-order cook.” Currently, with eight or nine mouths to feed, I don’t have the time to be a short-order cook either. It’s also almost […]

Prioritizing Nutrition Without Creating Control Battles

One of the only five reasons kids misbehave is physical needs. When our kids are tired, dehydrated, or not getting the nutrition they need, their brains won’t have the fuel they need to make good decisions. The tricky thing about helping our kids get the proper nutrition is that we can find ourselves in a […]

5 Crucial Skills Your Child Needs to Play Independently

Does your child play well independently? Do you ever want to scream, “Why won’t you just. go. play !?!?” I talk a lot about assuming a CAN’T instead of a WON’T with our kids. So let’s apply this to independent play. Just like there are physical developmental stages that need to happen in a certain […]

How to Help Your Kids Grow Without Compromising Trust

Are you naturally the bad guy or the pushover? One of my favorite quotes from the late Dr. Karyn Purvis, author of The Connected Child* and The Connected Parent*, is, “If we give our children nurture when they need structure, we inhibit their growth. And if we give them structure when they need nurture, we […]

6 Expert Approved Ways to Play with Your Kids

I love my kids, but I would rather do chores than the pretend play where you get out the farm animals or dolls and make them talk to each other. And y’all know how much I hate cleaning! I want you to know that you’re not a bad mom if you don’t get down on […]