Is Your Children's Behavior In Public A Reflection On You?

My Two girls, minus their brother.

What I mean is, when you go out in public and your children act up and act like little hoodlems, does it make you look like a bad parent?

I don't feel that it does. At home, I try to run a tight ship as much as possible. I let them have freedom at home, but within the rules and expectations that we have set in place for them and that we remind them about them when needed. Even when we are in public, I expect my children to act and behave appropriately. But I guess I'm not doing that great of a job, because my kids feel that it's perfectly ok to jump around in a booth, sit on the table and make tons of noise while waiting to order our food. Granted, it took us a half hour of this going on and on and me standing in line at our local Wendy's to order food. I finally got pissed off and left. I got in the car, went to the drive thru and got our food in three minutes. Yep! This Wendy's was catering to ALL of the people in the drive thru, and I mean, all of them. No one got their food who had placed their orders at the register until a half hour after doing so. Guess you can't call them a fast food restaurant anymore! I won't be going back to that Wendy's to sit inside anymore, ever again! It's not worth the hassle and stress that it brought me and my two girls that day.

I can't take all three kids grocery shopping either. They open and close ALL of the doors in the freezer sections. They walk in front of other people, run up and down the isles and more. I get stressed out by the time we are half way through the store. Sometimes so much, that I let them pick out a $5.00 or less toy, candy or container of cookies and let them carry it through the store with the promise to buy it for them if they behave. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. I have gotten to the register and had three crying and upset children because they didn't behave, so I took their goodies away! Oh well, not my problem. They should have behaved and not acted up in public! This is the way I feel! They should listen, stay near me and behave. But of course, this is a place in which they seem to get bored while I grab groceries, even if I try to play I Spy with them or have them help me grab things on our list.

So, what do you think? When you see children acting out in a restaurant or grocery store, what do you think about the parent(s)? I am usually always alone out some place in public with my kids. I even had someone tell me that they thought I was a single mom!

"Raising Kids To Thrive: Balancing Love With Expectations and Protection With Trust" Book Review! @healthychildren #raisingkidstothrive #drkenginsburg

American Academy of Pediatrics Releases New Book from Best-Selling Author: Raising Kids To Thrive: Balancing Love With Expectations and Protection With Trust

Renowned Resilience Expert, Ken Ginsburg MD, MS ED, FAAP, Combines His Experience with Perspective from His Teenage Daughters and Over 500 Adolescents

In his latest book -- Raising Kids to Thrive: Balancing Love With Expectations and Protection With Trust (American Academy of Pediatrics, March 24, 2015) -- best-selling author, pediatrician and resilience expert, Kenneth R. Ginsburg, MD, MS Ed, FAAP, offers essential tips on fostering resilience in teens. He gently helps parents understand how they can meet the challenge to balance unconditional love, yet still hold high expectations for their children. Through his “Lighthouse Parenting Strategy,” he also helps parents recognize when to set boundaries and when to get out of kids’ ways.

This groundbreaking book includes two chapters written by Dr. Ginsburg’s twin teenage daughters, and interweaves opinions and input of over 500 adolescents who participated in the “Youth View” chapters. By combining the wealth of experience from Dr. Ginsburg and insightful commentary from today’s teenagers, Raising Kids to Thrive offers a fresh take on how to successfully parent teens in today’s complicated world.

Raising Kids to Thrive will help parents to raise kids who thrive for lifetime by:

• Balancing unconditional love with high expectations.
• Eliminate the need for helicopter or “tiger” parenting.
• Start meaningful conversations with their children by being a sounding board, not necessarily a dictator.
• Become a stable beacon so their children can turn to them for guidance and self-measurement.
• Understand and accept that people are uneven and the importance of expecting growth, not perfection from children.
• Reduce anxiety – for themselves and their kids – as they venture out on their own and move into adulthood.
• Holding our kids to high moral standards, while also being a role model for those standards.

“People are uneven,” says Dr. Ginsburg. “Highly successful people are great at something, and their desire to explore other areas is what makes them interesting.” He adds, “We harm kids when we suggest that to make it in this world they must be good at absolutely everything.”

Kenneth R. Ginsburg, MD, MS Ed, FAAP, is a professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and director of health services at Covenant House Pennsylvania. He is the author of the best-selling Building Resilience inChildren and Teens: Giving Kids Roots and Wings (AAP – currently in its 3rd Edition, October 2014).

My Review:
Raising Kids to Thrive is a great book for parents of tweens and teens. I have younger children, but I still found a few points in the book helpful, especially with talking to my seven year old son. He is in first grade, but he says that he doesn't care about things, whatever and that he hates me when I take things away from him.

I learned from reading this book that love, compassion, understanding and listening to my children will help to get us through anything. I know now that my children's opinion in how I parent them is needed at times. As they get older, I will have talks with them about what they want and curfews etc. But I refuse to be their friend. I am their parent, first and foremost, and that won't change.

Raising Kids to Thrive offers three approaches to help you build perspective that will allow you, as a parent, to make well-informed decisions. (This was taken from the introduction in the book.) If offers you science (real answers to real questions), framed questions and tween and teen viewpoints.

Raising Kids to Thrive includes a Stress Management Plan for children and adults (page 127). In everyday life there's almost always something that is going to upset us or stress us out. We need to teach our children how to manage stress and how to roll with the punches, so to speak. This book also teaches parents how to renew their relationships with their children for the better.

If your looking to learn how to talk to your tweens and teenagers, this is the book you want to read. There's some really great advice inside that we could all use as parents.

This book will be available for purchase starting Tuesday, March 24th! You can purchase the book on amazon.com!


Disclosure: I received a copy of "Raising Kids To Thrive: Balancing Love With Expectations and Protection With Trust" book from Rolemommy.com in exchange for my review post. No other compensation was exchanged or received.

Hugging My Daughter

 (image source, not an ad)

My four year old daughter is a sweet little girl. But for her to feel good and comforted, she needs to be held on my lap at least once a day, and hugged pretty much every time she comes to me for a hug. If I can't give her a hug, she freaks out, and sometimes she will throw a tantrum, or cry, which makes me sad. So I have been doing the best that I can to stop what I am doing, and hug her.

Guess what? She's happier, not as needy or whiny, and she loves that me, her mommy, will stop what I am doing and hug her. I never knew that hugs could mean so much to my daughter, but they do. Hugs help her to feel secure and loved.

So stop what your doing when your children ask you for a hug as much as you can, and hug them. Talk to them for a few minutes and ask them if they are doing ok or if they need something from you. Chances are, all they want is a HUG!

This is not an ad, I just wanted to share this with you.