Parenting Perspectives

 Children are full of grit! They are so capable! They can be so resilient! As the adults in their lives, we have to help them to build those skills. Angela Duckworth has done some really interesting research on grit, what it means and how it's built. Angela teaches that effort is so much more important than talent in measuring success! I know that from personal experience as someone who doesn't feel naturally talented at many things this can be super hopeful! Persistence can be just as important as natural intelligence. I like that Angela talks about the 10,000 hour rule as well. The idea of the 10,000 hour rule is that you can be successful in something after you spend 10,000 hours deliberately practicing that thing. Deliberate practice is hard but will help to build grit. People with grit will be more successful in life overall. Carol Dweck discusses and researches mindset and how important it is to have a growth mindset. The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset. A...

As humans, we are born with a desire to be connected. John Bowlby studied the attachment that we create as children with our caregivers and he is the primary source for a lot of information in the child development world about attachment theory. Mary Ainsworth was also very influential in the realm of attachment styles as she further studied and classified attachment styles. This video is a super good summary of what each of the attachment styles looks like! I like that this video also shows how it may affect children as they grow up. Attachment Styles A child who is securely attached feels like they have a sort of safe base that they can always return to. They will grow up to have greater trust, better connections with people, and will overall be more successful than their insecurely attached peers. Insecure attachment can be broken up into 3 categories: Anxious ambivalent Anxious avoidant Anxious disorganized Children who are anxious ambivalent tend to have caregivers who they have t...

 It's so easy to get frustrated when children have tantrums or act out. Emotions are such a huge part of our lives! Why would we think that emotions play any less of a part in a child's life? I'll give you a hint-they don't! As adults we have days where we don't want to do what we've been asked to do or days when we just want to cry, but we've learned that is not appropriate and we've learned alternate coping strategies. This is where emotion coaching comes into play. The idea of emotion coaching comes mostly from a man named Dr. John Gottman. Dr. Gottman has done lots of research on this theory and wrote a really good book called  Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child. In this book, he discusses the 5 essential steps to emotion coaching: Dr. Gottman says that most behavior issues can be traced back to the emotions that your child is feeling. I think it is important to remember that there are reasons for the ways that our children act. If we put ourse...