Sarah Ockwell.smith Quotes

If you have told a child a thousand times and he still does not understand, then it is not the child who is the slow learner.

Children watch us more than they listen to us.

Three-year-olds, however, have the added disadvantage of a biological lack of impulse control.

Explain to your tween that currently their brain often causes them to act first and think later. Encourage them to take a pause and consider if they are doing something because they really want to, or because they are somehow feeling pressured to comply.

I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.

very last section of the brain to mature, during the teenage years and early twenties, is the prefrontal cortex, which controls judgment, impulse control, and emotion regulation. Until this section of the brain is well connected, it is reasonable to expect the child, or indeed teenager, to lack judgment and self-control.

Sometimes children who always shout or cry just simply cannot help it.

Parenting a toddler is like turning the blender on without a lid. Unknown

Dr Moon found that 72 per cent of parents believed that information regarding health issues on the internet was trustworthy, with 70 per cent saying they had used information found on the internet in an attempt to help their child’s sleep.

even government websites contained many errors, with 20 per cent of the sleep information presented being inaccurate.

we are all a work in progress.

ourselves all sort of heartache in the present. The irony

Great parenting isn’t about what you say to your kids, or any magic techniques you may employ with them – it’s about who you are and how you tackle your own demons to ensure you don’t pass them on to your children.

Our inner voices and the words that ultimately leave our mouths when we respond to our children, particularly in times of heightened emotions, are often subconscious memories of the way we were spoken to as children.

Our parents and caregivers are as much products of their own upbringings as we are; the only difference is that we live in a culture and time now that is aware of childhood trauma, so we can be the generation to break the cycle. Our parents and caregivers weren’t so lucky.

Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going inside ourselves.

This subconscious belief can – and does – often lead to children repressing their own emotions or needs in the mistaken conviction that they are unlovable and unlikeable if they are struggling. This learned, erroneous behaviour from the past can become a huge trigger for us as adults, when our own children misbehave, because somewhere deep inside us is a lost child crying for attention, but one who has learned to repress their needs. When our own children act in a similar needy or dysregulated way, it triggers us not only because of their needs, but because of our own past needs, too.

The absence of a calm, wise, supportive and regulated adult caring for us, with a calm and mature nervous system to match, means that we can find it incredibly difficult to learn these all-important regulation skills, not just because of a lack of modelling, but because we tend to live in a survival state. A state where we push our own needs and feelings to the back of our minds and focus instead on just getting through the day. In this state, we do not learn to identify our needs, let alone meet them, and we do not learn how to resolve or regulate stress levels.