The holidays are here, and they are often accompanied by a deluge of outside opinions on parenting.

Your mother thinks you ought to be harder on your kids. Your husband thinks you should cut the kids some slack. Your great aunt Ruth suggests that a touch of the Christmas brandy on your baby’s gums will clear his teething pain right up. Meanwhile, your social media feed is filled with suggestions about how to gentle parent…and at this point, you aren’t feeling all that gentle.

How do you decide whether you value someone’s opinion on your parenting? Whose parenting advice should you take? What parenting advice can you release?

I prefer to view parenting styles as a spectrum of choices we can make in any given moment. With each interaction, you can choose to respond in a permissive, authoritative, or authoritarian way, aiming for a balanced approach.

For example, let’s say your child begins to run around a restaurant while you’re eating dinner. What might you do?

“No” is a tricky word. You don’t want to eliminate it from your child’s vocabulary completely - after all, a well-practiced “no” will serve them well as they get older!

However, hearing “no” from a child can be a huge parental trigger. After all, it challenges our authority, disrupts our plans, and even evokes feelings of inadequacy or failure at times.

What’s a parent to do when their child throws out a “no”?

There are two answers:

Any toddler parent can tell you that emotional regulation, or the ability to recognize, understand, and manage feelings, is not a skill that kids are born with - it develops over time.

Post-it note towers. Paperclip necklaces. Tape sculptures. What do all of these things have in common?

Answer: they are all creations that I have watched children with ADHD build in “distraction-free workspaces.”

The truth is that there is no such thing as a distraction-free workspace for a child with ADHD, and it’s often counterproductive to try to create one.

You’ve probably heard the hype about reading with your children: reading to your child can build empathy, develop language and cognitive skills, and strengthen the parent-child bond (Child Mind Institute, 2023).

However, children’s books are also a powerful tool for generating discussions with your children about important and complicated topics like…

Parenting a child with ADHD can be a challenge, especially when your child with ADHD seems to constantly oppose anything they are asked to do. Some days, it might seem like your child ignores or outright refuses every directive they are given. But why does your child with ADHD seem so oppositional?

The answer comes down to their brain.

We’ve all been there. Your child has snatched someone else’s toy. The other kid is crying, and now that you’ve crouched down to intervene, you’re being met with stony silence.
What’s a parent to do?

Many of us probably wish that parenting had more shortcuts - magical tricks that would result in perfectly well-behaved, delightful children with little effort and lots of payoff.

Unfortunately, like most things in life, enjoyable parenting is a “long game”, with no quick fixes.

But there is one exception: The Dopamine Detox.

Have you ever felt like the topic you’re explaining to your little one is unbelievably important, but it just doesn’t seem to be clicking? Maybe they seem distracted, or bored, or maybe they just aren’t getting it. I’m here to let you in on a secret tool for connecting with your young child: social stories.