When the News is Scary

Supporting Your Child Through Difficult News

When tragic events dominate the headlines, parents often wonder how to help their children process what's happening. While we might think young children aren't aware of world events, they're incredibly perceptive to their parents' emotions and the atmosphere in their home.

Understanding Your Child's Perspective

Children can't tell the difference between what's close and what's far away, what's real and what's pretend, or what's new and what's re-run. Children experience news differently than adults. They may:

• Struggle to distinguish between repeated video footage and new events

• Feel that distant events are happening close to home

• Have difficulty separating reality from pretend

• Focus intensely on emotional expressions and reactions of people on screen

Creating Security in Uncertain Times

Children's primary concern during crisis is often "Who will take care of me?" Here's how to help them feel secure:

Limit Media Exposure

Turn off the TV when possible. Young children can be overwhelmed by repeated exposure to disturbing images and news coverage. Instead, spend quality time together away from screens.

Maintain Routine

Keep daily patterns as normal as possible. Regular mealtimes, bedtimes, and activities help children feel safe and secure when the world seems uncertain.

Listen and Validate

If your child asks questions, start by asking what they think happened. Validate their feelings by letting them know it's normal to feel scared or sad. You might say, "I'm worried too, but I'm here to take care of you."

Focus on Helpers

Direct attention to the people helping: medical workers, emergency responders, volunteers, and community members. This shows children that good people are working to make things better.

Taking Positive Action

Help your child feel empowered by:

• Reading comforting stories together

• Engaging in nurturing play

• Taking action as a family (making donations, writing letters of support)

• Spending extra time together doing enjoyable activities

Remember: your calm presence is your child's greatest source of security during difficult times. By providing comfort, maintaining routines, and offering age-appropriate ways to help, you're teaching valuable lessons about resilience and compassion.

Adapted from guidance by Fred Rogers Productions, PBS; 2024

Reparenting: A Compassionate Path to Healing Your Inner Child and Thriving as a Parent

When we’re in the thick of parenting challenges, it can feel overwhelming and even lonely. Sometimes, our struggles with our children might be triggering old wounds we didn’t even realize we had. If you’re feeling like you’re falling short as a parent or noticing that certain things in your life just aren’t adding up, it might be time to explore the concept of reparenting. This practice allows us to go back and provide ourselves with the care, attention, and support we may not have received as children.

Reparenting is a powerful tool that teaches us how to meet the emotional, intellectual, and even physical needs we may have gone without in childhood. While this doesn’t look the same as the care we might have needed as a child from our parents or caregivers, the beauty of adulthood is that we have the power to offer this to ourselves. Let’s explore some ways we can begin to reparent ourselves.

1. Practice Self-Acceptance and Acknowledge Your Pain

Many of us who grew up in less-than-ideal situations may have carried the belief that our struggles are somehow our fault. Maybe you were the “mature one” in your family, the one who held everything together, even more so than your parents. It’s possible that deep down, you still hold yourself accountable for the challenges and grief you’ve experienced.

Reparenting starts with acknowledging that hurt and understanding that it wasn’t your fault. It’s not about blaming yourself or denying your pain—it’s about accepting that there is hurt and giving yourself the space to heal. By doing so, you invite your inner child to the surface, allowing yourself to finally feel and process what you needed but didn’t receive.

2. Build Meaningful Connections

As adults, we crave relationships built on trust, mutual respect, and emotional support. Reparenting ourselves often involves unlearning unhealthy patterns and choosing to surround ourselves with people who reflect the healthy dynamics we may not have had growing up.

Healing is deeply connected to the relationships we cultivate. When you build relationships that provide the love and support you needed as a child, you are actively nurturing yourself. Choose relationships that feed your soul and offer encouragement rather than repeating old, damaging patterns.

3. Reparent Yourself Through How You Show Up for Your Children

Your role as a parent gives you a unique opportunity to reparent yourself. As you guide your children through their emotional development, you are also giving your younger self the care and understanding you once needed. Each time you model self-care, emotional regulation, and healthy coping skills for your children, your inner child heals just a little bit more.

This process can be transformative. You’re not only helping your children build healthy habits, but you’re also demonstrating to your younger self that it’s possible to have a loving, supportive parent-child dynamic.

4. Prioritize Self-Care from the Inside Out

Self-care isn’t just about taking a break or pampering yourself; it’s about how you talk to yourself, the thoughts you allow to take up space in your mind, and the way you respond to your own needs. Pay attention to the voice inside your head—is it critical or nurturing? For many of us, reparenting involves quieting the critical voice we may have internalized from childhood and learning to replace it with one of kindness, understanding, and patience.

Take the time to check in with yourself regularly. Give yourself permission to feel what you need to feel, and remember that healing takes time.

5. Re-examine Your Boundaries

Healthy boundaries are key to reparenting. Growing up, you might not have had the chance to set boundaries or have them respected. As an adult, you have the power to create and enforce boundaries that protect your well-being and emotional health.

Reparenting is about learning that your needs are valid, and setting boundaries is a way of honoring those needs. Whether that means saying “no” to relationships or activities that drain you or setting limits with your children, boundaries are essential to creating a sense of safety and control in your life.

Reparenting yourself is a journey of healing and self-compassion. It’s about learning to give yourself the love, care, and attention you deserved as a child but may not have received. This process takes time, but with patience and persistence, you can create a new relationship with yourself that’s rooted in kindness, understanding, and self-love.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed or unsure of where to start, know that you’re not alone. Seeking support from a therapist or coach can be a wonderful first step in reparenting yourself and building the life you deserve. Healing isn’t linear, but every step you take toward self-compassion and growth is a step in the right direction.

Mothering Without Your Mom

Key Steps to Reparenting After Mother Loss: How to Parent Without Your Mother

If you’re a mom who is parenting without your own mother, navigating motherhood may feel even more challenging. The absence of your mother can stir up unresolved emotions, making it harder to parent your own children. You may find yourself seeking ways to cope with the pain while showing up fully for your family. Here are key steps to help you reparent yourself after mother loss, and create a healing journey for both you and your children.

1. Practice Self-Acceptance and Acknowledge Your Pain

Many mothers who’ve lost their own mothers may struggle with feelings of inadequacy, guilt, or the need for perfection. Especially if you grew up in a dysfunctional or suboptimal family, it’s easy to feel that your struggles are entirely your fault. If you were forced to grow up too soon, you might still feel responsible for the grief you carry.

This is particularly true for daughters who lose their mothers—often, they take on roles beyond their years, feeling they are never doing enough. The truth is, without a model for navigating life’s ups and downs, you may have set unrealistic goals for yourself.

One of the first steps in reparenting yourself is acknowledging the hurt. Stuffing down the pain only delays healing. When you bravely accept all your feelings, life satisfaction improves, and you become the role model of acceptance for yourself. Connecting with your inner child and practicing self-compassion can help you heal the emotional wounds left behind.

2. Create Meaningful Relationships and Establish a Support Network

Motherless mothers often crave deep, healthy relationships. Once you begin healing, you open yourself to unconditional love from others who are ready to offer genuine emotional support. However, it’s essential to avoid repeating unhealthy patterns from your family of origin. Seeking support from a trained therapist can help you develop healthier emotional skills and avoid falling into toxic dynamics.

Choosing a support network based on mutual respect, trust, and emotional nourishment allows you to reparent yourself by cultivating the healthy connections you always needed. Surround yourself with relationships that align with your emotional growth, and limit interactions that keep your old pain alive.

3. Reparent Yourself Through How You Show Up for Your Children

Your children rely on you for more than their physical needs—they also need you to model emotional health, self-care, and boundaries. When you demonstrate healthy coping skills, emotional regulation, and self-love, you’re not only parenting your children, but you’re also reparenting yourself.

Each positive interaction with your children is an opportunity to heal your inner child. The way you show up for your children can help you undo the damaging patterns you experienced. Teaching your children how to co-regulate, rather than self-soothe excessively, ensures they grow up with the support and emotional care you may have missed.

4. Practice Self-Care From the Inside Out

True self-care begins with how you treat yourself. You are your constant companion, and your internal dialogue has a significant impact on your well-being. To reparent yourself, you must be kind to your inner child, nurturing yourself with the love and compassion you may not have received growing up.

Pay attention to your negative self-talk, and lovingly correct it. Many people raised in punitive homes carry self-criticism into adulthood, believing they aren’t worthy of love. Practicing self-compassion involves giving yourself the care, attention, and validation that your parents may not have provided.

5. Re-examine Your Boundaries

Establishing healthy boundaries is a key aspect of reparenting yourself. Whether your upbringing was authoritarian or permissive, understanding how boundaries affect your life as a parent is essential.

If you grew up with rigid or nonexistent boundaries, you may find yourself struggling to set limits with your own children. Learning to co-create boundaries with your kids, while modeling emotional health, can shift these dynamics. By embracing healthy boundaries, you ensure your children grow up feeling valued without needing to comply for acceptance.

Learn What Your Parents Couldn’t Teach You

Reparenting yourself takes time and patience, but it’s a powerful way to heal childhood wounds and cultivate a sense of self-worth. By following these steps, you can become the loving, nurturing parent to yourself that you always needed—and create a more fulfilling, emotionally healthy life for both you and your children.

By targeting moms who are navigating motherhood without their own mothers, this blog offers helpful guidance on how to manage emotional challenges and reparent themselves. It also provides actionable steps for those seeking to heal while raising their own children, all while drawing attention to the unique struggles of "motherless mothers."

Learning the Art of Rupture and Repair

How to cultivate self-awareness and self-compassion for the most challenging moments

No matter what your unique situation presents to you as a parent, there are those moments in parenting that can stand out so dramatically in our minds and hearts that we simply wish that we could turn back the clock and get a little “redo” that guarantees that we stay calm, cool and “collected”. But of course, this cannot happen.

What CAN happen are our efforts to seek to understand how a situation was created so that we can better understand why our child acted in a way that we could not - in that moment -understand, and instead found ourselves engaging in a behavior of our own that not only felt awful for us, but for our child as well.

It is vital that as parents, we learn the skills to dig deep into our own relational programming when we were children ourselves to look for every bit of insight to help connect the dots between what we felt as children to what we feel now as parents.

Navigating Fear and Projection

When we witness our child display a quality or behavior that activates the fear center of our brain through our limbic system, we are unable to perceive things as they are, rather than as our fear and misunderstanding project things to be. This can often lead to a “fear spiral” in which all of what we feared would happen to us as children and what may happen to our child now takes center stage in our minds and through our actions.

From Inner Safety to Other Safety

To truly understand our child, we MUST fully understand ourselves. Every relationship we have is based on the relationship we have with ourselves.

This means that in any given moment – especially in the most upsetting and challenging ones, knowing what state of your nervous system you’re in. You can create an inner awareness that then enables you to be more deeply aware of how your child feels as well.

When you recognize the different:

·         physical sensations and emotions

·         thoughts, stories, and beliefs

·         and behaviors and actions of each state you are in, you can take back agency and control, rather than being overwhelmed by what’s happening in your nervous system.

You can engage with it rather than feeling helpless and not understanding why you feel drained, anxious, or overwhelmed in some of your connections.

In the Sympathetic Nervous System state, you may notice:

·         heat, tension tightness throughout the arms, shoulders, and chest.

·         anxiety, agitation, restlessness.

·         you have difficulty switching off or like you can’t relax.

·         you have thoughts like “I’m going to fall short. I’m going to fail.” Or “Something bad is about to happen.

·         you may find yourself becoming argumentative, criticizing, or blaming other people.

·         you may say hurtful things that you later regret.

Repair and Redeem

Relational safety is a major aspect of a health parent/child dynamic. But it is often a very fragile part of the connection between parents and children. Repairing and redeeming a (temporary) relational rupture with your child is a skill that you can develop as a parent by practicing how to notice your intrinsic memories (triggers) from your own past, how to interpret what they mean to you and to understand what “stories” you tell yourself about those past events. To be “triggered” meant that our nervous system perceives a signal of threat in our environment, telling our body and brain to prepare for “fight” or “flight”. It means that our body and brain work together to figure out how to get us to physical and emotional safety as soon as possible.

When you recognize your own thought patterns around how you felt as a child and how you were parented, this can inform you of how you feel in the present when your child behaves in ways that frustrate you, anger you, and cause a great deal of confusion. One of the keys to being able to repair and redeem a situation when you became “unglued” and detached from your inner awareness is to accept that you and your child had a very difficult, upsetting experience with each other, so that from there, it can become an opportunity for more growth that can strengthen your relationship.

Here are the steps that we can practice together in our coaching sessions to help you and your child grow closer together after a very difficult situation. Children are indeed quite resilient, and when given the chance to heard, seen and loved no matter what they have done or how they feel, the connection you both seek can prosper.

Recipe for a Meaningful Repair:

1.     Connect with your child. Seek a time and place when you and they are calm to talk.

2.     Ask consent – ask your child if they are willing to have a chat with you – if not now, let them choose a time

3.     Use an inquisitive approach by starting with saying “I imagine you may be feeling_____”.

4.     Let them know how you’re feeling about what happened: “Because I chose to________”.

5.     Tell them “I regret that I ______ because it caused you to _______”.

6.     Reassure them by saying “In the future, I’ll do my best to ________”.

7.     Share details such as “Here’s what I’ll do right now to help_______”

8.     For now, would if feel good to you if I ______”?

This strategy can certainly be tweaked in any way that makes most sense to you and to your child as it is a situation of trial and error as you become more adept at recognizing your past experiences, your triggers and how they relate to your present feelings and thoughts about who you are and how your child “ought” to be too. Step by step you CAN build a stronger, more empathetic relationship with your child!

If you have questions or comments, I welcome you to reach out to me by email at lifetransition4u@gmail.com or book a complimentary call on the Bookings page!

Parenting from the “Inside Out”

As a parent, how often are you truly aware of what you’re thinking and how you’re feeling when there is unwanted behavior - your child’s and even your own – as a daily presence in your household?

Now more than ever, parents have so much to juggle within the family just to survive our challenging times that it’s all too easy to dismiss what causes the frequent feelings of overwhelm, distraction and simply not being present for our kids as our minds hold a million thoughts at once.

Enter parenting from the “inside out”.

What is this? Parenting in this way is a mindset shift that can take us away from reactions to our child’s confusing behavior toward responses that uses the information we gather about how we’re feeling to inform how we express ourselves to our children.

Part of what makes certain situations when caring for our children so difficult to handle are our selective thoughts and feelings about them and the meaning we give to them. This is what often fuels the automatic and repetitive reactions we have, especially when we find ourselves more confused than ever about why certain behaviors just won’t stop.

Often, our child’s needs will mirror our own, but without some self-reflection on the inside, we are not at our best to respond to our child on the outside.

For example, if our child is crying often or excessively and we feel very anxious or unnerved by this, it is natural to try to figure out why the crying is occurring. But, if we react with our own feelings of anxiety about the crying without first asking ourselves where our feeling comes from, we are not very likely to meet our child’s needs.

We must first meet our own by discovering why crying makes us upset. You may have your own childhood memory of not being heard when you were crying, or you may have been told to stop crying without any help from a parent or caregiver. This can lead to a mistrust of the emotion behind crying as it was not properly addressed.

Here are four tips to help you discern what your personal experiences are so that you can create better connection to yourself:

• Check in with what you are feeling throughout the day and ALLOW it to be okay – NO judgement!

• Observe your thoughts and notice if they are kind and empowering.

• Consider what you loved to do as a child – find a way to do it!

• Respond to the physical needs of your body with kindness.

 Once you can practice this over time, it will lead you to a parenting tool that can help tremendously as you navigate your child’s behavior and your own toward a blending of what you both need in order to have greater harmony in your household.

The overall goal in parenting from the inside out is ultimately to create connection - first with yourself, and then with your child. Although the demands of parenting a very challenging child are many, you deserve to give attention to your own needs as an individual first, in order to be the best for your child as a result of your inner connection.

Parents, your story is valid and valuable! Let’s connect in a FREE 30 minute discovery call when you can share your concerns and I can show you how my services can help you with your most pressing needs.

A Gift for Your Child:How to Supercharge Your Self-Care for Better Parenting

Finding the time and summoning the energy to take better care of yourself as a parent of a child with special needs can feel like a full-time job. But it is a vital need to address - burnout from the highly challenging tasks you face every day, often without any help, will put you and your health at risk.

And as a parent, it can feel like there are insurmountable obstacles standing in the way of any kind of care you can give to yourself. At Prosper Parenting, LLC, we work with parents to create a plan that focuses on parent health and wellness first so that the entire family can thrive, rather than just survive. After all, how can you as a parent give your best to your child when you have not given any attention to your own needs? Despite that our culture deems an excess of busyness and stress admirable, the cost of neglecting your own needs can be far too high when it comes to parenting children with diverse needs.

Caring for a child with special needs is a full-time job — and an overwhelming one at that, especially if you do not have adequate support. Without enough help, parents may be headed toward caregiver burnout, which negatively affects everyone in the family.

The consequences of chronic stress related to raising kids who have intense needs are real. Studies show that parents of children with special needs are far more likely than others to experience:

• Anxiety

• Depression

• Insomnia

• Fatigue

• Chronic Stress

The risks, both emotional and physical, to caregivers of challenging children are important to address, for the children’s sake as well as the parents’. Below, we look at common contributors to caregiver stress and offer some suggestions to help parents stay healthy, balanced and committed to their kids.

Accepting limits to what you can do

Experts agree that part of avoiding or lessening burnout is to challenge the idea that you are the only one who can help and there is no limit to what you need to do.

Dr. Wendy Blumenthal, an Atlanta-based psychologist, says she sees mothers who reach a breaking point because they are driven to shoulder all the responsibility for their high-needs child. “These supermoms — they’re not sleeping, they’re constantly anxious, calling every doctor they can think of.”

“These parents feel like they should be able to do it all and the first thing to go is basic self-care,” says Elaine Taylor Klaus, the cofounder of Impact ADHD, which offers training for parents of kids with ADHD and other conditions. “There are long-term risks of caring for these kids,” she says. “And one of them is that parents burnout.” When the days get especially tough, it is very common to find that parents wind up neglecting the most basic aspects of taking care of themselves such as:

Getting enough sleep every night

• Staying hydrated

• Getting regular exercise

• Spending time away from children

When you have a child whose behavior is difficult or whose needs are challenging, feeling cut off from support and empathy can contribute to the stress. Colleagues, neighbors, friends, family — even your spouse can seem to be on another planet. “

More than ever, parents – and Moms especially – need a clear-cut way to regain some sense of attention and care of their needs, and I am not talking about just the basics. It is likely not quite enough to have the chance to grocery shop alone or take a longer than usual shower to feel revived. Parenting is about nurturing your child, but it is also about nurturing yourself so that you can be the best at what you do, at least more often than not.

Prosper Parenting is here to meet the needs of parents who are falling short of meeting their own needs amid incredibly challenging – and sometimes nearly impossible – tasks on a daily basis. Give me a call at 703-507-3253 to learn more today!

The Road to Resilience – Are You Parenting in Overdrive?

Parenting in today’s world of unprecedented uncertainty and near-constant demands can find parents feeling like they are living in overdrive. The effects of unrelenting stress can leave parents less equipped to handle the unexpected and often overwhelming needs of their children, and for many people, there can be a significant emotional toll.

But, understanding responses to distressing demands can help parents cope effectively with their feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, and can help them along the path to creating effective solutions.

What are common reactions and responses to parental overdrive?

• Intense or unpredictable feelings. You may be anxious, nervous, overwhelmed, or even grief-stricken if a great deal of freedom has been taken from your usual home life routines. It is common to feel more irritable or moody than usual.

• Changes to thoughts and behavior patterns. It may be difficult to concentrate or make decisions. Sleep and eating patterns also can be disrupted, causing a more heightened reaction to stressful events.

• Strained interpersonal relationships. Increased conflict, such as more frequent disagreements with family members and even coworkers, can occur. You might also become withdrawn, isolated, or disengaged from your usual social activities.

• Stress-related physical symptoms. Headaches, nausea, and sleeplessness and even preexisting medical conditions could be affected by parenting stress.

So how can you cope?

It is important to remember that resilience is possible, and prolonged distress is not a state that is natural in any way. There are a number of steps you can take to rebuild emotional well-being and gain a sense of your personal equilibrium, including the following:

• Give yourself time to adjust. Anticipate that this will continue to be a difficult time in your life. Allow yourself to process some of the changes you have experienced and try to be patient with changes in your emotional state.

• Ask for support from people who care about you and who will listen and empathize with your situation. Social support is a key component to parenting a child with special needs. Family and friends can be an important resource. You can also find support and common ground from other parents in your situation to share notes on what has worked for them.

• Engage in healthy behaviors to enhance your ability to cope with excessive stress. Eat well-balanced meals and get plenty of rest as often as possible. If you experience ongoing difficulties with sleep, you may be able to find some relief through relaxation techniques.

• Establish or reestablish routines. Build in some positive routines to have something to look forward to during these distressing times, like pursuing a hobby, walking through an attractive park or neighborhood, reading a good book or simply talking to a trusted friend.

Certainly, there is much more that you can do as a parent to ease some of the burdens you feel as you navigate these challenging times. At Prosper Parenting, we have several options for you as we work together to create better understanding of your child’s needs and behavior while designing the best strategies for making sure your own health and wellness needs are met. You deserve the best, and so do your children!

Book a call to discover how my services can meet your needs.

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