……” or “You must …” or “You need to …” all serve to raise the counterwill instinct. Consequences are also commonly used to get a child to comply, with statements…
…familiar with the attachment-based developmental approach. I’ll try to keep it brief as alarm has a way of shortening our attention spans. But first, some comments on the nature of…
…go to school to give their parents a break, or if coming from troubled homes, to find some safety and stability. The inference, however, in these dogmatic declarations is that…
…coming from within the child to construct, build, create, and so on. This type of play is called emergent play and in this state you see curiosity, imagination, and sense…
…some confidence she could survive this inevitable loss – just as she had survived Trisher’s death. Grandma died shortly after receiving the letter. There were many more tears to come,…
Halloween, among all our traditions, has a visceral feel of tapping into something very deep in our psyche. I am going to talk about fear. There comes a day when…
…the ultimate end-point of a mature adult. Unfortunately life isn’t that neat and tidy, and many of today’s common parenting practices may get us the sock-free living room we crave…
…our family. This can leave us in gut-wrenching contortions, searching for that perfect gift, panicked inside the feeling that we will come up short. Even when we do keep ahead,…
Sometimes in our travels we come upon something that seemed initially like just one more place to visit, only in retrospect to reveal itself as absolutely key to our understanding…
…alarm and frustration had escalated to the point that it was impossible to get him to do anything. Any request coming from an adult was welcomed with the exact opposite…