Sometimes it can be a good thing to let kids fight. This played itself out last week as I was caring for my niece and nephews (4th – 7th grade). During dinner they began to argue the sort of argument…
Last Christmas I pulled out God’s Word to read the familiar passages of Luke 2:4-20 to my niece and nephews and extended family. The version I read from was the Hawai’i Pidgin Bible (“Da Jesus Book”), a Wycliffe translation of…
Simply stated, kids have tantrums because they pay off. In some convoluted sort of way they get what they want. Even if it means they lose their cool and wear themselves out. The challenge for a parent is determining what exactly a…
“Oh, honey, come here. Let’s fix that.” Or, “Hey kiddo, let’s clean up that mess.” Nearly every parent has repeated phrases like these, perhaps many times. With small kids, there’s probably no harm in using this phrase or approach to…
I just read another decent parenting book by a well-known author. It’s got some good ideas in it about how to manage kids’ misbehavior. But like so many of the parenting books I read, it is laced with what I…
“I wasn’t safe! I need to go to my room to think about this,” exclaimed five-year-old Selah after hitting her infant brother Caleb. It seemed almost miraculous that she would say such a thing.
It starts with our example. Angry kids almost always have angry examples to follow. If those examples are parents, and those parents stay angry over the years, little can be done before their adulthood to re-teach kids about healthy anger.…
Just like us, our kids sometimes react angrily when something important to them feels attacked. First expressions of anger are almost always aggressive. As kids get old enough to express themselves, the aggression becomes words and actions. One day I…
I was mad. Several times in recent weeks our kids had become careless about their toilet flushing habits. So when I went in to use the bathroom and saw the most recent “solid evidence,” I was irritated to say the…
Research has shown that being bored is not such a bad thing for kids. Boredom can foster creativity and patience. Yet, when a parent hears that tired phrase again and again, we may feel the need to “fix” the…