Freebie on Gentle Discipline

If you haven’t downloaded it already, I have a new freebie “guide” for families about 5 Mistakes Gentle Parents Make When Disciplining Their Child.  In this guide I go over five of the most common mistakes I encounter when working with families and what you can do instead.  Too often people find gentle discipline too hard and feel they’re doing it wrong which leads them towards more punitive approaches and I never want any parent to feel that’s the switch they should make.

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Extinction Sleep Training: The Role of Distress

January 2nd, 2021|12 Comments

The premise behind extinction sleep training is that infants (and toddlers) are being taught to "self-soothe"; however, this ignores key points of what self-soothing abilities can be expected from children and how distressed they are at the time of separation. Instead of focusing on these extinction methods, gentler methods that respect where the child is developmentally should be considered.

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What is Evolutionary Parenting?

In short: Understanding how we evolved to parent.

The longer answer is that it is a philosophy surrounding parenting that involves biology, history, neuroscience, anthropology, and developmental psychology.  We as humans have evolved in a particular manner, and the parent-child relationship is no different.  Children, especially babies, expect certain behaviours from their caregivers and research is starting to understand both how deviations from these expectations affect child development and the bidirectional nature of the child-parent relationship.  Of course, not all people can or want to parent our children based on their biology.  In this realm, Evolutionary Parenting focuses on the idea that anytime we deviate from a known biological norm, we should have good reason and try to mimic biological processes as much as possible in order to minimize disruptions to later outcomes and child well-being.
In addition to the philosophy, Evolutionary Parenting is about understanding and integrating research into our decision making process.  In today’s day and age, there is almost too much information and too many choices for parents to make, meaning researching decisions could become a full-time job.  Yet often what parents are told is “evidence-based” is lacking in good evidence, or the evidence that does exist only speaks to one outcome whilst ignoring others.  Thus, summarizing and integrating research is an essential part of Evolutionary Parenting, with a clear focus on discussing the quality of individual pieces of research and how it aligns with the philosophy outlined above.