Heading past the holiday season into the new year is a good time for parents to strengthen an essential skill for caring for our blended and foster families, specifically taking care of ourselves. Self-care sounds like the opposite of self-sacrifice, but it’s actually an important foundation for that trait. Here are five important reasons to use self-care as an important tool in our parenting skill set this year…
This week is Free Speech Week, celebrating our country’s unique rights to express our opinion. Perhaps because I’m a lawyer, or perhaps because I’m just argumentative, I think the right to freely discuss ideas is an essential foundation of a free society. Unfortunately, much of our society uses that freedom to yell angrily at each other, and schools seem to actively encourage students to demonize some opinions.. It is more important than ever that we parents teach our children how to respectfully discuss their point of view with people who have a different opinion…
I’ve been traveling out of the country, so I’m republishing one of my more popular blogs in honor of National Bullying Month. I’ll be back later this week with fresh content. Another problem that we can face with traumatized children is that they can become the bully in a given situation. Children who have…
I’ve written earlier about how challenging it can be to step into a child’s already-existing story, which is what we stepparents and foster parents do. One of the best principles I’ve found for making that transition work to any degree is to learn how to pick your battles. We don’t need to correct every mistake that our children make (assuming that the actions really are mistakes) or join every argument. Most times…
Being a stepparent or foster parent is a challenging task for many reasons, but the highest hurdle may be knowing how and when to provide strong structure for our children. There is no doubt that structure and predictability are important foundations for families. However, there are many reasons we need to make nurture a higher priority for our relationships than enforcing structure…
I am a sucker for off-beat holidays, and yesterday was National Make Your Bed Day. It reminded me of Admiral McRaven’s 2014 commencement speech advising UT Austin graduates how to change the world. His first piece of advice was…
I’ve been thinking through the study I mentioned earlier this week, as well as previous research showing that children generally need less adult involvement in their decisions. Yet we are heading into a season where our instincts and current culture will take us in the opposite direction…
As the school year starts, we know that our children will face numerous challenges. School can be particularly difficult for children who have suffered from traumatic events, and the structure and social interactions there can be just another source of chronic stress. It is tempting to try to help our kids by laying out a blueprint that we know will make life easier for them, such as…
Like most foster, step-, or adoptive parents, one of my biggest challenges has been knowing how to respond to my children’s bone-deep sense that I was not supposed to be in their lives. Children are hard-wired to want a biological parent, and only biological parents, as the foundation of their families. There’s…
As summer starts, many of us start thinking about a family vacation. Meshing schedules for blended families can be challenging, not to mention asking all of the kids to get along. Our family loves to travel, and we have often taken a collection of younger relatives and friends along with us on many trips. Here are some techniques that…
In my last post, I discussed why we need to let our kids emotionally bounce off us. In this post, I discuss how to do that. Here are some important principles that I have learned for dealing with kids in the moment…
One essential and hard-to learn skill is knowing how to respond when our kids are angry, unhappy, having a meltdown, or simply reject us. Children who have suffered trauma are particularly liable to react in all of these ways. The best thing we can do as parents of those children is…