Category: Healthy Discipline and Setting Limits with Children

How One Mom Kept Her Limit (and Her Calm) After a Playdate

By Andrea McCracken As the school year has got started my daughter has gotten more and more social, and wants to play with her friends often after school. One day at a friend’s house they had played, had ice cream and done more activities than would typically happen at our house. She was enjoying her

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5 Parenting Tricks To Make Halloween A Real Treat

Halloween is a time for fun, thrills and excitement, but it’s also a time for costumes, candy and chaos. No wonder children can become a little, er, “ghoulish.”

Here’s how you can use Hand in Hand’s Playlistening and Staylistening tools to overcome 5 common Halloween hurdles.

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A No-Fuss Way to Set Limits on Screen Time

My four-year-old son LOVES garbage trucks. He is obsessed with them, and not just the trucks. He loves everything to do with garbage disposal: garbage cans, recycling, compost, trips to the landfill, and the garbage itself. He sorts all of our trash and puts our cans on the curb. He wakes up an hour early

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How To Set Limits In Five Words or Less

Even when we bring our best selves, by not shouting, bribing or threatening children when we try and tell them no, setting limits, and having them listened to, still often feels like an uphill struggle. But there’s a simple way to reach children who are acting off-track. Use touch over words. When children are acting irrationally,

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Sometimes the Answer Just Has To Be “No”

By Andrea McCracken As parents, we often fight with the idea of saying “no” to our children, especially if it means a big upset in public. But sometimes the behaviour that is driving us batty is because children need a definite “no” to push back from. And sometimes the best thing they can do is to push

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Wired to Connect: Discipline Shouldn’t Hurt

Discipline doesn’t need to hurt to be effective. In fact, it’s more effective when the child has a deep attachment to you. The end goal is to provide him with the skills, tools, and motivation to reach his fullest potential.

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Mad Love: or Why We Let Our Kids Get Angry

Teaching kids healthy ways to deal with anger is challenging. It means caring for myself, asking for help through the hardest parts, pushing hard against the door and letting myself growl, “how dare they act like this after all I have done for them today!?!”

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stop yelling at your kids mom stress

15 Tips To Stop Shouting at Your Children

We’ve all been through it. That moment where you catch yourself saying things that you regret later. We all say things that don’t exactly sound like the loving, peaceful parent that we intend to be. It can feel like we are channeling an adult from our distant past, and we wonder why we have lost

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Why Your Child Acts up on Vacation

When a child displays off track and unreasonable behavior, they are often asking for us to bring a limit to help them stop. Bringing a limit to off track behavior can provide the emotional release children need and return them to their balanced, fun loving selves.

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A Fun Way to Get Bedtime to Happen

Having a power struggle at bedtime is hard on everyone. By using Playlistening, my son could save face and get to practice having some power in the situation, which small children rarely do.

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4 Reasons Punishment Is for the Birds

a guest post by Sarah MacLaughlin, LSW I have been in the field of education, child care, or social work for the past 20 years. I have spent my entire life working with young children and their families. This work, paired with hundreds of books, and many trainings on trauma, crisis intervention, behavior management, developmentally

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Using Play to End Sibling Rivalry

I could let my son continue to show me his impulse to interfere with his sister and I didn’t have to yell at him or tell him he was a “bad” kid. I knew there was nothing wrong with my son just because he wasn’t feeling connected and his impulse control was impaired. He needed connection first, before he could have good impulse control.

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Is Your Toddler Too Angry to Sleep?

Is your toddler too angry to sleep? Read on to learn how to read the signs and get a solution.  By Lyra L’Estrange Does it ever seem like your toddler is just unsettled? Can’t be happy? Can’t be playful? And definitely can’t sleep? Are there days where this carries on into the night, and your toddler

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