Give the Gift of Connection
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5 Ways to Communicate Love No Matter What (Even in Misbehavior!)
This is part of a series on “Discipline that Connects®: Four Powerful Messages All Kids Long to Hear”. Communicating “love no matter what” when kids misbehave can seem like a tall order. But when these five simple changes come from…
The Five Powerful Results of Empathy
There is no more important time for kids to know they're loved than when they misbehave. If the love message misses them then, they may think that love is conditional. People who believe that tend to rise and fall with their performance and compromise themselves for approval. Not what we want for our kids. So communicate love through empathy!
The Most Important Time to Love Your Child
What might happen if every time we disciplined our children we remembered this powerful message of God's love for us: "See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!" (1 John 3:1).
Four Powerful Messages All Kids Long to Hear
Every parent wants their child to choose good, right behavior. Every family consists of real, mistake-prone people. No one is perfect. How do we teach our children to learn from their mistakes and help them grow up well? 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...
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.…
When Kids Act Up, Don’t Try to Be More Patient…
There are certain time when kids seem especially prone to “pushing our buttons”: after Christmas, after birthdays, summertime, and the list goes on. Kids have trouble figuring out “sharing patterns” for their stuff, everyone’s jazzed on sugar and tired from disrupted…
Uncommon Thoughts About Bullying
What if we viewed bullying the way Jesus the Christ viewed the aggressive pursuits of Saul the Pharisee? In the story, Jesus’ followers have been viciously ‘bullied’ by Saul. But instead of going after him with the penal code, Jesus…