sentimental me

It’s been a sentimental year really. My Mum’s house burnt down in February. She was lucky to get out alive. She had taken a sleeping tablet before bed as there was a raging storm outside. Lightning hit the house in the middle of the night and followed the electricity lines into the kitchen and set […]

pull-ups, not put-downs

In her 1995 Boyer Lecture titled “A Truly Civil Society”, Dr Eva Cox, an Australian sociologist and social commentator, said that our homes are the most toxic places for our children. She said that it was an indictment on our society that children are safer with kind strangers in early childhood services and schools than they […]

kid’s skills

My youngest boy is the kind of kid who develops habits. He has had a habit of sniffing for a while now. It started with a bout of severe hayfever. I cleared up the hayfever by removing all yeast from his diet (bread, crackers, flavoured crisps, sultanas – yeast is in a lot of foods). He is […]

it’s been a hard week

♥ Lots of lessons learnt and dispensed this week. We have always told our boys “friends come and go, but brothers are forever”. I had two brothers growing up and we did everything together. We learnt how to play by playing together, and we learnt how to fight by fighting with each other. Forgiveness was an […]

be the change

Gandhi said “be the change you want to see in the world”. My children were very little when I was studying for my degrees. When I wasn’t busy caring for them I spent a lot of time reading and typing at the computer. My middle boy was about three years old when he set up a desk that […]

he’s doing it for the attention

Many years ago I worked in the disability field. One day I was asked to go to a group home where I had not worked before. It was a busy morning shift , getting the five residents up and ready for their day placements. One of the young men in the home had cerebral palsy. […]

fear versus love

There are two base emotions – fear and love (Dr Bryan Post). How do fear and love play out in our parenting? “How do your words fall on your child’s heart?” Lisa Nichols. Fear-based parenting views the child as “bad”. Love-based parenting views the child as worthy of our love, time, and attention. Fear-based parenting […]

acknowledging feelings

This is an article I wrote for my Hands, Hearts and Minds blog. It is about acknowledging children’s feelings and emotion coaching. A beautiful technique for fostering understanding and resilience with your children (partner, parents, etc). Imagine the following scenario… You like to collect things or grow things or build things. It’s an interest of […]

last for 2012

I have been away writing on several other blogs that I have set up. Some for work, one for professional development, one for the studies on Druidry I have been doing. I have been writing short parenting articles for a local monthly gazette which reaches about 12,000 homes (small stuff but it all adds up). I’ve also had three […]

how quickly they grow

How quickly they grow. In one of the parent groups I facilitated this year, a dad was talking about how proud he was of his 10 year-old son. I can’t remember the specifics but the boy had really thought something through. Having a 10 year-old son myself, I reflected that when your child is 10 […]