Parenting Blog

"Realize that now, in this moment of time, you are creating. You are creating your next moment based on what you are feeling and thinking. That is what’s real. We can let go of the unconscious belief that being anxious about the past or the future will somehow protect us and instead reprogram our cells with new ways of responding.” -- Doc Childre

Do you worry about your child?  Join the club.  It's part of the job description. But when we say "Be careful!" to our kid, we're not giving the message that we care, even though that's what we feel. We're giving the message that the world is an unsafe place and we don't have confidence in our child to navigate it.    READ POST

“There is scientific evidence that when we practice bringing attention to what we appreciate in our lives, more positive emotions emerge, leading to beneficial alterations in heart rate variability. Neurobiologically, gratitude is nested within the social emotions, along with awe, wonder, elevation and pride. It can be both practiced and experienced.” -- Charity Focus.org

Our inner critics are designed to find fault. They think they’re protecting us, warding off potential disasters.   READ POST

"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom." -- Victor Frankl  READ POST

"Nothing has to be different for you to be whole.” -- Stephen Levine  READ POST

“The key to joy is unconditional kindness to all life, including one’s own, which we refer to as compassion.” – David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.

The Buddha said that one of the main benefits of meditation is that it creates Amaitri, or unconditional friendliness toward the self. Psychologists call it unconditional positive regard, or self-esteem, and say it comes from parents who accepted all of us, even those "negative" and challenging feelings. You could also think of this trait as unconditional love for yourself.  READ POST

"Dr. Laura -- You say that all emotion comes from our thoughts, so that we can change our thoughts and therefore change our emotions.  But you’ve also written that we need to acknowledge our emotions and "feel" them, rather than ignore or stuff them. I’m confused." -- Corinne

The simple answer is that there's a difference between honoring our feelings -- and preventing them.  Once we’re feeling an emotion, we have no choice except to breathe our way through it, if we want to move beyond it. That's why it's so important that we have someone nonjudgmental that we can speak to about our parenting, so we can blow off steam before interacting with our child.   READ POST

"More often than not, fear doesn’t emerge as nail-biting, cold-feet terror, but surfaces instead as anger, perfectionism, pessimism, low-level anxiety, depression, and feelings of isolation.  In these many disguises, fear can permeate life, leaving room for little else.  It morphs from one pseudoemotion to another, rarely declaring itself, poisoning each moment it touches." -- Dan Baker, Ph.D.

You may think your moods just come out of nowhere.  But scientists now believe that moods are mostly a response to what we think, usually without even noticing. So those bad moods and cranky days are often created by our own inner critics.  READ POST