Your kid comes home from school, slams the door, and collapses onto their bed or the couch (usually buried in a phone or tablet). You know something’s wrong.... but when you ask, all you get is a muttered, “Nothing.”

If our kids are more in the 2-5 range, maybe this plays out differently. When they arrive at home, they either bounce off the walls or just melt down over how you sliced their sandwich.

For many parents, the knee-jerk reaction is to either press for answers or let them stew in their emotions, hoping they’ll come around eventually. But what if we could approach this differently?

Introducing... Empathy. You’ve probably heard of it and, yes, it lives up to the hype.

Gone are the days of parents just reigning themselves to the old cliche’s “You’ll get over it” or “It’s just a phase”. Empathy is about connecting with your child on a deep emotional level, fostering trust, and most importantly, helping them navigate their feelings and recognize them....

Here’s a brief rundown of how you can be empathetic with kids of ALL ages with five simple rules:

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Kids “not listening” is a virtually universal experience of parents, not only for millennial parents, but going back for literally millennia. Before I jump into some practical strategies for more effectively communicating with the tiny humans, I first want to clarify something…

Most of the time, we say our kids won’t “listen,” it’s really not so much about listening as obeying. Now, there is no doubt that if your kid is engrossed in their iPad, you could probably tell them you were taking them to Disney World RIGHT NOW and they still might not look up, but this is the exception, not the rule (don’t worry, I have a hack for that too, later).

Most of the time though, it’s less about “not hearing” than it is about compliance.

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Play is EVERYTHING for kids. It’s how they learn in so many facets of their lives and the benefits of intentionally prioritizing play are overwhelming. That’s why, if you ask me, kids under 12 actually have the potential to learn MORE in the summer months when they don’t have formalized/organized education than they do the other nine months out of the year.

(Trigger warning: this may make you question the formalized classroom 7 hour schooling system... sorry, not sorry.)

I say “the potential” because that learning isn’t guaranteed by any stretch. If we pack their summers with structure and constant organized, adult driven activity, it won’t happen. So let’s dive into why play is important and how we can get the most out of it for our kids while social convention and schedule allow.

The Science of Play

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If your child is melting down after school, refusing to listen, or suddenly “shutting down” around learning, this conversation will likely hit close to home. We unpack what’s really happening beneath behaviors like school resistance, emotional …

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Don’t worry, friend. I got you.

Sibling conflict is unavoidable. There is no mythical “perfect age gap” that prevents it and as a result of reading this will not miraculously go away. That said, as with all things in parenting, there are things we can do that can:

• Help reduce avoidable sibling conflicts

• Help reframe sibling conflict into learning opportunities

• Help reduce the potential long term relational affects of sibling conflict

And wouldn’t life be a whole lot better if we could [at LEAST] do that?

So in an effort to keep my weekly to less than a length of a book chapter, let’s just jump into it.

Here are my three rules to raise good siblings.

Rule 1: No Comparison

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Most parenting advice focuses on what to do when your toddler refuses to listen, has meltdowns, or pushes every limit. But what if the real challenge isn’t just their behavior, it’s what gets act…

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I want you to close your eyes after you read this paragraph and count 10 breaths, as slowly as you can. When you’ve done that, search your mind and memories, and contemplate (for as much time as you can devote to it) the following:

“What did my parents/care giver tell me about who I am?”

Your thoughts and feelings about the above question probably only scratch the surface of the reality of how your primary caregivers shaped with their words. Most people spend years or decades slowly unpacking these things to fully comprehend the immense impact of what our default most trusted sources of information shaped in our self-identity with what they said.

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That question was “Am I totally messing this up?” (sometimes with more colorful vocabulary 🤬).

I had one of those moments again two weeks ago. I could feel my childhood trauma and personal baggage fighting to pull be back into the harmful shame cycles I am trying to break. I was totally overwhelmed and barely surviving. It was literally ALL I could do to just keep my mouth shut, my limbic system in check, and survive until my wife got home from Target....

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This, admittedly way too long email, is what to do when that happens to YOUR kid...

• They get appendicitis and wind up in an emergency surgery;

• They fall off a bike and wind up in an ER with nine stitches in their chin;

• They lose a relative to an aggressive disease;

• They’re in a minor car accident;

• They witness a person on the street have a medical emergency;

• They go to...... the dentist 😱.

All of these things are what I like to call “Everyday Traumas.”

They are regular parts of growing up that usually do not require professional therapeutic intervention but yet can affect kids profoundly, especially if they go unprocessed.

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The bad news is that these everyday traumas of life are unavoidable.

The better news is that with some simple strategies parents can not only help their kids process these events but actually set them up to be more resilient with respect to future everyday traumas of childhood and for the rest of their lives. Remember, everything that happens is an opportunity for growth with our kids provided we engage patiently and intentionally.

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For the rest of this email I’m going to be using an example from my own parenting.

When my son was four, he fell and split his head open on the leg of a coffee table (on the only 3 inch section that wasn’t coated in foam.... unbelievable...) Subsequently, he had to go through two additional compounding traumas: the insertion and then removal of complex stitches at a plastic surgeons office (the latter without local anesthetic) designed to eliminate what otherwise would be an extremely prominent facial scar. After this ordeal what followed was numerous symptoms consistent with someone who has had an everyday traumatic experience in childhood. I processed that the experience with him, in accordance with best practices, as outlined below.

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It’s part of life.... and frankly there is much to be scared about out in the world.

Whether it’s being afraid of the dark, the diving board, or driving on the highway, getting scared is just part of life at every age and every stage (You should see my adult mother with heights).

One of our primary jobs as parents is to be a safe and stable support system in the midst of their fears so that they can feel empowered to go out and face those fears on their own terms, but often times we don’t know what to say to help them feel safe, seen, and secure in the midst of scary things. That’s what this email is about.

Before we jump into that though, I want to make one thing clear in case you just read over it...

I said “on their own terms” and I really mean that.

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It’s not even an actual photo at all, just a memory still-frame

My youngest is screaming on the den floor of a house we no longer live in, wearing a red sweater that “IS SO SO SO ITCHY.” The tree lights are half falling off the tree and just a little too bright. A discar…

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The Arctic tern.

It weighs about four ounces. Roughly the size of a deck of cards and yet it travels from the top of the world to the bottom and back again: from Greenland to Antarctica, tracing a 25,000-mile circuit of sky and sea.

No G…

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Halloween is obviously an exciting day for kids, packed with costumes and trick-or-treating....

But it’s also an OVERWHELMING day as we break from the regular predictable routines and enter chaos mode.

As fun as it is, Halloween is just a lot for yo…

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