Connected Parenting

Let’s talk about tests.  We want our kids to do well on tests.  Yesterday, I had two conversations that I didn’t think were related, but were.  One was with a mother who has a son in third grade and test prep has been coming up in his school. He goes to a really high-performing school […]

[Read a previous post on: Turning Reluctant Readers into Resilient Readers] This is me as a kid. And, I have a secret to tell you… I was a bad student. I was the kind of student who constantly got calls home with well-meaning declarations from teachers: “she has much potential” but “she just needs to […]

[Read a similar post on: Normalizing Mistakes] The other day, a parent said to me “I know it’s my fault that my daughter is such a perfectionist.” I could tell that she was feeling so guilty. Like all of us feel when we see characteristics we don’t love in ourselves show up in the tiny humans […]

[Read a similar post on: Meaningful, Fun, Celebration] I’ve been thinking about taking pride in the small stuff. Not waiting until a big accomplishment, but noticing the small wins along the way.  For our kids who are struggling with a subject in school, particularly in reading, it can feel like until everything is right, nothing […]

[Read the previous post on: Reading is More Than an Academic Subject] I have been talking to a lot of people about how to help our kids with the transition into school. Yes, we’re getting ready to go back to school. It’s going to be September before we know it, and we do want to […]

“Kids these days don’t like to read – they just want to be in front of a screen!” “I loved reading as a kid, but my child would rather do anything than sit down with a book. Where did I go wrong?” “My kid gets extra frustrated with reading homework. They just won’t put any […]

We want our kids to do well in school. So, we often focus on all the traditional metrics of academic success: Is she completing her homework on time?Is he studying diligently for his tests?Is she behaving in class? But these questions leave out the bigger picture, and forget about the overarching goal that should be […]

It takes so much to just get our kids through the day: we want them to do better in school, get enough sleep, eat healthfully, enjoy some extracurriculars, and have enough time to relax. When our kid acts out, we often think about how we can restructure the things above. Do we need more rules? Higher expectations? […]

I hear this all the time from parents. You sit down to help your child with their reading homework, and almost immediately it’s an argument. …Whether it’s “you’re not explaining it how the teacher would explain it!” or they insist “just tell me how to spell it!” …Or you ask them to write their spelling words, and there […]