What were your beliefs about a bully when you were in school? I’ll be honest. Until I began doing research on bullying, I thought that kids who were bullies didn’t weren’t being parented well.

I know! Judgy!

I thought that they were just acting like either their parents or perhaps an older sibling or family member. A lot of people still think of bullies this way and you know, society overall tends to be very judgy about parents and kids.

I thought that bullies were just bad kids who loved making people like me miserable. 

But, no one ever had a conversation with me about bullying or bullies at all. 

The truth is that kids who bully are just kids who have not been taught how to deal with their emotions. Now, I’m not going to tell you that all kids who bully decide to target people for the same reason. 

There are many motivators for bullies to do what they do. But right now, I want to talk about what you should do if your child is a...

I recently overheard a conversation going on right next to me between two people. They were discussing the outrageous amount of money that rich people throw away every day on the non-sense type of stuff.

One of them said that if they could only have a few million dollars, all of their problems would go away.

That comment really caught my attention. It made me wonder how many kids believe that money solves all problems or that money can create complete happiness.

I thought about that because that conversation reminded me that I was a kid who believed that money solved all problems. I believed it because that's what I would hear adults say.

But when I became a teenager I learned that those beliefs were merely myths. Overhearing that conversation and thinking back to what I used to believe about people with monetary wealth made me reflect on what “rich” people’s hardships might look like.

I thought a bit about what it must feel like to wake up each day knowing...

My daughter came up to me after a rough week of behavior challenges and asked, “Was I, good kid, today?”

This is to say, I was stunned by that question. I felt awful that she thought she was not a good kid at any time.

I also blamed myself for the way she was thinking of herself. Perhaps I’d been too strict. Maybe my tone was too harsh, but at the same time, I thought about the actions she had done that led to me correcting her. 

Kids can go through phases of defiance. However, they don’t last long if we help kids correct those actions right away. I am not a perfect parent. Believe me. I have a lot of regrets about how I handled some situations. 

Therefore, I try to consciously think things through even when I’ve very upset about something that my kids have done that I don’t agree with. 

As I was having a conversation with some parents, one of them asked me about how to help a kid who has bullied others and is trying to do...

I walked into my daughter’s room and my irritability immediately shot up! After days of reminding her to clean her room, it appeared as if she hadn’t made any attempt whatsoever to improve the mess. 

Can you relate?

Surely, every parent has experienced this type of frustration and anger. As I stood there looking at everything in that room, I realized that a lot of it was my fault. 

It’s A Parent’s Responsibility

You see, my husband and I were the ones who allowed all the toys to come into the house. The high stack of stuffed animals didn’t just appear out of nowhere. And the overfilled hamper hadn’t been checked for two weeks. 

When you make cleaning playful for kids, it doesn’t seem like a burden to do chores.

Similarly, the closet hadn’t been inspected by my husband or me either. Why? Because we were exhausted and we decided to see what would happen if we didn’t stay on top of their chores. 

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