Positive Discipline Parenting Blog
Sproutable’s Positive Discipline blog for parents and caregivers of children tweens to teens.
Real tips. Real talk. Read & grow.
Latest post
Opening Up to Your Resistance
Jennifer Bounauer Unsplash When I work with parents, lots of families resonate with the idea of letting go and being open & present with their children. But in reality, we spend so much of our[...]By Casey O'Roarty
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Being present with your teen’s school discouragement
A mom in our community shared this: “I’m struggling so much parenting my 15 year old son. He is so negative. He’s very smart & has friends, but he says he hates school, that the education system is stupid, homework is a waste, etc. He is literally negative about everything, yet he won’t do anything […]By Casey O'Roarty
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Minimizing Phone Drama with Tweens and Teens
This is a conversation that needs to happen frequently, whether you want to get it right setting up limits for a younger adolescent or if you have an older teen who’s been using devices for a while. Spoiler: screens are always an issue! When Should You Get Your Kid a Phone?By Casey O'Roarty
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Joyful Courage & Sproutable: one space for all parents & caregivers
We began merging our backgrounds in psychology, early child development, public health, counseling, mindfulness, social emotional learning, social justice, racial equity and Positive Discipline, joining forces to go farther than either of us could do on our own. We used innovation, technology, Alanna’s idea of videos of REAL families, and an online platform to share the helpful, immediately useful and mutually-respectful tools world wide.By Julietta Skoog
Views Empowering Kids to Navigate Social Conflict
Even for those of us who don’t fall into the “helicopter” model, when we hear “the kids were mean to me today” we are so quick to slip into mama/papa bear mode, ready to make phone calls and take those mean kids D-O-W-N! This topic, of course, was fitting to some of what my own kids are going through right now (that always seems to happen, right?). And I find my response to their experience is quick – MAKE IT STOP. We are all so quick to project into a future of our kids being bullied, ostracized and so desperate that they don’t see any way outBy Casey O'Roarty
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The 5 Parenting Lessons I Learned from 80’s Movie Quotes
For those of us children of the 80's, we have grown up to be parents in a new millennium. It blows my mind to live in a world with Internet, Apple Pay, scanners, and Netflix, not to mention having the intel ahead of time to predict the name of your driver and exact time of your taxi... er... Lyft, pick up. The fact that you can Jetsons style talk to grandparents ON YOUR PHONEBy Julietta Skoog
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Siblings: Get them in the ring
The most popular night of my seven-week Positive Discipline parenting series is the night we finally get to talk about siblings. From the first week, this is a source of angst for parents. It is on every list of challenges that we make, and usually the sibling fighting is a trigger that brings out the “Final straw! I’ve had it, that’s it!” moment in the night where we turn into the version of our parents we swore we would never become. It takes a full six weeks of building on parenting tools before we can get to this meaty and layered challenge. In this class, I always start by asking that same question, “what did you learn from your siblings?” After some scoffing, the answers range from:By Julietta Skoog
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Special Time, a Super Tool to Stop Attention Seeking
I have a secret. I am not enough. Yep, not enough. No matter what the self-help books and Instagram quotes say, I will never ever be enough. My kids will always want more. Once I realized I am THAT loved by them, and THAT important to them, I stopped trying to chase the “end.” One more game, one more hug- nope, they will never be filled. This is a GOOD thing. It means that our open channel of attachment, love, and connection is always flowing. It also means I am human and so are they. This is when I started implementing, with fidelity, the simple Positive Discipline tool called Special Time.By Julietta Skoog
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Solutions: The Antidote to Consequences, Punishment and Rewards
One of my favorite classes in my counseling graduate program was Group Therapy. I loved reading Irvin Yalom’s big thick book that described all the stages a group goes through, then actually getting to participate in the experience and watching how it played out. In essence, every group starts out with some sort of orientation […]By Julietta Skoog
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