Selina Carter, RCC

03/08/2025

❤️ this from Kelly Mahler

Massive lens shift here! And desperately needed!

04/04/2022

“Parents are not to blame because they’re reacting anxiously to a hyper-competitive world with ferocious academic pressures, runaway inequality and technological innovations like social media that propagate unrealistic ideals of how we should appear and perform.

Parents are placing excessive expectations on their children because they think, correctly, that society demands it or their children will fall down the social ladder. It’s ultimately not about parents recalibrating their expectations. It’s about society—our economy, education system and supposed meritocracy—recognizing that the pressures we’re putting on young people and their families are unnecessarily overwhelming."

"Parents can help their children navigate societal pressures in a healthy way by....."

Rising parental expectations and criticism are linked to an increase in perfectionism among college students, which can have damaging mental health consequences.

03/01/2022

"Understanding a bit about how kids perceive the world in each phase of their development helps you deliver information about it in the most age-appropriate way. Of course, every child brings his or her own sensitivities, temperament, experience and other individual traits to any conversation. So use your best judgment as to how your child tends to takes in information to determine how deep to go."

For 2-year-olds to teenagers.

10/25/2021

Yes! 👇
From Institute of Child Psychology

Children’s behaviour is always communication. So often we punish the behaviour, without taking the time to really question what is going on underneath. What is your child telling you? Do they need more connection? Less stimulation? More consistent limits? More sleep? Let’s stop punishing and instead start really identifying and working with the underlying need.

10/20/2021

"Squid Game, the gruesomely violent South Korean series that’s become a Netflix megahit, is clearly not appropriate for children. But that isn’t stopping many kids from being exposed to it."

A reminder of how important it is to not only monitor, but really examine, the type of digital media content our young children & teens are consuming.

The Netflix murder-fest is clearly inappropriate for children, but they are being exposed to it anyway. And teenagers are drawn to dystopian fiction. What parents can do.

10/16/2021

"A parenting mantra to tuck in your pocket:

So many problems can be avoided if we respond with L.O.V.E. instead of reacting in haste…

💞Listen - “I hear you.”
💞Observe - “I see you.”
💞Validate - “I accept you.”
💞Empathize - “I understand you.”

Found on L.R.Knost - Little Hearts/Gentle Parenting Resources

Children are whole people.
They are separate individuals.
They are humans with problems
and plans and goals and opinions
and preferences and interests
and wants and needs and feelings
and good days and bad days and ideas
and anxieties and hopes and fears
and dreams and disappointments that are
just
as
valid
as
ours.
🌱
Give them space to grow and explore.
🌱
Help them if and when they ask for help.
🌱
Encourage them when they struggle.
🌱
Support them when they fail.
🌱
And guide them gently
when they get off course.
🌱
Love is the answer
to every question,
every problem,
every challenge.
🌱
Love is always the answer.
🌱
That is the heart of peaceful,
gentle, respectful parenting.
- L.R.Knost

🌻 🌻 🌻
A parenting mantra to tuck in your pocket:

So many problems can be avoided if we respond with L.O.V.E. instead of reacting in haste…

💞Listen - “I hear you.”
💞Observe - “I see you.”
💞Validate - “I accept you.”
💞Empathize - “I understand you.”

Remember, a need met is a problem solved. Responding with love restores peace — to your relationship, to your child, and to yourself.
-L.R.Knost
________________________________

🌻Peaceful parenting resources: http://t.co/T8goym3P6Z
________________________________
📷

——————————————————

www.LRKnost.com

Fighting a rare, incurable cancer, but I'm still here!💞 L.R.

09/09/2021

Found on TimberNook

It's important to remember that we don't always need to entertain children. ❤

"We are a society afraid of boredom. We are addicted to entertainment and the stimulation of certain neuro centers in the brain. We are losing the ability to just be.

When we deny our children their God-given right to boredom, we are restricting their development.

Do you remember the hours you spent in boredom as a child? We would daydream in the waiting room, stare at the dust motes dancing in the sunlight, invent new games, draw, read, create, research. We were building important neuro pathways. Did we whine to our parents that we were bored? Of course! But we quickly learned that this would only lead to chores or being forced outside regardless of temperature or weather.

When we had a question, there was no Google. We had to ask another person, look it up in a book, or, gasp, ruminate on it until we found the answer within our own brains. We developed common sense and logic, because we were experiencing the world firsthand and engaging our problem solving.

So, don’t be afraid of boredom! Every generation before this one has had to learn to live with it. And they have benefited because of it.

Give your children the gift of boredom." - Homeschooling with the Classics

08/25/2021

Found on All thats left unsaid.

4 yrs later and this is what I needed

05/17/2021

Well said Hey Sigmund - Karen Young !

For way too long, there’s been an idea that discipline has to make kids feel bad if it’s going to steer them away from bad choices. But my gosh we’ve been so wrong.

The idea is a hangover from behaviourism, which built its ideas on studies done with animals. When they made animals scared of something, the animal stopped being drawn to that thing. It’s where the idea of punishment comes from - if we punish kids, they’ll feel scared or bad, and they’ll stop doing that thing. Sounds reasonable - except children aren’t animals.

The big difference is that children have a frontal cortex (thinking brain) which animals and other mammals don’t have.

All mammals have a feeling brain so they, like us, feel sad, scared, happy - but unlike us, they don’t feel shame. The reason animals stop doing things that make them feel bad is because on a primitive, instinctive level, that thing becomes associated with pain - so they stay away. There’s no deliberate decision making there. It’s raw instinct.

With a thinking brain though, comes incredibly sophisticated capacities for complex emotions (shame), thinking about the past (learning, regret, guilt), the future (planning, anxiety), and developing theories about why things happen. When children are shamed, their theories can too easily build around ‘I get into trouble because I’m bad.’

Children don’t need to feel bad to do better. They do better when they know better, and when they feel calm and safe enough in their brains and bodies to access their thinking brain.

For this, they need our influence, but we won’t have that if they are in deep shame. Shame drives an internal collapse - a withdrawal from themselves, the world and us. For sure it might look like compliance, which is why the heady seduction with its powers - but we lose influence. We can’t teach them ways to do better when they are thinking the thing that has to change is who they are. They can change what they do - they can’t change who they are.

Teaching (‘What can you do differently next time?’ ‘How can you put this right?’) and modelling rather than punishing or shaming, is the best way to grow beautiful little humans into beautiful big ones.

05/15/2021

Via Raised Good ❣️

In our over scheduled world how can we slow things down for our kids and ourselves? If we don't the magic of childhood will be over before we know it.

05/14/2021

We must look beyond/under/around disruptive behavior to fully understand it's message -- a child's need for connection. The behaviour, although it may feel like it in the moment, is not an intentional act to destroy, manipulate, or get under your skin. It is a child's attempt to be seen, heard and understood.

Via Growtherapy: Child & Adolescent Mental Health & Wellbeing

What if we got better at seeing the communication of needs that lie behind children's behaviour?

05/02/2021

Useful checklist to help challenge and reframe negative thought patterns.
Via WholeHearted School Counseling