The Upsides of Enforced Slowness in Lockdown with Carl Honoré TPPP36
The Parent Practice Podcast
If you’re feeling really over the whole pandemic thing this episode will lift your spirits. The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly changed our lives. We’ve been forced to accept changes to the way we live in order to try to control the disease, some of which have been inconvenient, to say the least. Some families have found the enforced lockdown extremely difficult and for some isolation has really affected their mental wellbeing. But it hasn’t been all bad. Carl Honoré has written extensively about the benefits of slowing down –he calls it embracing our ‘inner tortoise’ - and...
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Juliet Richards - Navigating Anxiety TPPP35
The Parent Practice Podcast
We are all aware that anxiety is a growing problem amongst our littlies, our tweens and our teens, and a recent Bristol University Longitudinal study ( ALPSAC) has identified that anxiety amongst our young people, children and teenagers has risen over the past 3 months of the pandemic from 13% to 24% during the crisis. So this podcast helps parents understand it and most importantly gives some top tips re what can be done to manage anxiety, reduce stress and how to respond to it. Our guest today is Juliet Richards, who has been part of the facilitation team here at The Parent Practice since...
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Louise Treherne - Helping Children Cope with the Return to School TPPP34
The Parent Practice Podcast
Some of you will have children who have already returned to school, albeit part time, and some of you will have children who will be returning for the first time in September, so this episode has relevance for everybody whatever transition you are going through. Some children are terribly excited about going back and some are quite apprehensive. And parents may have mixed feelings too. Our guest today is Louise Treherne who is Head of Character Education at ‘Role Models’, an organisation which supports children to be resilient and creative problem solvers. Louise has a degree in...
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Michele Borba - Raising empathetic children in an all-about-me world TPPP33
The Parent Practice Podcast
There is no doubt that in this era of the Covid-19 pandemic there has been a huge amount of uncertainty and with that some anxiety. You may be feeling some anxiety yourself and perhaps your children are too. Well, the antidote to stress is empathy and our guest today has many, many ideas about how you can build empathy in your children. Dr. Michele Borba is an educational psychologist and former classroom teacher who is recognised globally as a parenting, bullying and character expert whose aim is to strengthen children’s empathy and resilience, and break the cycle of youth violence. She is...
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Alex Webb - Understanding self for future happiness and success TPPP32
The Parent Practice Podcast
Alex Webb is an experienced coach and facilitator, working with young people on an individual basis and in teams to become resilient leaders. Alex focuses on behaviour change, self-awareness and the understanding of self. Her belief is that if you understand yourself, you can then understand others, allowing you to adapt your behaviour to improve relationships. Her business is called Flying Start and she has been working with The Princes Trust to help young adults with leadership skills and confidence in their Future Leaders Programme. They help young people understand the future of work and...
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Dr Laura Markham -We need to talk about racism - TPPP31
The Parent Practice Podcast
You may have been provoked by the recent death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in Minnesota or by similar events in the UK and Australia, and elsewhere, to think really hard about racism. Were you galvanised into taking part in a protest against racism and against police brutality? Are you wondering how to bring up your children not only to not be racist themselves but to be outraged by discrimination on the basis of skin colour and to speak out against it? If you want to raise children who are going to be kinder, more tolerant adults who will create a better future for...
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Victoria Bagnall -Executive Functioning - TPPP30
The Parent Practice Podcast
Do you have a child for whom there is a disconnect between level of intelligence and academic performance? Do you have a teen who has issues with time management, who can’t get up in the morning? Maybe you’ve even got a young adult who is struggling now that the scaffolding of school has been taken away and they’re trying to manage on their own at university. Do you have a child with a diagnosis of ADD or ADHD or any other neurodiverse condition? Chances are he has executive function challenges. To function in the 21st century with everything we’re juggling we need to have finely tuned...
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Pam Custers - The Primary Relationship is with the Parents not the Children TPPP29
The Parent Practice Podcast
Conflict is normal in a healthy relationship, and relationships have definitely been feeling the strain in lockdown as we’re in each other’s company 24/7 and the division of responsibility in the family around childcare, supervision of schoolwork and domestic duties becomes strained. Parents are used to putting the children first but our guest today believes that the primary relationship is between the adults. The couple relationship can get lost if parents become a child-rearing unit. This episode looks at how we can communicate our needs in an effective way, Pam Custers is an experienced...
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Elizabeth Fletcher - Parenting Apart in Lockdown TPPP28
The Parent Practice Podcast
Right now every couple relationship is being stress-tested. Being forced into close proximity with your other half 24/7 and with other possible anxieties around work and finances and child care and education and concerns about your own and others’ health may mean that cracks are developing. If your relationship was already under strain before the arrival of this coronavirus it may have reached breaking point now. If you’re listening to this particular episode presumably you have an interest in helping children deal with the breakdown of a relationship, whether that is something that...
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Sharon Charlton-Thomson - Radical Self care for the real world we live in TPPP27
The Parent Practice Podcast
Those of us working in the coaching space right now know that many parents are feeling overwhelmed, stressed and depleted as our expectations of ourselves are through the roof. We’re supervising learning at home and many of us are working from home too; we’re getting the kids off electronic devices and coaxing them to take some exercise; we’re sorting out sibling squabbles and getting them to make their beds and put their clothes in the laundry basket, while also cleaning, shopping and cooking, all in closer proximity to our partners than usual. Never before has the phrase “For better,...
info_outlineThis week’s episode is with Bonnie Harris. Bonnie is a parenting and child behaviour specialist. She has designed and taught parenting workshops and coached parents for more than thirty years. Bonnie is the mother of two adult children and three grandchildren.
Bonnie is the author of two books:
· When Your Kids Push Your Buttons and what you can do about it
· Confident Parent, Remarkable Kids, 8 Principles for Raising Kids You’ll Love to Live With
You may have excellent parenting skills. You might have done a lot of work on developing really effective strategies and have spent a lot of time thinking about how to connect in a positive way with your child. But my guess is, since no parent is perfect, you’ve also had moments where you’ve yelled at your kids or nagged them or sent them to their room, and afterwards wondered why you did that, knowing that it only served to push your child away from you. You did it because your buttons were pushed.
Bonnie’s work fills in that essential missing piece of the parenting jigsaw which helps us understand why we react to our children’s behaviour in ways that we later regret, when our buttons have been pushed. Bonnie helps us understand ourselves, to be compassionate towards ourselves but also to access the strategies that we know to be more effective.
Listen to this episode with Bonnie Harris if you want to learn:
- What it is that gets in the way of you responding to your child calmly and with dignity and the great strategies you can come up with in moments when your child is not present.
- About how children have their own agendas and how they can conflict with yours.
- How our beliefs formed in our own childhood present themselves as The Truth when we have children ourselves and hijack our good intentions and leave us responding in ways we don’t like.
- To be compassionate towards ourselves when we lose it. No wonder we had that reaction given what we were thinking and feeling about our child’s behaviour.
- About common buttons –control, responsibility, approval.
- What it was that you were feeling in the moment when you shouted at or threatened or punished your child and what were the thoughts about yourself and your child that gave rise to those feelings. If I’m feeling out of control it is likely to lead to some kind of controlling reaction.
- How to change your feelings by altering your thoughts about yourself and your child.
- How to analyse your expectations and reassess the reasonableness, or otherwise, of them.
- To change your reactions by reframing your perceptions and judgments about your child’s behaviour.
- That in button-pushing moments your children are having a problem, not being a problem.
(These ideas are explored in detail in module ten of our ten week course or in our workshop How to be a Calmer Parent: what to do when your kids push your buttons.)
In our celebration of vulnerability and perfect imperfection Bonnie shares with us a Low Parenting Moment of her own.
And Bonnie also shares her top tip for raising children to be confident, happy and successful.
Links
To get in touch with Bonnie:
Website: https://bonnieharris.com/
Social media:
https://www.facebook.com/connectiveparenting/
www.instagram.com/bharrisconnectiveparenting
Bonnie’s own podcast Roots and Wings will be appearing in the Spring.