Growing up, whenever I got in trouble, my punishment was being sent to my room. To an introverted kid, this was a delight. I just curled up with some good books and got lost in my imagination for a while. My oldest boy, Asher, shares this same affinity for quiet time. When sharing a room…
Conversations Happen Over Blueberries and Bathwater “My husband died when my children were in preschool. He was sick for twelve hours with an illness the ER doctors misdiagnosed, and he died on our bedroom floor two days before Christmas. Overnight, my children lost their dad and I became a 31-year-old widow.” These are the…
Splink 1: Staying Together Go outside and play Blob Tag. The object of the game is to tag all players, making them part of the Blob. The game starts out as an ordinary game of tag except that as players are tagged, they join hands with the Blob (the person who is “it”) and…
Sometimes, as an attempt to comfort your heart as you are struggling through a new diagnosis, or even years afterward, friends or family might offer consolation by saying something along the lines of, “God chose to give you a child with autism because He knew you were strong enough”, or one of my personal favorites,…
So you might have noticed there’s this tension in parenting. Okay . . . you may have noticed, there are 1,000 tensions in parenting, but today I’m going to focus on just one. What tension you ask? The tension between the parent who wants to enforce the rules and the parent who wants to focus on…
*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on Deseret News. Do American teenagers still have reverence for the Bible? That’s a central question that guided a recently released report about youths’ biblical engagement. Despite increasing secularization in American culture, the study, titled, “Teen State of the Bible 2016,” found that a majority…
*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on Live Science. Across the U.S., there’s been an uptick in the percentage of teens who are having episodes of depression, a new report finds. From 2013 to 2014, about one in nine teens in the United States had a major depressive episode, up from about one in 10…
If you were asked to share with a group of parents things you’re glad you did as you were raising your kids, what would you say? My husband and I were given this opportunity recently at our church. Over the next five posts, I want to share with you the five choices we’re glad…
In a perfect world, I would be patiently doing many hours of therapy each day with my son and in a perfect world, he would be meeting milestone after milestone. Then there’s reality. Calvin is one of five kids who need me, he is not “catching up” developmentally, and some days it’s all I can do to…
*The following is excerpted from an online article from Beloit College. We have had the NOW generation…get ready for the RIGHT NOW generation, entering college this fall. This fall’s entering college students, the class of 2020, were born in 1998 and cannot remember a time when they had to wait for anything. They also…