By Dr Kathryn Murray Has there ever been a time in your house where you feel like you are talking to yourself when asking your children to do something? Do you feel like a recording asking children to have a shower, do their homework, put their clothes away, pack up their toys? It’s exhausting! Often children won’t comply or ignore us because they feel that they have no power in the situation. I have found that by offering a realistic and legitimate choice to children that they feel empowered and are happy to comply with what we are asking them to do. It all comes down to the way we present ou ..read more

By Dr Kathryn Murray Have you ever felt exhausted, frustrated, annoyed or just plain angry because of someone else’s behaviour or demands? Being human means that we experience a range of emotions hundreds of times a day. But what happens when you can’t or don’t know how to manage emotions? What happens when you feel like you’re going to explode? As parents, we feel that way at times and can usually find ways to manage it, such as going outside or for a walk. But what happens if you are a child and don’t know how to calm down? In my experience, children become overwhelmed by emotions usually be ..read more

Families come in all shapes and sizes and aren’t exclusive to those with biological ties. It can expand to whoever plays an important part in caring for and raising a child. The village that helps you raise your child for instance would be family as would perhaps your best friend. Family doesn’t always have to be about blood. The quality of relationships within a family unit is by far more important than the composition and size.  My parents only have one sibling each, however I grew up with more Aunties and Uncles than I could list here. Their friends took on that role without being prom ..read more

I will be the first person to put up my hand and admit that I am not always kind to myself. I have days where my inner monologue screams hateful things at me and days where I feel so useless that I want to stay in bed and hide form the world forever.  The sad thing is that this can be normal for a lot of people. The good news is, we can prevent it from happening to our children.  Self-talk isn’t a new concept for your child. Think about it – did they ever talk to themselves when they were little? Here we were putting it down to a strange little fluke, invisible friends, and ghosts wh ..read more

The brain is an odd thing.  It will have moments that make you feel like a superstar and the next, you are a grey cloud amongst the sunshine. Most of the time, you don’t even know what is happening or why it is happening. One thing you do know, is that when bad thoughts visit, they can get pretty damn nasty, and they can stick around for a long time. The important thing to remember though, is that you can change them – and it isn’t as hard as you may think.   This is called cognitive reframing and it basically means that you are identifying and changing the way you view things i ..read more

(*This blog post makes reference to sensitive topics like self-harming.) I am going to be real. I am sick to death of the way society treats sadness. Like it is some sort of plague we need to force ourselves to ignore. Fun fact: it’s not. Sadness is a perfectly normal part of being human and a healthy way to deal with overwhelming emotions. Shutting them down or ignoring them isn’t. Teaching our children – particularly our boys – that crying is a weakness has to stop. If anything, it takes a lot of guts to admit that you feel sad and to let the tears out. Tears release chemicals like oxytocin ..read more

How many times do you think to yourself “I can’t do this” or “this is too much”? If you answered daily, I am right there with you. However, after everything that happened last year, I like to think that that little voice is a little quieter now. After all, we survived a massive lockdown, global pandemic, toilet paper shortages… and home-schooling. For adults, it is an easy thing to change our “I can’t” to “I can”. For kids – sometimes, they just need a little positive encouragement. This is called self-efficacy – the ability to believe we can do a task or reach a goal. Failure is never fun for ..read more

When younger children feel overwhelmed by their emotions, their brain goes into survival mode and they can revert to immature actions to deal with it. Which makes sense. If I am feeling emotional overwhelmed, I go and hide or ugly cry. The only difference is that we, as adults, know how to self-regulate our emotions and our children don’t. Adults are quick to label children’s emotional outbursts as them acting out or attention seeking. As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, my daughter’s prep teacher thought her anxiety and social unawareness was just my daughter being a bad kid and atten ..read more

As adults, we are used to feeling a multitude of emotions. Dread and happiness for the school holidays, happy and sad for milestone (or any) birthdays, excited and hysterical for the first day of school and emotional upheavals dealing with day-to-day things. We know how to label and deal with them. Our kids? Not so much.   These warring emotions are called “Ambivalent feelings”. It means having mixed emotions or contradictory ideas about something or someone. Mixed feelings are all a part of adulthood – I don’t know about you, but I go through at least six different emotions before m ..read more

Emotions are crazy things. They can jump from happy to sad to anything in between in the blink of an eye. They are also a huge part of who we are. While it may be tricky, even as adults, teaching our kids how to manage and monitor them is such an important life skill. It can help self-awareness and show them that thoughts, feelings, and behaviour are all connected. If they know how they feel, they can pick up on how others feel which then builds empathy. Wheel of Emotions found under the Identifying Emotions activity in the ParentalEQ BackPack App is a great place to start. It can help start t ..read more