So often we over-complicate our discipline attempts. Remember this though – not everything has to be a teachable moment. Sometimes, making a small, simple change, is the best thing for your sanity and your child’s safety and happiness. Focus on something YOU can change, rather than expecting them to change.
Author Archives: SarahOckwell-Smith
Helping Children With Low Self-Confidence
A lack of confidence can manifest in many different – and often unexpected – ways in children. At one extreme there’s the quiet, shy child who doesn’t take risks; at the other, there’s the child with challenging behaviour who doesn’t listen, has no attention span and tends to sabotage activities. It’s fairly easy to spot theContinue reading “Helping Children With Low Self-Confidence”
When to Expect Positive Change when Working on your Child’s Sleep (or sleep training)
Working with baby and child sleep is like doing a jigsaw puzzle that has some missing pieces, some placed in the wrong position and a handful of extra pieces from another puzzle that don’t belong thrown in for good measure. Some children need all seven steps to be implemented consistently for them to sleep as soundly as possible, whileContinue reading “When to Expect Positive Change when Working on your Child’s Sleep (or sleep training)”
Why We Need To Stop Calling Children “Naughty”
Labelling children helps nobody, least of all the child. The words we use about children can and do change the way we think about them. If we call a child, or their behaviour, naughty enough we will start to see them that way, which changes the way we subconsciously treat them. The result? We can encourage more of the undesired behaviour, because we are constantly on alert for it.
Losing Heart with Gentle Parenting? Look for the Glimmers!
Have you been questioning your parenting style recently? I think lockdown has resulted in a lot of navel gazing for many of us. The combination of more free time (for some – I know not all, thank you to those of you working hard through this!) and more time spent at home with our children means 1. a lot more difficult behaviour and 2. a lot more time to spend second-guessing ourselves and our choices parenting wise.
Keeping Calm When Your Child Loses Control
When your child pushes your buttons and you feel yourself getting stressed or angry, you should absolutely not discipline him until you are calm. Take a deep breath, hold it for a few seconds, and slowly exhale. Repeat as often as necessary until you can think more clearly. Sometimes you have to give yourself a ‘time out’. That is, move away from your child temporarily, so that you can think more clearly.
Helping Children with Anxiety, when Starting School
Help your child to see that it isn’t school as a whole that is scary but instead there are certain aspects they are struggling with. This doesn’t mean that school itself is bad, or that they will always be unhappy there. Spend some time talking about the things at school that they do enjoy, or are looking forward to, with them and focus on building excitement and happiness on these points. If they tell you that they don’t like anything once started, then ask their teachers to let you know what they have enjoyed throughout the day, so that you can bring it up with them. Finally, empower your child by helping them to realise that anxiety isn’t all bad, it’s a sign that they care about themselves and their brain is trying to prevent them from getting into danger.
Books for Helping Children Deal With Big Emotions
I’m often asked to recommend books to use with children to help them to understand and process emotions. Here are my top recommendations:
Preparing Children for a House Move
Moving house is a major – stressful – life event for adults and is huge for children too. As with any big transition, you can expect a little unavoidable turmoil while your child gets used to the move, however there are plenty of things you can to do help prepare them and make the move go as smoothly as possible. Here are my ten top tips:
What Does ‘School Readiness’ Really Look Like?
A question that seems to crop up again and again among discussion groups is “what do I need to teach my child so that they are ready for school?”, this is commonly followed by questions such as “do they need to know their ABCs?”, “do I need to teach them to read?”, “should we practice phonics?” and “should they be able to write simple sentences?”
Sarah Ockwell-Smith 