Spark & Stitch Institute - Parenting for Courage and Connection

“But I KNOW he can do this! He just did it all by himself yesterday! My child’s behavior is too much right now.” An exasperated parent exclaimed as she explained to me how difficult it had been to get out the door that morning for school.
Another parent recently lamented, “She CAN manage her anger; she is just choosing not to! It is so frustrating!”...

“I am going to be screen free tonight!” I say to myself with conviction. I am already looking forward to a calm and focused evening. “Anything I need to see on my phone can wait until tomorrow,” I think with confidence.
I place my phone on the counter and open the back door to greet my kids coming home from after school activities. They pile in the back entryway and explode into the kitchen, eager to move on from, “Hello” to a project in the basement....

I was recently asked to try to go back to my own childhood and try to remember the things that I worried most about when I was young. Closing my eyes, it didn’t take me long to channel my inner child and generate a robust list of worries that ranged...

Technology and teens. If you are anything like me, on any given day you vacillate wildly between, “Technology is amazing! What a time to be alive!” and, “Throw. It. Out. The. Window.” Such is parenting life in the digital age.
News headlines exacerbate our ambivalence. Media reports convince us that social media is the key to our children’s undoing on one day and the next day declare that there is no effect at all. This means that we are often left to our worries, our gut...