The Parenting Secret No One Will Tell You

The Parenting Secret No One Will Tell You - Parenting Like Hannah
Photo by Leigh Caldwell

The next time our world has a problem that needs a creative solution, I suggest we turn to the authors of diet books. They are some of the most creative people around. Diet books have to convince the reader there is a new, exciting, fun way for you to lose weight. The only problem is there really is only one healthy way to lose weight – burn more calories than you consume.

Eating less and exercising more sounds dreadfully boring, perhaps even painful. Quite frankly, I feel a little faint even thinking about the few calories I will get to eat. However, if you package it in some pretty or glamorous sounding package, I am all in. In fact, people spend millions of dollars every year on various diet books and cookbooks. In spite of all of this creativity, most people still fail in their attempts to diet. The reason most diets don’t work is that there is no magic involved. No matter how pretty the package, the bottom line is you will be eating less and moving more if you really want the pounds to disappear.

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What A Son Needs From His Mom

What A Son Needs From His Mom - Parenting Like Hannah
What A Son Needs From His Mom by Cheri Fuller

Growing up, I had a younger brother and lots of guy neighbors and friends. I wasn’t exactly a tomboy, but I could kick a football barefooted and knew enough about sports to impress my buddies. I was very comfortable hanging out with guys and imagined if I ever had a son, raising him would be somewhat intuitive.

Having a daughter has kept me immersed in the world of tea parties, dress buying and girl things for the last sixteen years. I have hesitated to comment much on raising boys in case things have changed since my childhood. Until recently, my search for solid books on raising boys has not been very successful.

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What Mary Poppins Can Teach Parents

What Mary Poppins Can Teach Parents - Parenting Like Hannah
Photo by Ross Hawkes

One of my favorite movies is Mary Poppins. With all the sliding down banisters, jumping in chalk drawings, cleaning rooms with a snap of the fingers and tea parties on the ceiling, it is easy to entirely miss the point of the story. You see Mary Poppins isn’t really about Mary at all. It is about two parents who are so caught up in their own lives, they have almost forgotten they are raising two sweet, very lonely children. Sound familiar?

My heart breaks as I meet child after child desperate for some positive, meaningful interaction with an adult. Their parents are often delightful people and may even be faithful Christians. They are great parents by the world’s standards. Their children are well-dressed, clean, well-fed, educated and in a variety of societally approved activities. Yet, these wonderful parents are so busy with their careers, charity work, errands and even running the kids to various activities, that they barely know their precious little ones.

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Asking Your Child For Forgiveness

Asking Your Child for Forgiveness - Parenting Like Hannah
Photo by hang_in_there

For many parents, the concept of asking your child for forgiveness just sounds wrong. Why would you apologize to your child? Wouldn’t that give your child the upper hand? Or did I really mean the sarcastic “I’m sorry you don’t like it, but that’s the way it is”, faux apology?

One of the biggest building blocks of the Christian faith is forgiveness. Remember the parable of the servants who owed debts? One owed an unbelievable amount of money to his “boss”. He couldn’t repay it and his master was ready to throw him in prison. After much begging, the master not only relented, but forgave the man’s entire debt. So what did the servant do? He turned right around and threatened someone who owed him a very small amount of money with jail. In spite of the guy’s pleas, the servant was unrelenting. When the master discovered what had happened, he was furious.

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Tween Whispering

Tween Whispering - Parenting Like Hannah“Hormone” is a word that strikes fear in the hearts of many otherwise confident adults. We have all heard horror stories of how sweet, loving children suddenly turn into screaming, tearful tyrants who may just be capable of seriously harming themselves or others.

While that may be the case in some homes, I think there are things parents can do to lessen the negative effects of hormones on your tween’s behavior and your own sanity. I have used many of these ideas in my home and have seen them work for my friends and their now adult daughters when they were in the tween stage.

These tips for “tween whispering” (or “teen whispering”) are in no particular order, but hopefully you will find a few of them work for you too.

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