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Morning Routines – Getting to School on Time without Nagging, Yelling, Fighting…

February 11, 2011 By 19 Comments

With 3 primary age boys and a 12 month old baby, mornings were not necessarily the most serene time of the day. Despite telling myself that I was not going to yell, nag and spend all morning chasing children around the house with a hairbrush…I would wake up early with the best of intentions, only to find myself yet again, running around the house chasing children with hairbrush and toothbrush, whilst trying to find matching socks that were the right colour, style and ankle length in order to succumb to the particular fashion whim of each child. I would drop the children off at school, sweating now from the last minute dash around the house to find 3 gold coins for free dress day, a favourite toy for show and tell, last nights spelling words, the tennis racquet for the lunchtime lesson and the footy boots for the after school footy training. I would kiss them goodbye, be left with the relative peace of a 1 year old, and find myself wondering yet again what all the fuss was about [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Discipline, Modern Parenting, More Joy Less Stress Tagged With: ,

Providing the Right Environment for our Families to Thrive

February 9, 2011 By 2 Comments

Building up resilience in ourselves and our family is certainly something that relies on many different contributing factors. Whilst there are things we have little or no control over and that much of how we cope comes from life experience itself,  I do believe however, that there are many things we can do to help provide the right environment for our children to better enable them to withstand lifes challenges.   Below is a list of what I believe are some of the important ways in which we can help make a difference to the coping abilities of our families. In the future I hope to use these beliefs as a foundation to help explore the many numerous issues faced by parents and adolescents. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Modern Parenting Tagged With: ,

Resilience -Where Does It Come From?

February 6, 2011 By 18 Comments

 

In the months following the death of my 4 month old daughter, friends, family and even those I hardly knew would repeatedly comment on ‘how strong I was’ and how ‘well I was coping’ and how unlike me, ‘they could never have handled something so tragic’. Whilst grateful for the acknowledgement, I found myself thinking more and more about this strength everyone talked about. If they all saw me as so strong, should I continue to ensure that they never saw me as anything else? If I wasn’t being strong, if I was in fact having a really bad day…would they therefore think me the opposite of strong, or at the very least, not doing as well as they thought or were led to believe? Or if I was so strong, when they ‘could never have coped’…did they think I didn’t feel enough sadness? [Read more...]

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The Trials of the Modern Parent

February 2, 2011 By 7 Comments

How does the modern parent survive and even thrive?

So many choices, so little time, so much to contend with, so much to compare to and so much we need to compromise. When it comes to parenting in this ever changing technological society, information overload has led us all to constantly question what it is we are doing and a steady stream of constant media has left us all fearing the worst. When it comes to parenting in the modern era we now have to read the experts, evaluate, give ourselves a performance appraisal, wallow in guilt when we dont get a perfect score, avoid discussing our own test results with friends and colleagues for fear of judgement and constantly come up with newer and more elaborate excuses to justify our childrens “completely out of character” behaviour. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Modern Parenting Tagged With: , , ,
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