MyParentingSource Articles

Have you ever wondered when your crying baby will rest peacefully? Tried every game and disciplinary action in the book to get your child to eat peas?

At My Parenting Source, we have expert Parent Coaches on hand to help parents with these and other parenting challenges. Just as a star basketball player needs direction at times, we know parents can sometimes use a little guidance.

Feel free to ask a parent coach a question. You'll get a personalized response. And, its free!

Teach your child to manage his anger by giving your child words for his feelings.

Anger often escalates when a child feels misunderstood. Simply enabling your child to communicate by giving names to his feelings can help him feel more calm and be understood.

Is it safe to say that all of us as parents at one point or another have asked our children to apologize? Apologies are transparent when you think about it. The ‘I just want to get out of trouble and get this over with’ apologies are really obvious. With these types of apologies there is li
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Kids’ Friendships Can Last a Lifetime

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The phone rang one night last week, and there, to my surprise, was the voice of an old friend.

Best friends at the age of 13, we’d helped each other cope with recitals, canoe trips, and a plethora of adolescent stumbling blocks. But we’d gone our separate ways after high school and had connected only sporadically over the years. Suddenly, she was not only on the phone, but in town.

We live in the age of disposability. Everything is designed to be discarded – from paper plates to major appliances. It’s shockingly wasteful. What’s more appalling is that we treat relationships with the same abandon.

We don’t take a long-term view of relationships. We’re a country of corporations that relocate and re-staff as routinely as they retool. Our insurance companies imply that counselors, to whom we unburden our hearts, are interchangeable – just close your eyes and pick. If the dry cleaner on the corner annoys us, we go down the street.

As for friendships and even marriage, we move on, perhaps too quickly.

And our children are watching.

Kids learn how to work through the rough spots in relationships by observing their parents. Through you, they can experience that relationships deepen and become stronger and richer through that process. Through you, they can learn to properly treasure and care for the people in their lives.

Show them by example how to be tolerant of irritating but inconsequential things that people inevitably do. Maybe Mom parks a little too close to the middle of the garage. It’s OK; that’s just Mom.
Coach kids to treat their friends lovingly, confront issues and work out differences rather than supporting them in “dropping” someone who has rubbed them the wrong way.
Give them a longer view. Friendships sometimes end – but unless they’re toxic, what’s the hurry? Sometimes having a break from each other and growing a little will allow a relationship to endure.

Taking care of relationships is not always neat. It’s intense, full of emotion and hard work. But the fact is, relationships are not interchangeable. And they shouldn’t be disposable, either.

As for my friend and me? Decades later, it was magically like old times.