by Susie Windle | Jun 23, 2010 | Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, The Power of Play
Cross-cultural research indicates that a father’s warmth plays an important part in a child’s long-term healthy development. Expressions of love and nurturance—such as verbal expressions of love, hugging, cuddling, comforting, praising, and playing—predicted healthy...
by Susie Windle | May 12, 2010 | Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, Your Child's Brain
Beliefs are our ideas about how the world works, and beliefs are at the center of how we get to know ourselves and others. What we believe is cultivated by repeated experiences, which become the basis of generalizations in our minds—generalizations about how the world...
by Susie Windle | Feb 3, 2010 | Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, The Importance of Emotions
Imagine a mother holding and gazing at her baby, perhaps pursing her lips to make a kissing motion. At that, her baby’s lips move inward. Mother then widens her mouth and lips into a slight smile, to which baby responds by relaxing his or her lips, hinting at a grin....
by Susie Windle | Jan 7, 2009 | Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, The Importance of Emotions, Your Child's Brain
Social experience plays a part in the development of emotional understanding. In fact, preschoolers whose parents explicitly teach them about diverse emotions and frequently acknowledge their children’s emotional reactions calmly and with care are better able to judge...
by Susie Windle | Dec 31, 2008 | Discipline and Trying Times, Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills
As Lawrence J. Cohen says, there are a lot of great reasons to choose a “meeting on the couch” over a “time out.”* Whenever a problem of any kind arises, a meeting on the couch will allow parent and child to reconnect. Having “a problem” means that somewhere a...
by Susie Windle | Nov 26, 2008 | Discipline and Trying Times, Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, The Importance of Emotions, Your Child's Brain
Temper tantrums are the expression of intense emotional storms. Because they are so intense, temper tantrums can be frightening to the child experiencing the storm and overwhelming for a parent. To avoid the whole situation turning into a matter of who “wins,” it is...
by Susie Windle | Sep 9, 2008 | Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, The Power of Play, Your Child's Brain
Harold Gardner put forth Multiple Intelligence Theory (MI) in his book Frames of Mind in 1983. Gardner’s theory redefined aspects of human intelligence, and one of the strengths of Gardner’s work was that he could accurately pinpoint parts of the brain that correlated...
