Category: Parenting tips

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How to get time for yourself: Set your kids up for independent play

Create new exciting activities your kids will love and read a novel for a change!

Remember how you used to love to read for pleasure?  You’d spend hours in a well-lit room with a book and at the end of it, you didn’t know a new recipe, have another way to spice things up in the bedroom, or learn how to install blinds.  Instead, you had memories of far away landscapes and intimate relationships with imaginary characters

Ahh, the joy of fiction.

But now, you have kids.  You don’t have time to read for pleasure– right?  WRONG!!!  In fact, it’s more important than EVER that you do WHATEVER brings you joy and pleasure. read more

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What kind of parenting life do you want? Get specific!

This article is kicks off our Whole Life Parenting series, which offers practical tips to meet the needs of both parents and children.

It’s spring. Time to think about renewal, visions, and growing the lives we want.

Do you want to have a life in addition to having a child?

I think that’s perfectly reasonable.

What do you want that life to look like?

Between school, the babysitting coop, and my work with Awake Parent, I talk to parents quite a bit.  I’ve noticed that many parents, particularly parents of young children, are pretty much consumed with parenting. Parenting is their life. read more

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How I averted a power struggle and created a game instead

After I learned to Go for the Giggle, I had an experience with a child in which I could see two distinct choices before me of how to handle a potential power struggle.

It was another afternoon with “Kyle”, six years old, and “Neil”, who was two. I was sitting in the playroom folding the family laundry.

Just as I had almost finished, and was stacking some of the folded laundry into the basket, Kyle ran over and knocked the basket over, spilling the newly folded laundry on to the floor. read more

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Five Keys to Getting Kids to Help with Clean-up

Ever wonder why you can’t get your kids to help clean up?

I know, it seems like a nice idea and all, but how the heck do you actually get kids to want to and enjoy helping with clean up?

At first, I didn’t think it was possible either. But it turns out, I was grossly underestimating young people.

In fact, during my first year as a preschool teacher in a Montessori school, my limited ideas of the kids’ cleaning capabilities were completely blown out of the water!

I looked around the classroom and saw three-year-olds sweeping, mopping, dusting, and helping each other clean up messes! read more

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Go for the giggle: your secret parenting tool revealed

Wanna have more fun with your kids AND keep your heart healthy?

Then try Going for the Giggle!

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We’ve all heard the old adage “Laughter is the best medicine.”

Well… guess what?

It’s really true!

Recent heart and blood vessel research shows that laughter may actually help prevent heart disease!  By laughing more with your family, you’ll have more fun and connection while supporting healthy hearts all around.

Here at Awake Parent, we’re big fans of letting kids release their feelings- but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck listening to screaming, crying kids all the time! read more

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