Category Discipline
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?
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…
“How Do I Get My Kids to Do What I Want?”
“No matter how hard you try, you simply cannot control another person’s behavior. You can only influence it.” ~Dr. Scott Larson from “When Teens Stray” Parents often ask us, “How do I get my kid to do what I want…
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 & 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.…
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…
What to Do When We Blow Up
As hard as we try to parent like God would, we are human, and sometimes we mess up. We lose our cool, we speak harshly, or sometimes we even blow up at our kids. See how one mom handled…
Did God Spank Moses?
The story of Moses at the burning bush is (thanks to Cecil DeMille and Charlton Heston) one of the most famous stories in the Old Testament (see Exodus 3 & 4). But have you ever read it as an example…
Why Do Kids Obsess Over Video Games?
During my recent reading of “Boys Adrift” by Dr. Leonard Sax, I came across a letter that really grabbed my attention. The letter’s author is a 27-year-old doctoral student at Notre Dame — oh, and he’s addicted to video games.…
How to Deal with an Attention Addict
Recently, on a weekend when all our kids were home, we dug out the family videos for a trip down memory lane (or, in the case of our daughter-in-law, a crash-course in Jackson family history). Our kids’ childhood antics…