Parenting Resources

Effective communication between parents and children is essential for building strong, healthy family relationships. In a parenting workshop setting, communication is emphasized as more than talking—it involves active listening, understanding emotions, and responding with empathy and respect. When parents communicate clearly and consistently, children feel safe, valued, and more willing to express their thoughts and feelings. Positive communication helps strengthen trust, reduce conflict, and support children’s emotional, social, and behavioral development, laying a strong foundation for lifelong relationships.

People think that parents don't have feelings.  Describe in one word how you are feeling today?  Once you have established what you are feeling, how do you usually resolve those feelings?  Are you feeling sad, happy, tired, frustrated? Examining your feelings as parents and trying to decide how that affects your parenting and your children's responses to you is a fantastic way of figuring out how to parent. 

These are the things that no one ever tells you when you are to become a parent.  Everyone talks about the sleepless nights, the fact that sometimes you have no way of knowing why the baby is crying, but no one ever talks about when the time comes to set boundaries, to establish behavioural patterns.  Many people don't know this but establishing these benchmarks start during pregnancy.  

It is during the beginnings of pregnancy that a child begins to assert him or herself. The food cravings, the nausea.  All of these are the beginnings of children asserting themselves and their rights to be.  How we deal with these first feelings establish how we will be as parents.  Do we give into the nausea and the food cravings at the first sign, or do we say to ourselves, eating all of this rich food, which is what I am craving is the best outcome.  If we limit ourselves during pregnancy and establish our boundaries, we are setting the tempo for what kind of parents we will become.