Category: Healthy Discipline and Setting Limits with Children

How To Set Limits That Help Children Sleep

In this post on sleep issues, we talked about using play as a tool that helps children release the minor fears and tensions that hold them back from sleeping well. Sometimes those fears run deeper and play alone isn’t quite all that’s needed to let go of those fears. How Setting Limits That Gently Insist

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Are You Missing This Vital Ingredient to Stop Dinner Time Battles?

We’ve all read the stats. Eating dinner together with our children helps with everything from language skills and emotional resilience, to avoiding drink, drugs and obesity, and scoring better grades in school later on. So we juggle our schedules, shop with care, turn off the TV and take a break from chores. We try really

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Surprise! Holiday Meltdowns Are Actually A Good Thing

  Your child will have big feelings when a special holiday or birthday comes up. It’s one of the phenomena you can set your clock by. We parents wish the universe were governed by forces a little easier on us than this one. But it may help to know that every other family deals with

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Five Positive Things You Can Do To Promote Sharing On Playdates

  Parenting can be all encompassing. It can seem to take us an age to figure out what we can accept and what our boundaries are at home, and then bam! We have to leave the house. What happens when your strategy for sharing between your siblings is working beautifully, but then you go to

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9 Steps to Beat Boredom With Connection: Infographic

What happens to you when your child announces “I’m bored?” Despite research telling us that boredom is actually good for children – it can help foster creativity and independence – most of us try to rush into a solution when we hear those words. Boredom can happen when children become disengaged. Perhaps they are used to

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Listening to Little Kids Helps Them Sleep

By Laura Minnigerode Carmela is 21 months old, and a student in my classroom in a community college lab school. Because she loves to play and is not as sleepy as many of the other children she usually struggles at nap-time. Often, the teachers in the classroom will tell substitutes and student teachers, “Carmela doesn’t sleep

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How to Help a Grumpy Preschooler

  A guest post from Sabina Veronelli Do you sometimes feel like your child has suddenly become grumpy or distant, and you have no idea why? When pre-schooler Charlie starts ignoring his friends one day at preschool and seems distracted at home, his mama wants to get to the heart of the matter. Here, Hand

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Tantrums, Tools and Teachers: Helping Tribal Families Connect

One thing Shelley Macy likes to avoid is being called as an expert, despite the fact she has worked for decades training teachers. Shelley is an early childhood educator working with tribal early learning programs in Washington State and Idaho. She has native heritage but was raised in the white community. “That brings a white perspective,

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How to Say No to Your Child with Love

Saying no can be hard. Some of us avoid saying it if we feel like we just don’t have the energy for another fight and we skirt around saying “No.”  For others it brings up a lot of feelings. Feelings of resentment, guilt, anger or a general feeling of discomfort or unease. These feelings can coerce us

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How Closer Connection Created a Calmer Classroom

I work as a learning assistant in a large comprehensive school supporting children who have a variety of special educational needs. One of the most challenging is an English class with 13 and 14 year olds. About ten children really struggle to engage or focus. One girl in particular has a reputation for being very

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What Playful Limits Look Like at School

Sarah Charlton on Setting Loving Limits  I recently began working as a learning support assistant in a UK secondary school. The job’s going well but there is one girl that I support who has been highly resistant to any help, from me or any of the other learning support assistants. She covers up her work

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An Alternative to Shouting During Morning Upsets

I have done a lot of limit setting and Staylistening with my 5-year-old since learning Hand in Hand Parenting’s five tools, and I’ll admit that Staylistening has been a work in progress. Staylistening comes from the approach that children cry and tantrum to release feelings that are troubling them. Parents might be aware of what

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