“Many of us parents take our children’s “emotional temperature” several times a day.  We monitor their feelings, asking them to describe those feelings, to express them, to talk about them.  We expect our children to have a complex awareness of their own emotions, with the insight and vocabulary to convey that awareness.  While our intentions are well-meaning  –“Honey, do you think your anger at your sister might also be a little jealousy?  Can you tell her how feel inside?”  — this emotional monitoring has an unexpected effect.  It rushes kids along, pushing them into a premature adolescence…..To dissect and parse that, to push and push, imagining that they are hiding a much more subtle or nuanced feeling or reply, is invasive.  It is also usually unproductive, expect perhaps in making a child nervous.” — Simplicity Parenting, Kim John Payne

Just for today, think in your head how your child feels and connect with that through Continue reading →

“In their consistency, rhythms establish trust.  They offer children a sense of order…the joy of anticipation and the security of things to be counted on, every day.”  — Simplicity Parenting, Kjm John Payne

This is the time of year when many mothers lament to me that they feel like a failure.  “We haven’t gotten enough done in homeschooling!  We will be homeschooling in July!”

“My one main goals this year was to establish a rhythm to my home for my small children and I am still struggling with it.”

Or it can be very black and white:  “I have a rhythm, I stick to it…but there is no joy, no spontaneity, no room for the unexpected.” Continue reading →

We when think of simplicity, we often think of harmony….Yet, I love what Kim John Payne notes in his book , “Simplicity Parenting”:

“As parents we must not become “harmony addicted.”  It’s tempting to hope that every day might be a sort of “rainbow experience” for our children.  Wouldn’t that be nice?  If only we could suspend them in a sort of happiness bubble.  But they need conflict.  As Helen Keller noted, “Character cannot be developed in quiet and ease.”  Children need to find ways to cope with difficult situations; they need to learn that they can.”

The important part of this, for children of all ages, is to have parents who are steady and connected to them during these sorts of touch points of childhood. Continue reading →

Balance means weaving yourself into the fabric of your everyday life.  What moments are for you and you alone? Continue reading →

Watching a sunset.

Planting flowers.

Eating an unhurried dinner together.

Having weekends free for a hike or a visit to the lake.

Being able to kick a soccer ball around the yard together or play catch and watching the dog steal the ball. Continue reading →

I was thinking today about how activities are like circles in our lives: that circle that is a place of worship and all its corresponding activities, this circle that is a beautiful homeschooling group, here is a circle for the activities of this child and here is a circle for the activity of that child…

The circles can be beautiful, like overlapping flower petals..But they can also be so numerous that the center of the circles, the family, is dissected into little bits. Continue reading →