Note: This post is excerpted from my latest parenting book, Your Children are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You. There are four specific strategies that are the best way to transmit messages to your children. The aim of each strategy is to provide a pathway for your messages into your children's minds. Catchphrases. For just [...]

Note: This post is excerpted from my latest  parenting  book,  Your Children are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You. A key question you should be asking yourself is: “So how do I get healthy messages across to my children?” Before you can take actual steps to convey specific messages, you need to [...]

Though my focus in Your Children are Listening is on how you can send healthy messages to your children, the message highway is not one way. Your children are constantly sending you messages that you may or may not be getting or interpreting correctly. Your ability to receive and understand those messages can help you [...]

Note: This post is excerpted from my latest parenting book, Your Children are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You. Of course, you love your children and want to send them the very healthiest messages so they internalize the most positive values, attitudes, and beliefs about themselves and the world. But, as many adult [...]

Note: This post is excerpted from my latest parenting book, Your Children are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You. The most important thing that you can do to ensure that your children get the right messages is for you to know what those right messages. This understanding is not a given for [...]

For you to send the healthiest possible messages to your children requires that you fully buy into my notion that children become the messages they get the most. Though it seems to be a pretty intuitive and reasonable concept, I feel the need to thoroughly convince you of the profound value of messages to your children's development. Why Messages? I've always been a bit of a tech geek and first adopter and, for some time, I've been blogging on the Psychology of Technology for a variety of web sites. One concept that I come across frequently in the technology world is "default." For those of you not familiar with what a default is in tech-speak, it's defined as a "preset option: an option that will automatically be selected by a computer if the user does not choose another alternative." Though I didn't understand why for some time, the idea of defaults has always resonated with me and struck me as meaningful at a psychological level. Now you may be wondering what a computer default has to do with raising children. Well, in raising your children, whether you realize it or not, you're creating a set of default options in just about every aspect of their lives. To paraphrase the computer definition above, these child defaults are "automatically selected by children if they do not deliberately choose another option." In other words, your children's defaults are reflexive responses to their life experiences, including their first thoughts, emotions, decisions, and actions to any given situation. Defaults, whether healthy or unhealthy, are so important for children because they are the first option that will arrive in their "outbox" when faced with a choice. If you can "install" healthy defaults in your children, you are increasing the chances that they will choose that healthy option over other alternatives that might be more attractive to them, but also potentially harmful. Read More...

How Do Children Become Who They Become? The key question that intrigues me as both a parent and a so-called parenting expert is: How do children become who they become? Certainly, genetics play a formative role; intelligence, physical attributes, and temperament all have been found to have a strong hereditary component. Evidence is equally strong [...]

I had three experiences recently that were real eye openers for me when it comes to raising children. I have to admit that I don't have too many epiphanies these days, considering that I've worked with children for years, I'm the author of three parenting books (working on my fourth), and I have two kids [...]

The spring is a bittersweet time for young people. For high school seniors, their secondary education is coming to an end and they are either experiencing the highs of acceptance into or the lows of rejection from their first choice of college. For winter and spring sport athletes, their seasons have come to a conclusion. [...]