Avoiding Power Struggles

It's easy to get into power struggles or arguments with your children. However, once you learn what triggers power struggles, you can avoid them.

The article "Avoiding Power Struggles with Your Children" provides some concrete examples of what to say in order to stay out of arguments. Try it out this week and let me know how it works for you!

Making big internet mistakes

It’s important for our children to be able to make mistakes so they can learn from those mistakes. However, the internet enables children to easily make serious mistakes that can follow them around for many years. In this situation, we are wise to discuss the mistakes other people have made so hopefully our children will learn from those mistakes instead of their own.

One mistake we don’t want our kids to make is to post text, pictures or videos that they wouldn’t want everyone to see. The potential consequences were highlighted last week in an article published by The Seattle Times titled “Teens sending nude photos via cell phones”.

Often people electronically send messages or pictures that they think will only be seen by one or two people. However, anything digital is easy to forward or have fall in the wrong hands. It’s critical to teach our children to think hard before pressing send!

New book for expecting fathers

Expecting fathers now have their own guide written by advice columnist and dad, Harlan Cohen. He covers topics from how to make pregnancy a joyous time to tips for dealing with the new baby. This may be the perfect Father's Day gift for that dad-to-be!

Divorcing parents - advice from a divorced dad

I’ve heard people compare going through a divorce to the turbulence of white water rafting. Negotiating the rapids caused by divorce is made even more challenging when children are involved.

Len Stauffenger is a dad who has been through a divorce, remarried and successfully raised his children. He recently wrote a book, “Getting over It! Wisdom for Divorced Parents”, to help others in similar situations.

This book provides guidance to parents who are going through a divorce and are concerned about how their children will be affected.

Stressed over birthday parties?

A parent lead group has created a web site called Birthdays Without Pressure. The purpose of the site is to raise awareness of the problem of out-of-control birthday parties and to offer alternatives.



The way we celebrate our children’s birthdays teaches them a lot about our values. This web site is a great resource for considering less stressful birthday party options.

Parenting: The Most Important Job You’ll Ever Have

I really believe that parenting is the most important job we as parents will ever have. I was fortunate to be interviewed on this topic on the Giving Zone radio show. You can listen to the radio show by clicking the link below:

Giving Zone radio interview

Hear parenting stories and find out what inspired me to create an online parenting class to share these critical parenting skills.

“I’m bored.”

Summer vacation is almost here and parents are likely to hear their children sometime complaining “I’m bored.”

Whose problem is this? If you’re bored then it’s your problem. However, if your children are bored then it’s their problem. Figuring out how to spend free time is an important skill for children to learn. You can let your child own the problem by responding “What are you going to do about it?”

Another approach is to use empathy along with suggestions for chores that would help the family. You might say “How sad. Well, I sure could use your help pulling weeds or cleaning the bathrooms. Which would you like to do?”

It will be fun to see how they solve their problem of being bored!