I’m fighting a virus this week, so I’m recycling two of my earliest posts about stepping into the history of a child who has joined our family, either through foster care or forming a new stepfamily. For a thorough exploration of the topic, download my free ebook (and sign up to get these blog posts in your Inbox) here…
As we think this week about helping our kids find lasting happiness, I want to discuss what I see as one of the biggest barriers our kids face. The current philosophy of encouraging our children to think of themselves as perpetual victims is extremely dangerous to our kids, especially those who are trying to…
I ran across some wonderful parenting advice in an article that has nothing to do with parenting. The curator of a model railroad museum explained that hobbies can “really bring that extra spark, the extra ingredient to bring that fulfillment. When you have that, that is a happiness you earn and that is the most…
As we start a new year, it’s a good time to think about how to evaluate the multitude of advice that we get about parenting children who have suffered trauma. We hear about attachment theory, trauma-focused parenting, and a multitude of other ways of parenting from just as many experts. Having parented…
Our children steadily are becoming more anxious and depressed. Even before the pandemic, anxiety disorders and depression increased by 27% and 24% respectively among children. By 2020, 9.2% of kids studied had been diagnosed with anxiety problems and 4% had been diagnosed with depression. During the…
Resilience is one of the most important skills we can teach our kids, as well as one of the hardest ones to instill. One big hurdle is the narrative that our kids tell themselves about their lives. We want them to believe that they can accomplish anything. They often see themselves through the prism of whatever…
Bullying is an ongoing problem for many of our kids, and with the focus of October as National Bullying Prevention Month, we’ll see a lot of suggestions about how to prevent bullying. Contrary to what many parents (and children) think, not every insult or disagreement is a bullying situation. Sometimes a dispute…
Parenting is unique in that, if we do it right in the long run, we work ourselves out of a job. Our most important responsibility is to teach our kids how to develop into adults who don’t need us. Yet, in today’s protective culture, it can be hard to teach our foster or stepchildren the essential trait of self reliance. It’s a…
Most foster parents and many stepparents have to help our kids through bouts of anxiety and depression. Inevitably, the question comes up of whether to opt for medication and how much of it to agree to. Often it seems that therapy isn’t helping, and that medication is the only option. Some articles that I’ve seen…
In my last post, I discussed some important techniques that we can use at home to help our kids find more success in school. In this post, I’ll discuss three more important principles for helping our kids who show symptoms of anxiety or excessive worry about either school or life in general. As with all parts of…
While we are working with the school to help our kids adjust, we can’t forget the rest of the time that our children spend with us. After all, while they spend a lot of time in school, they spend more time at home. That fact raises the question of what we can do to help our kids succeed in school. Some of our kids will…
As we head into the back-to-school season, we need to remember that for many of our kids, particularly foster children, school is a place of failure and added trauma. Not all of our kids are suited for academics, and we may not be helping them by forcing them into that mold. For older kids who struggle with school…