Little ones love to help especially when it involves food. When we built our house (from a floor plan we bought from Southern Living magazine!), we made a slight modification to the kitchen. I made the end portion of our kitchen island about 8″ lower than standard counter height. Why? Because I wanted our kids […]
In your work, you see children who have experienced hard things. Childhood trauma is something that we, as early childhood professionals, need to be aware of, sensitive to and informed about. The pandemic has had serious implications for some children who have experienced family loss, isolation and social setbacks. In this podcast episode, I talk to early […]
What does your parenting approach look like? Do you do things differently from the way you were raised? Or are you emulating your own parents? One area I see parents doing things very differently is with eating. My daughter and her partner are taking a really different approach to meals with their 3 kids – […]
I’ve discovered an amazing website that I want to share with you! The National Institute for Play (NIT) has resources that help you understand the importance of play in children’s brain development, mental health, and learning. There’s also plenty in there about how YOUR play in everyday life supports your mental health. I hope you’ll check it out. […]
We all need play in our lives. Yes, even you! It’s amazing to watch babies and children play. It comes so naturally to them, whereas it seems like we as adults completely forgot how to do it. Even though the way children play seems relatively simple, it’s actually developmental play. It’s how babies and young […]
Just like everything else when it comes to children, humor is developmental and amazingly enough, it starts really early in life. Babies laugh before they talk, which makes laughter one of the earliest hints on how they are experiencing the world. What’s funny to children changes with time, as their cognitive or intellectual development increases and that […]
Do you like to DIY? I sure do! Especially when it involves the kitchen and kiddos. When I was a toddler teacher, we had a tray with all the ingredients for making playdough, measuring cups and spoons, and an old saucepan with a tattered recipe card in it. Whenever the time seemed right, we’d pull […]
Worry. It seems to come with the territory of parenting. We worry about… … whether we can break the unhealthy patterns from our own childhood.… if the isolation of a pandemic will affect our child.… how the uncertainty of today’s world will affect our child’s future. In today’s podcast episode, bestselling author Holly Elissa Bruno […]
Resilience, persistence and patience. These are characteristics we want children to develop so they’ll be able to manage the challenges of life. Seems kinda crazy but guess what, there are things you can do today to help children when they’re in third grade trying to figure out long division and playground politics. But how do […]
Eat, sleep, poop. Eat, sleep, poop. It seems like that’s all your newborn does in the first 60 days. What is it about this time period, then, that’s so crucial to your baby’s development? In today’s episode of Parenting in the First 3 Years, we answer all your burning questions and debunk all the common newborn myths […]