Positive Discipline Parenting Blog

Minimizing Phone Drama with Tweens and Teens

This is a conversation that needs to happen frequently, whether you want to get it right setting up limits for a younger adolescent or if you have an older teen who’s been using devices for a while. Spoiler: screens are always an issue! When Should You Get Your Kid a Phone?

Joyful Courage & Sproutable: one space for all parents & caregivers

We began merging our backgrounds in psychology, early child development, public health, counseling, mindfulness, social emotional learning, social justice, racial equity and Positive Discipline, joining forces to go farther than either of us could do on our own. We used innovation, technology, Alanna’s idea of videos of REAL families, and an online platform to share the helpful, immediately useful and mutually-respectful tools world wide.

Empowering Kids to Navigate Social Conflict

Even for those of us who don’t fall into the “helicopter” model, when we hear “the kids were mean to me today” we are so quick to slip into mama/papa bear mode, ready to make phone calls and take those mean kids D-O-W-N! This topic, of course, was fitting to some of what my own kids are going through right now (that always seems to happen, right?).  And I find my response to their experience is quick – MAKE IT STOP.  We are all so quick to project into a future of our kids being bullied, ostracized and so desperate that they don’t see any way out

The 5 Parenting Lessons I Learned from 80’s Movie Quotes

For those of us children of the 80's, we have grown up to be parents in a new millennium. It blows my mind to live in a world with Internet, Apple Pay, scanners, and Netflix, not to mention having the intel ahead of time to predict the name of your driver and exact time of your taxi... er... Lyft, pick up. The fact that you can Jetsons style talk to grandparents ON YOUR PHONE

Siblings: Get them in the ring

The most popular night of my seven-week Positive Discipline parenting series is the night we finally get to talk about siblings. From the first week, this is a source of angst for parents. It is on every list of challenges that we make, and usually the sibling fighting is a trigger that brings out the “Final straw! I’ve had it, that’s it!” moment in the night where we turn into the version of our parents we swore we would never become. It takes a full six weeks of building on parenting tools before we can get to this meaty and layered challenge. In this class, I always start by asking that same question, “what did you learn from your siblings?” After some scoffing, the answers range from:

Special Time, a Super Tool to Stop Attention Seeking

I have a secret. I am not enough. Yep, not enough. No matter what the self-help books and Instagram quotes say, I will never ever be enough. My kids will always want more. Once I realized I am THAT loved by them, and THAT important to them, I stopped trying to chase the “end.” One more game, one more hug- nope, they will never be filled. This is a GOOD thing. It means that our open channel of attachment, love, and connection is always flowing. It also means I am human and so are they. This is when I started implementing, with fidelity, the simple Positive Discipline tool called Special Time.