 Illustrations of the four parenting styles laid out in a square, from top left clockwise: authoritarian, authoritative, uninvolved, permissive. Image credit: Joshua Seong in Parents magazine Many times, parents find themselves in a position of rebuilding relationships with their children after a separation (perhaps from divorce, prison, or prolonged illness), building new relationships with children (such as when fostering), or adapting to maintain closeness as children age. This article is intended to serve as a short list of best parenting practices that will encourage close relationships between parents or caregivers and their children. A resource list is provided at the end. Part 1: Parenting Style Original research identified three main parenting style types: authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive, based on parental control, and further research added the neglectful style. Recent research confirms original findings that children whose parents have an authoritative parenting style typically have the best outcomes, as they are made to feel supported and loved while reasonable rules are pragmatically enforced. This article does a good job of describing the different styles and explaining why it is important to adopt an authoritative style rather than one of the other three types. Those children who grow up with parents utilizing one of the other three styles, especially authoritarian style, have poorer outcomes (see studies and article linked above). Tips
Part 2: Healthy Attachment Activity Principles Attachment can be disrupted for any number of reasons. Some examples include parental substance use; parental mental or physical illness; separation, death, or divorce; parental incarceration; children’s placement in foster care; and adopted children. However, there is hope to rebuild a strong bond when parents or caregivers are open to change and put in the effort. A quick internet search will provide many ideas for activities, so for this article, we’re highlighting the principles that make a good bonding activity. The Five Love Languages of Children is a great place to start when trying to decide what to do with your kids. They offer a free quiz on their website to quickly determine the love language of each member of the family. The basics of attachment begin with the concept of things we do with newborns. We gaze into their eyes adoringly. We hold them, snuggle them, and make sure they are warm and fed. We tell them how cute they are and how much we love them. We tell each other, in baby’s presence, how much they look like a family member or which tiny new behaviors remind us of one or the other of the parents. These behaviors are vital to the baby growing into a safe and happy relationship with his or her parents. Using imagination, parents and caregivers can recreate these behaviors in age-appropriate ways for their children. Guidelines for Attachment Activities
The guidelines above are a starting point. Readers are encouraged to use their own imagination and knowledge of their children to create additional activities and to browse the linked resources below for more information and inspiration. Resources* The 5 Love Languages of Children Free Resources (from The 5 Love Languages) Play Therapy Activities: 101 Play-Based Exercises to Improve Behavior and Strengthen the Parent-Child Connection: LaVigne LCSW RPT, Melissa: 9781647391263: Amazon.com: Books Parenting With Love And Logic (Updated and Expanded Edition): Cline, Foster, Fay, Jim: 9781576839546: Amazon.com: Books You Can't Make Me (But I Can Be Persuaded), Revised and Updated Edition: Strategies for Bringing Out the Best in Your Strong-Willed Child: Tobias, Cynthia: 9781578565658: Amazon.com: Books Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today's Parents: Gray, Deborah D.: 9781849058902: Amazon.com: Books Facilitating Developmental Attachment: The Road to Emotional Recovery and Behavioral Change in Foster and Adopted Children: Hughes, Daniel A.: 9780765702708: Amazon.com: Books 99 Ways to Drive Your Child Sane: Clair, Brita St.: 9780970352514: Amazon.com: Books Healing Parents: Helping Wounded Children Learn to Trust & Love: Orlans, Michael, Levy, Terry M.: 9781587600968: Amazon.com: Books *We are not affiliated with any of the companies listed, and do not receive any compensation for listing them. In fact, we’re pretty sure they are unaware we exist. Heidi E. Jameson, LMHC is the founder of The Mangroves Seeds of Change, LLC. You can read more about her here. Follow us on Facebook, X, BlueSky, and LinkedIn.  Four illustrations in a square pattern with the positive model of others attachment styles at the top (secure and anxious with low avoidance) and the negative model of others at the bottom (avoidant and fearful with high avoidance). Image credit: Stock image from Dreamstime
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 If you’re neurodivergent, you may have hit the trifecta - decision fatigue, task paralysis, and perfectionism. Any one of these three issues can make life more difficult, but in combination, they can significantly impede progress towards your life goals. The following tools, tips, and mind tricks can help. The individual items are often helpful in more than one area, so check them all out! Tools* Gaming dice - this idea was developed while working with a client to overcome decision fatigue. Make a numbered list of 20 items - 15 chores of varying lengths and 5 short rewards. Break out your 20-sided gaming die and roll, doing whatever chore or reward’s number comes up. Variations: Use one die for chores and one for rewards or use a die with fewer sides for lists of chores that take longer. Keep the lists for future use to avoid decision fatigue. Finch - This free app gamifies self-care and rewards you for completing a goal. It’s customizable and starts off with easy to accomplish goals based on your preferences. Take care of yourself (and get some chores done) while sending your little bird on adventures, decorating its nest, and cashing in points for new outfits. You’ll also earn micropets for your Finch while meeting your personal goals. Invite friends to work on goals together. You can also pay for access to more clothes and furniture for your bird, but the free version works well on its own. GoblinTools - If you haven’t discovered the free site GoblinTools and its different bots, you are in for a pleasant surprise. Our favorites include the MagicToDo list, which breaks projects down into all the steps (which can also be further broken down if needed) and The Chef, which tells you what you can cook for dinner when you list the ingredients you have in the house. The Formalizer will take your words and convert them into the style you would like to convey, such as more professional, more sociable, or grammatically correct. These are very popular with our clients. Tiimo - This is a paid app (although it does have a free version with limited features) designed by neurodivergent people specifically for people with ADHD or other executive functioning needs. The free version includes planning tools, to-do lists, and the focus timer. The paid version has many additional features, such as widgets that keep your tasks on top to help you stay focused. AudioDiary - This is a voice journaling app. In the paid version, AI will help by organizing your thoughts and suggesting goals, which may be easier than text input for some users. Tips Calendars - Simple but effective, calendars are great for visual organizers. One of our counselors uses an old school paper calendar to keep track of her three electronic calendars - two professional and one personal. There are several types out there, so research and experiment to find what works for you. We even had one client who used a spreadsheet to create a weekly schedule. Extra tips: The keys to success when using calendars is to schedule more time than you think a task will take, only put what’s absolutely necessary on the calendar (like appointments, meetings, and events), and leave plenty of “whitespace” as a buffer in between items so you have time to compensate for changes without feeling overwhelmed. Alarms - We have a running joke with some of our clients that we all have “hydrate & urinate” alarms set on our phones to help us break off from hyperfocus while working and engage in some health maintenance. Task or To-Do lists - Another simple solution that works well, but the key is to avoid overloading yourself. We suggest making one big list of all the tasks you need or want to do, then picking 3-5 items for your daily “to do” list and cross them off as you do them. Count success as completing 1-3 items from the daily to-do list to avoid feeling overwhelmed. Then, whatever is leftover is still on the task list to be done another day. Spreadsheets - Ah, spreadsheets. They scratch a mental itch like few other things do. If you haven’t yet discovered the glory of a good spreadsheet, let us introduce you. More than just a budget planner (although a fully developed budget with formulas that automatically update totals is a thing of beauty), spreadsheets can be used to set up routine tasks. For example, we know of one person who used Google Sheets for meal planning so she could set it up once and not have to think about it again. She set up spreadsheets for 4 weeks of meal plans, linking to the recipes on the list. For each week, she listed all the ingredients to make double the amount of each recipe. Lastly, she used one of the pages in the spreadsheet to create to-do lists for herself and her partner to do the meal prep for the week’s recipes, reserving half of each for the freezer for a future meal. Now they cook every other weekend and have meals for two weeks. When she was finished with the spreadsheets, it amounted to 8 weeks of meals without any more dinner decision making. Plus, her grocery list was ready to order online for delivery once every two weeks. To make it easier, she did one spreadsheet every other week until she had the four of them done instead of doing all four of them at once. Mind tricks GETMO - Good Enough to Move On describes the concept of doing enough instead of doing things perfectly. Perfectionism is the enemy of progress! Just 5 Minutes - Set a timer and do just 5 minutes on a task. This helps overcome inertia. If you do just 5 minutes, you’ve succeeded. Once you get going, you may discover that you want to keep going once the timer dings, but you’re not obligated. Plan to “Fail” - this is a concept I developed in working with neurodivergent clients. The idea is to define success as not meeting your target. For example, a client once wanted to get all their cleaning done on Friday mornings, leaving the rest of their weekend for fun and rest. They made a list of the things they needed to do, in order, to maximize efficiency. They committed to getting up and doing their cleaning every Friday morning, but there’s a catch. The client had to choose one Friday per month to “fail” to clean in order to successfully meet their goal. This meant that if a special event came up or if the client got sick, they could still meet their success goal of cleaning all three Fridays. By allowing room for imperfection, the client avoided discouragement. We hope these ideas are helpful. Please let us know in the comments if you have any tools, tips, or tricks we should add. *We are not affiliated with any of the companies listed, and do not receive any compensation for listing them. In fact, we’re pretty sure they are unaware we exist. Heidi Jameson, LMHC is the founder of The Mangroves Seeds of Change, LLC. You can read more about her here. Follow us on Facebook, X, BlueSky, and LinkedIn.  |
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