Parenting

Dear Stranger, Yes, My Hands Are Full…

Inside: This is for the people who say “you have your hands full” in a way that sounds like I have an incurable disease. Because if you think my hands are full, you should know this.

Dear stranger,

This is for the ones who say “you have your hands full” in a way that sounds like I have an incurable disease.

It’s for the ones who asked if I know how birth control works. It’s for the ones who ask how old I am, like I sold myself short somehow. It’s for the ones who want to know if I’m “done” even though they don’t know my first name.

This is for the ones who say “better you than me” when they see me with my little troop at the grocery store, struggling to fit three grocery bags in one hand while I wrangle four kids with the other hand. It’s for the ones who cannot understand why anyone would want to do this to themselves.

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Dear Stranger, Yes, My Hands Are Full…Read More

How to Be a Toddler Whisperer: 7 Things Your Toddler Wishes You Knew

Inside: If your little one could explain what’s going on inside her toddler brain, this is what she’d tell you. Get ready because this peek inside the mind of a toddler will turn you into a bona fide toddler whisperer.

It’s a proven scientific fact that a toddler will engage you in approximately 57 billion power struggles every day. At least half of those power struggles will set off epic toddler tantrums.

And that’s just the power struggles.

That doesn’t even account for all the other instances of that special brand of toddler fun they bring to your day, like when they color on your carpet with a Sharpie, unlace all your shoelaces and re-tie them with 20 knots, or swallow a dime that gets stuck in their throat and requires a $25,000 surgery to remove. (Ask me how I know.)

Some days, parenting a toddler feels a bit like navigating a field of landmines, while balancing a tray of full champagne glasses on one hand and wearing boots three sizes too big…with your eyes closed.

Bonus: As a bonus for joining my weekly newsletter, download a free cheat sheet of 30 simple ways to connect with your toddler and ease power struggles.

What You Should Know About the Toddler Brain

This ain’t my first toddler rodeo – my third child is in the toddler phase right now. But we just welcomed a newborn into the family, so I’m more sleep-deprived than usual. Which means my patience for those typical toddler behaviors seems to be in even shorter supply lately.

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9 Powerful Phrases That Will Inspire Your Kid to Keep Trying—Even When It’s Hard

Inside: These are the best growth mindset posters because they help kids internalize the crucial message that putting in effort is how you grow your brain.

A few weeks ago, my 4-year-old Bailey was sitting at the breakfast table with a stack of paper, a stencil, and a bunch of colored pencils when she said something that broke my heart.

I’d been washing dishes about five feet away, so I saw her in my peripheral vision, holding the stencil to the paper with one hand and tracing with the other hand.

But then she sat back and said, “I’m not a good artist.”

I glanced up. The corners of her mouth pointed down, and her eyes were starting to fill.

This is the girl who tells me every day that when she grows up, she’s going to be an artist during the day, then at night she’s going to be Wonder Woman and fight bad guys.

But in that moment, I could see her confidence in her dreams slipping away.

I felt a tug in my chest. I turned off the faucet and dried my hands.

Settling into the chair next to her, I asked, “What makes you feel that way?”

“I just can’t do it right. Every time I try to draw with the stencil, it moves and messes it all up.” She hung her head, and I reached out to rub her shoulder.

Download: Get these fun coloring posters for your child to teach them the power of hard work and sticking with a problem.

The problem with negative self-talk in kids

The Problem With Kids Talking Like This

A little self-doubt can be healthy – as long as it drives you to put in more effort and try to improve.

But getting stuck in a negative mindset can cause you to give up on what you set out to do.

As parents, that’s the opposite of what we want for our kids. We don’t want to raise quitters who give up at the first sign of a challenge. We want to raise determined kids who work hard and persevere through challenges until they succeed.

A few kids seem to naturally learn that lesson and need no support to transform moments of self-doubt into a determination to work harder.

But after talking to my friends and reading messages from parents who write to me every day, what seems to be the most common situation is this: Our kids need our help to learn how to catch themselves in these moments of self-doubt.

They need our guidance on how to turn negative self-talk from something that makes them give up – into something positive that drives them towards success.

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Did I Say “I Love You” Enough to Last a Lifetime?

Inside: At the age of 31, with two boys to raise, with a nursing career, and in the middle of training for a half marathon, a stroke was not on my agenda. But this is what it taught me about how to love your children.

Within three months, my world turned upside down.

I’d had a cryptogenic stroke, which left me with Broca’s aphasia and apraxia. Aphasia and apraxia are just fancy medical terms for saying that my expressive communication – speaking and writing – was devastatingly affected.

At the age of 31, with two boys to raise, with a nursing career, and in the middle of training for a half marathon, a stroke was not on my agenda. Strokes very rarely affect someone of my age, but more important than my age was the age of my two children: 4 years old and 15 months.

My kids were much too little, and they needed their mother.

When your world turns upside down and you wonder if your children know you love themThis was taken two weeks after my stroke when I was allowed my first day pass out of the hospital.

This is what was left of me.

Three days after my stroke, the shock had subsided and the gravity of what disabilities I had been left with came into focus. As much as I tried, communication with the rest of the world was not coming back as easy as I would have liked.

My sister was at my bedside, as she was most of the time that I spent in the hospital. We were working on my speech rehabilitation, which was essentially what you would learn in early elementary school. She was reading out sentences that I was supposed to attempt to write.

I sat cross-legged on my hospital bed with a note pad, trying to write “The dog was black.” I couldn’t do it.

After what seemed like an hour, I scribbled “dog black.” I knew that wasn’t correct. I knew I had missed the connecting words of a sentence, but I had no idea what they were. My internal dialogue could say this simple sentence, but when I opened my mouth or put pen to paper, all I could muster was “dog black.”

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Did I Say “I Love You” Enough to Last a Lifetime?Read More

How Your Brain Stops You From Enjoying Motherhood—And How to Fix It

Inside: What’s the secret to enjoying motherhood when the daily work of motherhood drags you down? Thanks to recent brain research, we now know the most effective and powerful way to take charge of this mom autopilot mode so we can enjoy motherhood.

I stood outside my kids’ bedroom door, smiling as I listened to them wrestle and laugh while they were supposed to be putting their pajamas on.

During the day, I’d checked off a handful of items on my to-do list, I’d gotten my kids where they needed to go on time (well, mostly on time), and no one was sick or seriously injured.

Today seemed like a win.

But then my smile slipped, and that relief and gratification started to fade away. New feelings of emptiness and guilt settled deep in my gut.

Bonus: As a bonus for joining my weekly newsletter, download a free cheat sheet of 7 quick fixes to help you enjoy motherhood.

When you find that you're not enjoying motherhood

Here’s What I Realized

After a full day of being a mom to my sweet young kids, I didn’t take the time to stop and be fully present with them. I wasn’t enjoying motherhood.

Instead, my thoughts of daily tasks and to-do’s took control of my day.

  • I didn’t tune into the excitement in my daughter’s voice as she told me all about her solo in the upcoming school concert. How did I forget to pull dinner out of the freezer again?
  • I missed taking a pause during our naptime story to appreciate my 3-year old’s dimple that’s already starting to fade away. Just two more minutes until freedom!
  • I didn’t enjoy the 15 blissful minutes where all three of my kids played with kinetic sand – without fighting. What a mess! I’d better go get the vacuum.

Why Regret Keeps Coming Back

I start out every day with the best intentions of finding time to connect with and enjoy my time with these little people who also happen to be my favorite people.

Papers to sign, field trip money to send, lunches to be made – and that’s just the first three minutes of the day. So much to do and never enough time to do it all.

When you’re caught up in the current of day-to-day tasks, it can feel more like being pulled in by an undertow.

But I don’t want to spend motherhood pulled under and dragged around by all the doing at the expense of being with my kids.

So my question became: What’s the secret to enjoying motherhood when the daily work of motherhood drags you down?

How to enjoy being a mom

The Biggest Hurdle to Enjoying Motherhood

From my training as a family therapist, I know that our brains are wired for survival. They keep us going, even under stress. This means we can perform many tasks throughout the day without thinking much about them. In the span of 10 minutes, we can chop veggies for dinner, mediate a sibling fight, and restart the laundry in the dryer (again).

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How to Boost Your Child’s Emotional Intelligence With the Best Secret Weapon

Inside: Blank journals can work for teens and adults, but most kids need more support for journaling to work well. Here are the best journals for kids that will help your child get all the emotional benefits of journaling for kids.

Some mornings before school, my daughter won’t eat her breakfast, no matter what I say.

“You’re going to be starving when you get to school.”
“This is your last chance to eat for six hours.”
“You won’t be able to focus on anything if you’re hungry.”

She’ll take a bite or two to get me off her back, but that’s it.

Or on other days, she gets home from school, grabs a book, and heads straight for a quiet spot to read, barely acknowledging me or her sisters.

In both situations, I used to needle her for an explanation: What’s wrong? Did something happen today? What are you worried about?

But that never worked, and eventually I got the message. Because when you’re in the middle of real emotional upset, you don’t exactly want someone following you around and incessantly bugging you about it.

How do you help a child who's upset but won't talk about it?

What You Don’t See As a Parent

My child happens to show every bit of emotional upset outwardly, but every child experiences big emotions on a regular basis that they don’t know how to talk about or process on their own.

For example:

  • Another kid might have said something mean to your child, and it’s been eating at her all day.
  • Your child might have received a homework or test grade that made him feel like a failure.
  • Her class might have been running late on their schedule today, meaning your child had to rush through lunch and didn’t get to take a bathroom break mid-day.
  • He might be stressed about having to speak in front of the class soon or about a big project he doesn’t know how to get started on.
  • She might have heard about a birthday party her friends are going to but that she didn’t get invited to.

Every day, our kids encounter moments like this that leave their little hearts bruised.

As parents, we typically don’t know about these moments, and our kids don’t necessarily know how to bring up what happened in a positive, proactive way. Which makes sense because some adults don’t even know how to do that!

So how can we help our kids process these emotions and move forward?

Because if I’ve learned anything from watching Frozen 42 gabazillion times, it’s that “conceal don’t feel” is not a recipe for emotional wellbeing.

And as it turns out, research shows that kids who have a healthy emotional intelligence do better in school, have more positive relationships, and develop more empathy.

Related: 150 Family Conversation Starters That Will Unlock Your Child’s Heart

Kids with a healthy emotional intelligence do better in school, have more positive relationships, and develop more empathyPhoto by Caitlin Regan

How to Help Your Child Learn and Grow From Challenging Moments

Asking a direct question like, “Did anything happen today that upset you?” usually doesn’t work, and as I learned, needling your kid until they spill the beans isn’t terribly effective either.

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