Parenting Your Sensitive Child

This isn’t a typical podcast, but then, this hasn’t been a typical month for us. I took an unplanned break from recording new episodes, and I want to take the time today to share a little bit about what’s been going on for us and why a break was necessary. Going forward, I will publish occasional podcast episodes, but they definitely won’t be weekly. Make sure you are subscribed to the podcast and...

In the spirit of reflection, I want to offer you my own reflections, my own lessons learned over the past year of life with my almost nine year old daughter. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs this year. Our biggest challenges, in retrospect, have been breaking through negativity bias and navigating evolving friendships. Both of these things have created a lot of stress in our lives and have led to...

I want to close out 2023 with a question for you to think about. This is especially pertinent if you were sent to your room a lot as a child or you’ve been immersed in time-out culture as a parent. The question is this: When your child is upset and pushing you away, or attacking you, or running away from you, what if what they (and probably you) think they need isn’t what they actually need? In ot...

I'm publishing this episode a little bit later than I usually do because LIFE, but it's a fun one so here we are. I shared this as an Instagram post a few days ago, but as I'm sure you know, posts fade away much more quickly than podcasts, and I want these reflections to live on in a semi-permanent way. I don't know if you know this, but I used to teach kids yoga. I taught for several years before...

In the last episode, I shared some ideas for how you can regulate yourself when your child is feeling angry. If you’re regulated, you can respond calmly and help them through it rather than getting tangled up in their anger and prolonging their experience. But this just helps them manage. This week, we’re talking about how you can help them with whatever is causing their anger. More specifically,...

As we know, highly sensitive kids feel things deeply. When they’re excited, everyone around them knows it. They bubble over with excitement! Their joy is contagious. But when they are sad, they’re overcome with sorrow. If something is stressful for them, it’s completely overwhelming. Anger, like any other emotion, is also felt in a big way. So if you have a kid who you think is highly sensitive an...

I recently saw a Kids Eat in Color post that talked about the Switch Witch. Do you know that tradition? Essentially, the Switch Witch allows kids to set out their extra candy and trade it in for a new toy. In the video, Jennifer says that the Switch Witch worked great for her oldest child - they loved getting a new toy and had no problem trading in their candy. But for her youngest, the whole idea...

I think one of most of our goals as parents is to raise kids who are problem-solvers. We hear over and over again that this is a real-world skill that this generation needs, and that their creativity and problem-solving abilities will be essential as the job market continues to evolve. This is one of the reasons an approach like collaborative problem-solving sounds so appealing. We want them to be...

In honor of World Mental Health Day, we're talking about giving kids the option of mental health days to use as needed, as well as practicing connecting to our bodies together to help support our own mental health. * Schedule your 1:1 coaching consultation: Prospective Client Consultation - Partnered Path Portal ( coachaccountable.com ) Get full access to The Blackbird Chronicles at juliamcgarey.s...

A couple weeks ago, I saw an Instagram post from Kristy Forbes. Kristy is an autistic advocate and educator with a wealth of knowledge about PDA profile. Anyway, Kristy's post was talking about this idea that we need to get our partner, our co-parent, on our team. This is something that many parents of neurodiverse kids struggle with. On the one hand, you have your relationship with your child, an...

It's happened to all of us. We're right on track for bedtime, or the morning routine is lined up just right to get to school on time, and then... they get stuck. They're dancing in the bathroom and watching themselves in the mirror. They're picking at scabs instead of putting on shoes. They are pulling out the markers to start a drawing instead of grabbing their backpack. Or maybe...

We're going to talk a little bit more today about brains: specifically what being gifted means about a child's actual, physical brain. I'm going to be talking about two concepts, neurobiology and neuroplasticity, and I want to define them for you here at the beginning so that it's clear what I'm referring to when I use them. Neurobiology, at its most basic, is the biology of th...

School is back in session for our family, and that means it's podcast season again. I hope you've had a restful, restorative summer (or winter, as the case may be). We had a lot of family time and some great adventures, and I had the space to do some more personal writing, which has been wonderful. I'm sharing it on my Substack, The Blackbird Chronicles. And actually, I've set a li...

My daughter is at Girl Scout Camp this week, and it's been a challenge for both of us. She's on day two, and it feels very timely to talk about helping our kids do things that are hard for them, and knowing when to give them a little nudge and when to pull back. I'm sharing a reflection of our journey this week, including the clues that I picked up on along the way that led me to encou...

I'm tired of hearing well-intentioned people telling parents that the reason their children do so well at school and are so challenging at home is because they feel safe. Their parents are their safe space. Sure, there's truth in that. But is it actually helpful? For many parents, knowing that they are their child's safe space quickly gets translated to "They're saving it all...

This week we're talking about PDA profile autism. I hope this episode serves as a doorway or a starting point. I'm sharing my understanding of PDA profile and encouraging you - if it sounds at all like your child - to dive deeper and pay particular attention to autistic adults who are speaking up about their experience with PDA. You might check out PDA Our Way FB) , Unschooling Stanley (IG...

I value transparency. I created this episode to share some of the things that I often assume people know about me that are actually really important aspects of who I am and how I show up as a coach. If you've been following the podcast for a while, these things probably won't be new to you, but I wanted to create an episode where they all could "live," so to speak. I wanted to cr...

I want to share a metaphor with you today that is helpful for adults and school-aged kids alike. To be clear, I didn't come up with this metaphor. You may have heard it before. But it can be such a helpful tool, I just had to give it an episode, a place to live on this podcast. This one is all about allowing your emotions, and honoring your emotions, but not being dominated by them. So if your...

I'm sure most of you know what it means to be an introvert or an extrovert, right? Introverts are often more quiet and reserved and they recharge by turning inward, while extroverts are more social and recharge their batteries through social interactions. Super brief summary, but it's a stepping stone to what I really want you to know, and that's that being an introvert and being highl...

I want to share a couple of questions with you today that are going to help you reframe your thinking when your child is being aggressive, rude, disrespectful, destructive, or willfully defiant. Because the minute you peg their behavior as negative, you start looking for ways to shut it down and two things can happen: they either escalate and the situation gets worse before it gets better, or they...

You may have noticed that I didn't share a podcast last week. I was all set to create an episode about identifying your forced yeses - the situations where you are saying yes, adding things to your to-do list, holding yourself to your word because you feel like you're supposed to, when it actually isn't an ESSENTIAL TASK, you've just built it up to be, and practicing saying no inst...

I recently saw a NeuroWild comic about screen time as a regulation tool. It shows a cat skimming across a body of water in a rowboat, and a mouse treading water and being surrounded by jellyfish. I'll put a link in the show notes, but the gist of it was this: everyone experiences the world differently. For some people, the outside world is overwhelming and exhausting, and screens offer an oppo...

This episode focuses on some of the long-term lessons I've taken from my yoga practice and been able to apply to my life as a parent and just life in general. I'm going to focus on four key take-aways, and just know that these are the ones that came to me quickly and easily. Yoga has had a huge impact on my life, it definitely extends beyond these four points. But these really are life les...

If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you might have heard me talk a little bit about gifted kids and the relationship between being gifted and being highly sensitive. I like to acknowledge as I enter into any conversation about giftedness that, yes, the term can be off-putting. But I stick with it because most people understand what it means, and because I believe it's impo...

In this episode we're talking about one of the things that can happen when you start to invite your child into the decision-making process, when you start to build a more collaborative relationship with them. There is so much potential for connection when you make this leap to collaborating with your child. There's also huge potential for things to get way, way easier for your family. It&#...