My son grabbed a toy from his cousin. I said share please. He looked at me and held it tighter. I said it again. Still nothing. I probably said it five more times that afternoon in various configurations. Louder. Softer. With a warning attached. Nothing changed. It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand…
If you’re a bit like me, this might sound familiar. Your child is stuck on something. You can see exactly what the problem is. You could fix it in about four seconds. So you do. It works. Things move on, everyone’s happy. Except something small just happened that you probably didn’t notice. The watering can…
My child used to eat everything – until one day she didn’t. What followed was months of trying to get her to eat vegetables, and eventually learning something unexpected about pressure, control, and letting go. She used to love carrots. That is the detail that made everything harder than it needed to be. As a…
I used to worry my son was “too much.” Too loud, too energetic, too visible in places that expected children to be small and contained. Raising a high-energy boy meant moving through a world that often expects children to be quieter, smaller, easier to manage. My boy was never going to be easy to take…
It happened so many times a day I had stopped hearing myself say it. Good boy. Good boy for eating that.Good boy for getting your shoes.Good boy. It was a reflex. Something that came out automatically, the way careful does when a child runs near something hard. I didn’t think much about it until one afternoon when…