Connected Parenting

The holidays can be wonderful, warm and lovely but they can also be really stressful. Kids are tired, they’re sugared up and full of excitement. Unfortunately, excitement doesn’t always feel great in a child’s body. Sometimes it just feels like excess energy that they have to diffuse. With this level of excitement during the holiday season comes a lot of expectations and worry about, are my kids g...

Today I have my favorite guest, Natalie Syrmopoulos, joining me, and we’re talking about how to invest in play even when you’ve had a really stressful day. Like most parents just hearing that probably sounds exhausting, and it not like something that you really want to do. If you can relate, this episode is just what you need. Join us to hear our top tips for how to keep it fun even when you’ve ha...

Today I want to talk about teenage angst and in particular, the age of 15. 15 is a tough age for teenagers that I call that the ‘existential year’. Whether you have a teen this age or one upcoming join me and together let’s figure out what’s going on in their teenager brain, and learn what it is you can do to help comfort and soothe them all while forging a deeper connection. Have you seen my late...

It is unbelievably challenging to parent a master procrastinator. Your days are filled with worry, and an ever-growing pit in your stomach as you watch them play video games, or sit on their phone amidst looming homework due dates and projects that haven’t even been started yet. Often leading you to parent from a place of fear, where nagging, begging, pleading, threatening and the removal of their...

Today I'm going to talk about baby play, also known as limbic bonding. This is one of the pillars of Connected Parenting that includes moments where you deeply connect with your child, look in their eyes, rub noses, put your hands on their cheeks, or play with and tickle them. In those precious moments, incredible things are happening... You're bonding You're building emotional resilience You're s...

Today's an interesting topic --------- I'm going to talk about self-heckling and the broken self esteem that comes as a result of it. Self-heckling is that constant voice inside our head, that says things like... "of course, you couldn't do that", "someone else would do it better than you" "you're a failure" This leaves us or our children and us feeling less than, like we don't matter or that ever...

Today I want to talk about sleep as it is certainly a big issue for not only kids in general but more specifically gladiator kids and even us as parents. This can be especially true right after a high anxiety holiday like Halloween and or the upcoming time change that happens at the beginning of November. Sleep patterns get thrown off or completely tossed out the window. The good news is that if y...

For most kids Halloween and the time leading up to it can be really fun and they love it. But for a lot of very sensitive children the feelings and reactions can be quite the opposite and extremely anxiety provoking. Everywhere they look they are seeing scary images on every lawn, and on every commercial on television, there's images of witches, ghouls and ghosts. If this is something you are faci...

The teen dating scene, has become extremely complicated both for them and us as parents. In fact by the time you listen to this, the scene may have even morphed and changed a little bit again. Social media of course has played a huge part in really complicating things for sure because teens have been given the ability to talk to a number of different people all at the same time. The novelty of the...

Childhood is a time where kids are trying to figure out how to be heard, how to make an impact, when to back off, and when to step forward. They do this by making a lot of mistakes, bumping up against things and learning sometimes the hard, experiential way, what does and doesn't work. Today I want to talk about socially aggressive behavior and bullying, how to help your children if they are victi...

Your kids have been at school all day and then they've probably had after school programs, so by the time they sit down to do their homework at night, they are fried, they are tired, and they don't want to do it. The odd child already has their homework done and is bringing it to you to sign off on but that's very rare. Most kids procrastinate, drag their heels and refuse to do it. Some kids in fa...

Anxiety and worrying get a bad rap. We are taught to think of them as a bad thing and something we have to fight against. This is why it is vital that we help our kids understand the important role anxiety plays in our lives. For instance if we didn't have anxiety, then we wouldn't look twice when we cross the street and that could end very badly for us. The reality is a healthy amount of anxiety...

Sometimes your kid will say things like, I keep thinking of this, or every time I hold a glass, I think about smashing it and they get worried about what they see as troublesome thoughts better known as intrusive thoughts. So today I want to talk about these weird thoughts that come up for all of us at one point or another in different ways, what they are and how we should handle them. The truth i...

Today I have a really unique episode planned with my daughter Zoe. Just in time for the return to school, schedules and keeping everyone on track we are doing a deep dive into the CALM technique. We're going to roleplay and act out some ridiculous things that can happen in our homes and show what the before and after using the CALM technique looks like. If you haven't already listened to my early...

Kids and teenagers exist in time, which means they're almost never outside of time. When you're in time you care about what's happening in front of you and the part of the brain that actually thinks about where you are relative to time is just either not there or not yet developed. This means when our kids are eating their cereal, playing on their iPad or with their Lego in the morning thinking th...

Irrelevant behaviors is something that can be common all the way through childhood and even to into the teenage years. Irrelevant behaviors are the hooting, screaming, shrieking, singing silly songs, doing crazy dances sort of behaviors that really there's no purpose for. They are more like a discharge of energy as if the battery's overcharged and needs a way to get that extra energy out. Often th...

For some kids their anxiety and nerves pick up two or three weeks before school even starts. They really start to get anxious about going back to school. They wonder who is my teacher going to be? Who's going to be my class? Am I going to be able to do the work? Am I going to be able to do what a grade six or a grade five does. For high school kids, it's a huge transition, going from middle school...

Parenting is probably the hardest job we will ever do. Between trying to work, run a household, deal with finances, handle homework, get everyone to bed and be the frontal lobes for the entire house, it can be utterly exhausting. Having said that, even when we are run off our feet, frustrated and worn out we still have to be aware and accountable of how we are speaking to our kids. Not only is thi...

When it comes to money children are very literal. So if we say something like; "We can't do that because we don't have enough money" they think, oh my goodness we don't have enough money. This line of thinking starts them on a money path of scarcity. A belief that there is never enough to go around. It is a belief that carries on into adulthood and quickly becomes a story that we have to try and c...

When it comes to living in a household with members of your family there are always what I like to call the "Must Do's and Can Do's" of life. These include all the things that a family does both together and or separately. The can do's include chosen activities and commitments. Is it something I really want to do? Whereas the must do's are the things that we all take part in as a set rule of each...

Sometimes we worry so much about our children, about how they're doing personally and socially that we come at them from this place of fear for the level of pain they may be in. What we don't realize is that our fear based approach is often activating the very things that concern us and end up taking them into that space where they were previously doing okay. So how do we as parents regulate our a...

I feel like summer is the best time to be a connected parent because it's the time where you are less busy. Usually, there's more vacations, or at least some of the major things that kids are doing during the year have slowed down or stopped and there’s time to connect and regroup. Overall it's a time to really slow down, enjoy life and each other. For this reason I like to make summer all about m...

So this is actually probably the biggest childhood transition that there is. It's a really interesting transition because once kids get to high school, it's something that's very present in their mind. Moving onto the next stage is talked about a lot with parents and teachers. Talks around what marks are needed to get into college and what requirements need to be fulfilled. There's this big thing...

Picture this; you're playing a board game, everything's going fine when all of a sudden your child pulls the wrong card or their sibling does well in the game and the tides turn. Your once happy, family fun night has now become loud, angry, and out of control. You hear; "This game is cheap, I hate this game!" and then sometimes things go even further; the board gets flipped and they stomp away rea...

There is often a lot of talk about moms and what moms struggle with but there's not as much information out there to support dads. For this reason today on the podcast I am talking to my husband Barrett about his 15 years experience with "Connected Parenting". He shares some of the concerns and questions that dads are coming to us with and how we help them figure out solutions to their struggles....