Give the Gift of Connection
Tag parents’ stories
The Goal Was to Ask More Questions and Tell Less, But…
If you’ve read much of our content before, you might have picked up on the fact that we like questions. In fact, I often encourage the parents I coach to work toward asking more questions while telling their kids less.…
Anna’s Story: When Traditional Parenting Just Doesn’t Cut It
Anna Braasch, Connected Families Executive Director, has brought a much-needed perspective of building a family through adoption to the team. Formulaic parenting sounds good, but as Anna discovered, it didn’t work with her kids. The hopes and dreams of early…
Learning to Enter as a Coach
Brendon and Naomi are parents to three kids; ages 6, 4, and 2. After completing the Sibling Conflict online course Brendon reported, “This course has had a profound impact on our parenting!” He told us the following story about one…
To Unlock Your Child’s Heart, Just Ask for the Key!
If you are reading this, you probably want your kids to know how much you love them. And you probably tell them often that you do. But effectively communicating love is not always so simple. How can we be…
This Kid Changed Overnight! Here’s How…
Sometimes it takes a while for parents to change in ways that lead to deeper respect from their kids. Sometimes it can happen fast. When Dan attended our weekend workshop he saw an immediate change by practicing what we call…
An Unconventional Solution to a Child’s Resistance
We often see a common parenting cycle when kids are prone to anxiety. In short, it goes like this: Child feels anxious Worried, but well-meaning parent “encourages” the child toward to overcome the anxiety by pushing the child The…
How to Help Your Kids Repent
We received this story from “Shelly”, who was able to communicate love in misbehavior and saw it bear fruit with her 8 year-old-son… This morning my son Garrett was getting into his grumpy, yelling, the-world-is-against-me mode. I asked him, “It…
Possibly the Best Way to Build Wisdom
Asking sincere questions, even with small kids, is a great way to build wisdom. Here’s a story a mom emailed to us that shows the difference between making demands and asking questions. We were getting ready to leave the house,…
So you’re raising a feisty spitfire? Cool!
Julia was a spitfire. When she was a tyke, she was ready to take the world by storm. All who knew her mom, Maggie, knew of this little one’s intensity. Creativity, exuberance, a ferocious snuggle instinct, and excellent vocabulary…
How Your Support Helped a Child Learn to Take Her Own Time-Outs
“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.