A couple of weeks ago, some of my team and I attended a workshop on Becky Bailey’s Conscious Discipline, an approach to supporting the social-emotional development of young children. While it was created mainly for early childhood classroom settings, Conscious Discipline provides more examples of how to reach children through being in a relationship with them … More Conscious Discipline
Brains aren’t just born. They are also built. If traumatic experiences can harm the architecture of our brains, how can we create experiences that help our kids’ brains become strong, healthy, and resilient? The best ways we know how to build better brains include engaged and attentive interactions with other people. Since 1975, the … More Building Better Brains with “Serve and Return” Interactions
Have you learned your ACE score yet? ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) occur when we are children, and can impact our health and well-being throughout our lifetimes. The understanding of ACEs is changing the landscape of healthcare and community support across the nation. This 5-minute video explains. Ready to discover your ACE score? Follow the link. … More ACEs
I just spent some time on a great website called Lives in the Balance, put out there for parents and educators by Ross W. Greene, PhD. Dr. Greene’s approach to developing social-emotional health (or reducing challenging behavior) is not unlike Tina Payne Bryson’s and Daniel Siegel’s ideas about discovering what social and emotional skills children … More In the Greene zone! If a kid looks bad, it’s because she has some lagging skills
I had a conversation recently with Becky, a LCMFT in our agency. It made me realize that many of the stresses that families have (including my own) are not going to be fixed any time soon. Challenges like poverty, long-term illness, a history of trauma, social isolation, disabilities, and loss of loved ones, are not … More Top 5 Protective Factors for Healthy Families
I’ve heard three descriptions of mindfulness lately that help me understand it better. Here they are, in order of difficulty! (Hardest) Mindfulness is the gap in time when our brain is not using us. It is the moment we can still our thoughts, calm our judgments, and separate who we are from everything we think … More 3 Ways to be Mindful as a Parent
Here is the second way that Dr. Bryson and Dr. Siegel help us picture what happens when we get dysregulated. With this model, they refer to crossing the threshold out of the green zone as “flipping your lid.” Dr. Siegel also talks about how parents can use the hand model of the brain during … More Flipping Your Lid
So much of resilience comes from the ability to create a good response to what happens in the world around us, instead of allowing the more primitive parts of our brains to take over and react with fight-flight-or-freeze. Dr.s Tina Payne Bryson and Dan Siegel provide two different ways we can visualize our brain-states (or … More The Green Zone
My husband and I took our daughter to see the movie Inside Out yesterday. Man, was I impressed! Disney/Pixar used their resources to create a visual and entertaining educational film about basic human emotions, and a little bit about how to use Emotion Coaching with our children. My husband, who is a visual learner and … More Inside Out
Happy Father’s Day to new dads, seasoned fathers, and experienced grandfathers! Are you caring for a new baby? Do you want to know what the baby is trying to say to you? Here is a little dictionary of baby talk for you! Engagement Cues/Talk to Me!: When your baby is comfortable and alert, his eyes widen … More Baby Cheat Sheet
roots of resilience 