Author Archives: SarahOckwell-Smith

5 Ways to Encourage Optimal Baby and Toddler Brain Development

Are you wondering how you can best help your baby or toddler to grow and develop? How to encourage their brain, intelligence, language and physical skills? Perhaps you’re looking at the best developmental toys or activities to buy or do? Actually, it’s a lot simpler (and cheaper) thank you think! Here are the top 5 ways to grow and nurture your child to reach their full potential:

Why Fear and Compliance is not the Same as Respect when Disciplining Children

Our society is obsessed with children respecting adults. As children get older, our focus on this respect for elders increases. We tolerate what we deem as ‘disrespectful behaviour’ from toddlers and preschoolers, but once children are of school age our tolerance wanes. We take their backchat, rudeness and refusal to listen or do what we tell them to do as an indication that they are lacking in respect for us and we meet it with punishments, chastisements and consequences. We are wrong.

How to Raise a Financially Literate Child

So many adults today have a poor understanding of personal finance concepts, and I think this lack of knowledge – among other causes – plays a big part in the levels of personal debt and financial difficulties that many struggle with. We really must not leave our tweens’ financial instruction to their formal education because it is severely lacking in schools. I passionately believe that all parents should teach their tweens to be financially literate and allow them to learn to earn, save, spend, donate and budget money in the safety of the family home from a young age. If we don’t, we are doing our tweens a huge injustice that may impact them negatively for many years to come.

5 Ways Dads and Other Carers Can Settle a Breastfed Baby

I’m often contacted by parents who are worried how their baby will settle when the mother is breastfeeding and can’t be around at sleep time (when the baby usually only settles to sleep on the breast). The following 5 tips can help:

Why You Should Make a First Period Box for Your Tween Daughter (and what to include in it)

Making up a ‘first period box’ for girls, before they start their periods (known as menarche), helps them to feel prepared and by demystifying products that they may use, the whole experience becomes far less anxious for them. Making up a first period box also allows you to discuss the different selection of sanitary protection (san-pro) available, so that she can make an informed choice about her preferences.

Why Children are Never Naughty (and what really causes their problem behaviour)

Children (whatever age!) are never just “naughty”. There is ALWAYS a reason for their behaviour. Naughty is the tip of the iceberg, it is a wholly inadequate word to describe what the child is experiencing and it sets us on the wrong path of discipline.

The Bridge Between Two Worlds (a free excerpt from my new book BETWEEN – for parents of 8-13 year olds)

…before you can take a breath, you catch a glimpse of your child as the teenager they soon will be. A certain way they hold their jaw, peer through their impossibly long eyelashes or throw their head back as they laugh. And all at once, you realise that baby is no more. That child is fast becoming grown. Yet, they are not quite there. Life is now a strange dichotomy of big parenting (my term for raising more mature, physically larger children with more complex problems and emotional needs) and little parenting (raising small children with physically exhausting, yet relatively simple needs). This is the world of the in between. The bridge between two worlds. Not yet a teen, but not completely a child either.