Category Discipline

What If We are Doing It Backwards 2

What If We’re Doing It All Backwards?

Jeni wants her ten-year-old, Timmy, to be more obedient and responsible. What parent doesn’t want this? So when Timmy disobeys, and doesn’t take responsibility to clean up the kitchen as assigned on his chore chart, she enters the all too common battle of wills to get him to do his job.
One of Our Biggest Parenting Mistakes...

One of Our Biggest Parenting Mistakes…

One of our biggest parenting mistakes is to try to get kids to behave right for the wrong reasons. It’s a good thing to want our kids to behave responsibly and to internalize the value of responsibility, but parents tend…

What is Your Child Really Saying

What’s Your Child Really Saying?

It was the first warm day of spring in Minnesota, which usually means MUD. The ground was still soggy from the snow melt, but the air was clean and fresh and the flowers were just beginning to peek through the soil. I was outside with two of our three kids...
Is My Anxiety Holding My Child Back

Is My Anxiety Holding My Child Back?

You have good desires for your kids. You probably want them to learn neatness, diligence in homework, good eating patterns, and all sorts of other helpful habits. But if you are anxious as you try to help them learn better…

7 Practical Tips for Picky Eaters 1

7 Practical Tips for Picky Eaters

It is truly a God-given desire to feed your child healthy food. Unfortunately, this good desire can easily go awry when your child turns up his nose at what you consider to be essential nutrition. A child’s rejection of certain…

Regroup and Resolve

Regroup & Resolve

Every parent fails to deal perfectly with every parenting situation. In other words, we all screw up sometimes! Along the way we’ve discovered that what’s far more important than handling every parenting situation perfectly is to regroup, and resolve well.…

Warnings Make Kids Less Responsible

Do Warnings Teach Kids to Be Less Responsible?

When dealing with a misbehaving child, many parents follow this pattern: instruction, warning, warning, last warning, really strong last warning, angry explosion!! When we stretch out our instructions into multiple warnings and don’t follow through, it teaches our children to…