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It’s hard for us—just like it was for our parents—to know how to allow rough-and-tumble play. For one thing, many of us never did it—either because it was stopped by our parents or, in some cases, because we were raised as girls, and “girls don’t roughhouse.”
This post will help you learn why roughhousing —when we do it WITH our kids—can be such a great thing to try. And it will help you get started (and keep going!) in a way that is safe and helpful for everyone.
Read moreI offered a free workshop recently on setting limits without using shame or punishment, and as usual, the questions were my favorite part.
We have so many experiences as parents that challenge whatever textbook parenting advice we’ve received along the way.
Examples include:
“OK, I get that it’s a good idea to set a warm limit! But what do I do when I don't FEEL warm?”
“What do I do if agree with this approach in theory, but then when the sh*t hits the fan, I default back to threats and bribes?
“You’ve suggested that I bring connection when my kids are off track, but doesn’t that just send the message that my kid can act like a jerk and I’ll be nice to them?”
Read moreMy sweet, physical, fierce, tender kid turned 10 two weeks ago.
One decade of him.
Ten years of:
Late nights—oh no, he’s up too late; why won’t he sleep?; reading books x 1 zillion; “come on kid, let’s get those teeth brushed!”
Middle-of-the-nights—feedings; diaper changes; bad dreams; rocking rocking rocking; “I don’t know why I’m awake mama I just am;” phone scrolling; wondering if we’re doing it right/doing enough
Early mornings—sweet baby smell; bright eyes; new words that weren’t there the night before; quiet playtime; exhaustion; Special Time x 1 zillion; rushing rushing rushing to daycare/preschool/school/bus
… and so much time in between full of H, the way he is, the way he has always been.
Read moreWe’re about a month into a move from the US to Spain, and I’m using all my parenting tools to get through it. It’s been hard on me, and on my husband. But our 9-year-old is having the hardest time by far.
In this post, I’ll talk about one tool I’m finding particularly useful as we navigate the inevitable ups and downs of parenting a deep-feeling kid in the midst of a big transition.
That tool is play, or playfulness.
Read moreHere in San Francisco, this coming weekend is Pride weekend. I love this month and the ways I get to see queerness on full display throughout my city.
As a hetero-passing queer person (yes, JIC you didn’t know, I’m partnered with a man but I’ve known I was queer since I was 11), celebrating queerness is important to me.
Read moreLast summer, I completed a yearlong instructor certification program with Hand in Hand Parenting. I spent the second half of the year letting all of the echoes and reverberations of the year bounce around inside of me—and inside of my family and my coaching.
Read moreI taught a class—online, of course—on Sunday and as soon as I saw the lovely faces popping up on my screen, I was hit by a wave of longing for the beforetimes when I got to see and talk to and work with parents in person.
That’s the funny thing about this extended time, isn’t it? How it keeps unfolding and showing us where we have sore spots, even after almost a year at it.
Read moreWe can find joy again in a thing that has felt so much like a “have-to” this year, especially in recent months.
So, here’s my suggestion. Let’s find a way to play in our parenting again, and see if we can do more than just “make it through” the holidays and the end of this very strange, very trying year.
Read moreTo be listened to makes us feel seen, understood, and valued.
To be ignored or have our listening go unanswered makes us feel hurt, afraid, and sometimes enraged.
And, when our kids don’t listen to us, it can trigger a cascade of feelings and worries that reach both backward into the past and forward toward the future.
Let’s take a closer look at listening, and at what happens to us and to our kids when listening falls apart.
Read moreEating—and what, how, and when our kids do (or don’t do) it—is one of the things that many of the parents I support also spend considerable time observing and thinking about.
Read moreBecause supporting families is so important to me, I want to share a few thoughts with you about where my heart is now as white people wake up more and more to the fact of entrenched racism—and how deeply destructive it is to families and communities of color and to our society. I want you to know where I stand, and to ask for your help.
Read moreMost of us have the experience of feeling very angry at our kids at least occasionally. And, more than any other feeling we experience—in parenting or in other aspects of our lives—anger seems to evoke the most shame in us.
Here are a few thoughts about this particularly intense feeling, and how you might begin (or continue) to work with it, especially now.
Read moreThere’s nothing like a pandemic and a complete shutdown of life as we know it to test our mettle as people and as parents. This may be the truest, most direct experience of “parenting as path” that we will ever encounter.
Is it possible to continue to be the parents we want to be right now? Ask me again in a few months, but right now, I feel that it is.
Here’s what I’m practicing and finding useful right now when it comes to my parenting.
Read moreSince I started working with families, I have felt committed to helping parents access two primary things: more ease, and more joy. I’m not sure why these became my words. Heaven knows there’s a list of things as long as my arm that we need more of when we’re parenting. But it felt to me like these were the two things that were hardest for me to come by once my son came along, even if it sounded a bit different when I talked about it.
Read moreI often think about something a very thoughtful dad of two said to me during a coaching session last year. We were talking about his transition home after long days at work, and how hard he tried to come into the house with an open heart and mind.
Things had been very challenging with his 5-year-old son, and he worried about what he might encounter when he opened the door. He worried too about how triggering his son’s behavior often felt.
He tried to shed his day on the commute home, and plug back into family life with energy. But, he said, as soon as he stepped through the door, he felt as if he were “back in the lion’s den again, ready for war.”
Read moreLast month I went on a weeklong silent meditation retreat. I’m fortunate to be able to do this once or twice a year, and to have a partner who supports me in doing it.
I noticed how much lighter I feel after a week connecting with my deeper self. How much more like Me. Not the little “me” that runs around trying to be perfect and please everyone at work and at home, but the Me that can really connect authentically with people, not feel worthless if I fuck up, and offer something meaningful to the people I am trying to help.
But, since I can’t live continuously on retreat—nor would I want to—it begs the question: how can I (re)discover this authentic Me when I’m walking around in my daily life?
Read moreWe were traveling last weekend, visiting my parents in Florida to celebrate my dad’s 90th birthday. It was lovely, but possibly slightly boring for a 5-year-old. So, the day after the party we hit the mall to find some play spaces for him to move his body a bit. (That’s how they do it in Florida!)
The mall had a High Jump—one of those contraptions where they hook you up to a harness and some bungee cords and you can jump super high on a trampoline. Naturally, our kid was like a moth to a flame.
My son had to wait for a couple of other kids before it was his turn, sitting in a little chair inside the ring containing the High Jump. At one point, excited by all the jumping, he stood up. The ride operator immediately barked, “sit down!” He did, chastened.
Read moreHow would it feel to do a little less in your parenting today?
I’m asking myself this question a lot lately, because I find I’ve gotten wrapped up in old patterns of doing MORE these last few weeks, and it doesn’t feel great.
I mean a specific kind of “doing more” here, one that looks like:
Picking out my son’s clothes and putting them on him, piece by piece
Reminding him to take his plate over to the sink when he’s done eating
Talking over him in the middle of a big feeling.
I know why I’m doing all of this, despite my belief (and tangible evidence) that most of it isn’t helpful.
Read moreEvery family has its own heartbreaks, sooner or later.
But how to meet and manage the pain and sadness of these times without shutting down is a whole other story. And having kids complicates how (or if) we are able to work with it. It also raises questions about how much (or whether) to share it with our children.
Read moreOne of the biggest challenges we face as parents is knowing how to respond when our children have a big feeling—when they get angry, very sad, frustrated, or even super excited.
This work begins for us when our babies are tiny, when they sometimes cry for prolonged periods for seemingly no reason.
And it continues as our children grow into older babies, toddlers, and beyond.
How we meet our child’s big feelings will teach them how to meet their own feelings, and, I’d argue, how to understand themselves as they grow.
Read moreFertile Ground Parenting
Caroline Griswold
415.484.8889
caroline@fertilegroundparenting.com
