Category Archives: Coach

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Beat Boredom This Summer With These 4 Tips

Empowering your kids’ God-given creativity

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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, “I’m bored!” again and again, we may feel the need to fix the boredom problem, and keep our kids happy and busy. Does this work?  Possibly. But, only if you are trying to fix the problem in the short term. Once the activity or event is over, the familiar whine resurfaces. How do we beat boredom once and for all with kids, while at the same time teach them some important life skills? Read the story below about my interaction with a seven-year-old family friend, and consider these four tips to beat boredom in your own family.

Josie looked at me (the “fun guy” at the table) as she announced with conviction, “I’m bored!”

We were at an outdoor restaurant, and she had finished eating before the rest of us.

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Do you Offer Empowering or Trapping Choices?

Grow wisdom instead of defiance in your strong-willed child

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You’ve likely heard the wise advice to give two choices to help empower kids and significantly decrease power struggles. What you may not have heard is how kids often feel “trapped” by the choices parents present to them.

In partnership with Family Life Canada, we produced a number of short videos. Watch to learn how the choices you give your kids might empower them….or make them feel trapped.

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The Peace Process

Teaching Reconciliation In Your Home

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In our Sibling Conflict online course we teach something called The Peace Process, using the steps Calm, Understand, Solve, Celebrate. The story below is from a mom of three who has implemented this process in her own family.

We have three children: a 12-year-old daughter and two sons, ages 8 and 10. Our sons – Henry and Sam, respectively – were going through a period of hassling with each other frequently, and it was significantly affecting the overall vibe in our home. We decided to teach them the Connected Families steps for peaceful reconciliation.

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Should I make my kids share?

How to grow truly generous hearts

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Left to their own devices, toddlers form “rules of possession” that can last a lifetime if not understood and addressed by parents. Does this list look familiar?

  • If I like it, it’s mine.
  • If it’s in my hand, it’s mine.
  • If I can take it from you, it’s mine.
  • If I had it a little while ago, it’s mine.
  • If it’s mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.

Forcing kids to share robs them of the joy of sharing. However, cultivating joy in sharing leads to true generosity. This road of nurturing generosity is a slow process of building a life-long value. So be patient with your kids and yourself!

Armed with the guiding insights and proactive strategies below, you’ll be able to help your children learn to value and even enjoy sharing!

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How Expecting Your Kids to Fight Can Be a GOOD Thing!

Don’t miss a great opportunity to prepare kids for life.

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“He hit me!!!” “She took my marker!”

Have you ever thought – “I am just refereeing 24/7, and I certainly have better things to do with my day. This is just not okay! The fighting needs to stop.”

Unfortunately, the more we have an expectation that our children should not fight, the harder it is to deal wisely with the challenge of conflict.

The reality is that kids fight all the time! University of Illinois professor and family researcher Laurie Kramer, PhD, has found that siblings between 3 and 7 years old engage in some kind of conflict an average of 3.5 times an hour. The youngest kids (those in the 2-to-4 age group) are the most conflict prone at 6.3 conflicts per hour–or more than one clash every 10 minutes.*

Our kids aren’t going to stop fighting. In fact, we can expect that they will have many conflicts. What if we stopped viewing conflict as an unnecessary and irritating interruption, and started seeing it (and conflict resolution training) as an integral part of family life?

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Should I Require Fighting Kids to Apologize?

Read this mom’s story of genuine reconciliation

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Sibling conflict can be discouraging as parents wonder, “Will these kids ever learn to get along? Will they ever be close?” Jim and I wondered that. Our online course, Sibling Conflict: From Bickering to Bonding, is packed with the insights and practical tools we learned. We guided our kids from hurtful, even aggressive conflicts, to the joy, connection and heartfelt reconciliation that has equipped them to thrive in all their important relationships. 

Carrie, a single mom of triplets shared her story of implementing what she has learned in the course:

I watched the segment in your sibling online course about how to guide kids to repair broken relationships. I thought about the valuable opportunity to empower kids for true reconciliation. After bathtime, conflict inevitably erupted among my 5-year-old triplets over who was going to dry off with which towel.

Before the course, I would have quickly decreed who got which towel and commanded an apology: “Sorry.” “I forgive you.” No one would have meant it, of course, and by the time we had all said our well-rehearsed scripts, we would be scowling at each other.

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Finding Sanity During Family Car Trips

5 Tips for Peace in the Back Seat

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“Are we there yet?” “I have to go to the bathroom!” “I want a Happy Meal NOW!” “No, I want Taco Bell!!”

Ahh, the bliss of car-trip vacations. Whether our children are toddlers or teens, the stress of riding in the car together for extended periods can taint the whole vacation. Wouldn’t it be great if we could time-warp ourselves to our destinations? It’s appealing, but obviously not reality. The real-life temptation is simply to equip each child with a glowing device full of their favorite movies or games, and communicate the message… when it’s hard to get along, we just turn to screens to solve the problem. So let’s look at it differently, because a helpful insight for car rides or any other difficult parenting situation is: Every challenge holds a golden opportunity!

The challenge of car rides together is a great opportunity for connection, teamwork, and creative problem-solving.

Here are some practical, simple ideas:

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Equipping Kids to Calm

Practical ways to build your child’s self-regulation skills

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Parents want to be able to help their kids calm down when conflict happens. So it can be quite discouraging when conflicts spiral out of control. If screaming matches are normal at your house, or even if they are infrequent but still troublesome, here are three developmental stages to consider. Whether you have a toddler or a teen, we’ll offer practical tips to help you teach your kids to calm down so they can solve problems well.

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“Go To Your Room!”

Why your child resists and what you can do

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“Here we go again,” you think as your child gets more and more beet red in the face and your voices escalate. Realizing your face color is matching his, shade for glowing shade, you command, “Go to your room!” with as much dominant “authority” as possible! But even if your child complies, you know he hates feeling controlled and grows ever more resentful. You feel stuck, and wonder how this dynamic will look in 5 or 10 years…

To get unstuck from this pattern, it helps to understand how you might feel if you were angrily sent to your room:  Ashamed, intimidated, powerless and defeated? Misunderstood and seething under the surface?

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When Kids Want it NOW!!!

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“I want it! Can I have it? I want it NOW!”

Regardless of how articulate your teen or toddler may be, most parents are familiar with variations of this demand. When we hear this from our kids we’re inclined to quickly pronounce, “No!” and the fight or flight game is on. The two options we’ve given our kids are to 1) give in or 2) dig in and fight. When our kids give in, it’s not because they understand our logic or reasoning, it’s because they know they can’t win the fight. More often, however, they dig in and the power struggle intensifies.

The truth is, whether kids give in or not, simply pronouncing “No!” misses a great opportunity to help a child learn responsibility and wisdom, and our quick, firm refusal may also provoke an even stronger compulsion to get stuff as a way of feeling significant.

So consider this approach instead: