Just Ask Your Mom

If there's one universal celebration moment in parenting, it's when your child finally sleeps through an entire night. Opinions and approaches differ widely in how to accomplish this, but there's no need to villify one camp or another. Mary Vaughn, certified sleep consultant and mom of 4, joins us for a lively conversation about how parents can help their kids go to sleep and stay asleep. You can find her on mothertogether.com.

There's something deeply comforting about having a place where you can relax, take off your mask, and not pretend or strive. For many of us, that place is our home. What can we do to make our homes feel restful and safe, somewhere we can exhale at the end of the day and lean into one another?

Join us for a fun conversation about our favorite things we loved watching our kids achieve, some obvious and some maybe not so expected. Yes, the days are long and the years are short, but when your kids become more indpendent, life sure does get a little easier!

What does the word "home" bring to mind? In the first of a series on HOME, we take a peek into what our homes are for, what it is that draws us to the place or feeling of home, and what we can do to make a happy home for ourselves, our children, and others.

We're familiar with left-brain/right-brain functions & being left or right handed, but we also have a dominant eye, ear, and foot. The experiences and research from Dr. Carla Hannaford's book, The Dominance Factor, shed some surprising light (for us) on how our dominant sensory and motor functions may affect us under stress or new learning situations--which is pretty much the conditions our children are in all the time. This is just one more factor to consider for parents to "know their child."

Being intentional about raising your kids isn't about rigidity or loading even more expectations and pressure on yourself or your kids. Checking in with each other about your goals and course-correcting now and then makes good sense if you're aiming to do more than just survive another day. We run down some helpful tips to set yourself and your family up for success, make good habits, and celebrate the victories, no matter how small.

#8 in our cultivate series, we get into how to teach your kids what it means to be gentle and give you some practical ways to demonstrate what gentleness looks like. Even the strongest among us can be gentle with both words and touch. Gentleness matters in both sons and daughters, but there may be differences in how we teach it to each of them.

Tongue ties, mouth breathing, snoring, nursing or feeding issues, sleep issues, speech problems, tonsils and adenoid issues and frequent ear infections can all stem from correctible problems in jaw, tongue, throat, or facial muscles. Orofacial Myofunctional therapist, Chelsea Madison, from the BreatheWell Group, talks us through what happens at her office and the surprising and often quick results a visit to an OMT can provide. We learned so much in this interview!

Tantrums? Grabbing things? Interrupting? All young children struggle with self-control. It's one of the main areas parents teach and coach our children through. In this episode, we talk through how to help kids master this important skill.

Join us with veteran art teacher, Shawn Baughman, as we talk about what art does for kids. The obvious benefit is how it helps creativity, but there's so much more involving neurodevelopment, problem solving and more. Plus, she explains why all kids start out drawing "potato people"--an A-HA moment.