May 2009
4 posts
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Santa Claus, the...
Holidays are my specialty, especially when it comes to making them fun and exciting for kids. As a consequence, my children have a plethora of fond childhood memories regarding the holidays. Even so, as a father, my son has never been interested in following though with the myths related to Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. Neither has my daughter-in-law. So, from the beginning,...
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Keeping Kids Safe
I know that my six-year-old granddaughter is eventually going to outgrow her tendency to replace the “th” sound at the beginning of some words with an “f” sound, so I’m bound and determined to enjoy the tendency as long as it lasts. One such occasion happened a couple of days ago when Sekai began telling me about a nightmare she had in which she was being chased by a “feefh.” As cute as she was...
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Earning An...
I was downstairs in the laundry room folding clothes beside a woman who had just moved to our apartment building with her 10-year-old son. I first saw him riding his skateboard in our parking lot while the movers were taking his family’s belongings to his new home on the fourth floor. The woman and I got to talking about her son, and well into the conversation she heaved a sigh of exasperation and...
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Fighting and...
While I consider myself to be a bona fide movie buff, I don’t much like war, action, or science fiction movies. I can’t take a lot of violence—and there’s usually a lot of it in these three movie genres. More important, the violence is often glamorized and even consciously or subconsciously recommended as a way to resolve conflict. Resolving conflict without violence is not always a message that...
Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: On Whining
I went to Target the other day to purchase a gift for a birthday party that my granddaughter was going to attend. A mother and her young son were on a similar mission in the toy section. Unhappy with the focus of their outing, the boy began to whine, asking his mother to purchase him a toy. I made several attempts to escape the conflict, but whenever I moved to another aisle, the boy and his...