Life balance coach and speaker Renée Trudeau asks a crucial question of all parents and caregivers, what is your intention for the summer? Even though we’re all navigating a lot of chaos, it’s important that caring for ourselves not get shelved. Trudeau offers nine creative ways parents and caregivers can say no when feeling pulled …
Parents and Caregivers: Ways to Say No for Self-Care
Life balance coach and speaker Renée Trudeau asks a crucial question of all parents and caregivers, what is your intention for the summer? Even though we’re all navigating a lot of chaos, it’s important that caring for ourselves not get shelved. Trudeau offers nine creative ways parents and caregivers can say no when feeling pulled …
How to Explore the Connection Between Nature and Art With Kids
In The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, Michael McCarthy wrote, “There can be occasions when we suddenly and involuntarily find ourselves loving the natural world with a startling intensity, in a burst of emotion which we may not fully understand, and the only word that seems to me to be appropriate for this feeling is …
Feeling Out of Sorts? Start With Self-Compassion
We all have days when the harshest critic of our choices is ourselves. That’s why we need to model self-compassion for our girls as parents and caregivers. As life balance coach and speaker Renée Trudeau wisely points out in this article, instilling in your children the value of being kind to themselves can help them …
How to Nurture Creativity in Your Kids
Parents who want their kids to be more creative may be tempted to enroll them in arts classes or splurge on STEM-themed toys. Those things certainly can help, but as a professor of educational psychology who has written extensively about creativity, I can draw on more than 70 years of creativity research to make additional …
Play and Creativity: Help Your Children Play Out a Story
Just about every institution these days is looking for creative individuals. Adults who can innovate in high-quality ways and contribute to the progress of science, engineering and the arts. Creative expressions start from an early age. Children express creativity through “pretend play” – an activity that involves using imagination and make-believe. They make up stories …
Nine Ways to Help Girls Overcome Disappointment
From earning a low test score to losing a soccer game, it can sometimes be difficult for girls to cope when things go wrong. Parenting expert and best-selling author Dr. Michele Borba, Ed.D., shares insights to help them deal with tough setbacks and build resilience along the way. “We can’t—and shouldn’t—protect our kids from losses …
The Benefits of Imaginary Friends for Children
When my younger brother Bryan started telling my parents and me about his imaginary friend, we were worried. Someone talking to themselves can be jarring, even if that someone is four years old. But what my family discovered is it’s pretty normal for young children to have imaginary friends. And it turns out their temporary …
Cynthia Erivo Reads You a Story
Award-winning performing artist Cynthia Erivo is “this close” to getting her EGOT, but she’s not stopping there! Recently, Erivo completed a very special project that’s particularly close to her heart—a children’s book of inspiration drawn from her mother titled Remember to Dream, Ebere. As a gift to millions of fans and young readers everywhere, Erivo …
Five Ways to Help Your Daughter Express Her Anger
Anger is a powerful emotion, yet over and over, women have often been chastised for expressing their frustrations and rage. And kids are watching. A strength of the 2015 Pixar film INSIDE OUT is that the five emotions in the main character’s head (Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger) are shown as a crucial part …
How LGBTQ Caregivers Can Advocate for Themselves and Their Children
Many parents want to ensure that their kids are in classrooms where they and their families are respected and embraced. However, as a psychologist and researcher who has studied LGBTQ parents’ relationships with schools for over a decade, I have found that LGBTQ parents often have specific concerns when it comes to inclusion and acceptance. …