Parenting 101: Nurturing Gratitude and Kindness, not Entitlement
January 26, 2016
Hosted by Virginia L. Colin, Ph.D.
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Some parents, with the best of intentions, focus so much on their children’s happiness and feel so uncomfortable when one of their children is distressed that they behave in ways that produce the opposite of the results they would like to see. Instead of being secure, happy, and kind, their children become “spoiled” or “entitled” — difficult, unhappy, dissatisfied, and unable to regulate their own emotions well. Listen as two clinical psychologists, Dr. Lisa Ferrari and Dr. Carla Fry, talk with host Virginia Colin about the importance of parents paying attention to the values they want to encourage in their families and planning how to act accordingly. Authentically practicing gratitude and teaching your children to do the same can be a big part of raising children who are kind and grateful and are likely to grow up to be happy, self-reliant adults. Dr. Fry and Dr. Ferrari provide lots of practical step-by-step advice for raising children well.
Family Matters
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Our goal is to share good ideas about helping all kinds of families handle the challenges and problems that are common in today’s world. We seek to help people heal, grow, and thrive in a culture in which marriage, parenting, and other family relationships are under great stress.
We will feature experts on a variety of family matters. Topics may include building and maintaining healthy relationships, family mediation, divorcing with minimal damage, strengthening marriages, LGBT families, forming and maintaining stepfamilies, single parents, creating constructive separation agreements, addiction, preventing or ending abuse, and other Family Matters.
Virginia L. Colin, Ph.D.
Virginia L. Colin, Ph.D is an author, speaker, professional family mediator, Director of Colin Family Mediation Group, and a Founding Member of the Academy of Professional Family Mediators (APFM).
Having survived a nightmarish divorce, Dr. Colin actively supports divorce reform efforts, teaching people how to take a lot of the pain, financial cost, acrimony, and trauma out of divorce. She also loves learning and teaching about building healthy relationships and solving family problems long before anyone has a reason to consider divorce. She has been a foster parent, a married parent, a divorced single parent, and a remarried stepparent.
Formerly a research psychologist studying attachment and other aspects of human development, Dr. Colin has been providing family mediation services since 1999. She specializes in helping couples and ex-couples develop co-parenting plans and financial agreements that support their children’s security, self-confidence, and healthy development as well as their own adult well-being.
Dr. Colin has published two books, “Human Attachment" and "The Guide to Low-Cost Divorce in Virginia: How to Do It Yourself.” She has also written a variety of articles published in journals and on the Internet.
