My wife and I have been married for 32 years, have two grown children, and recently became grandparents (woohoo!!!). I have 30+ years professional experience on the business-management side of the education, publishing, and local non-profit industries.
While most of my professional life has been focused on managing finances, staffing, and operations, I have spent most of my adult life seeking to better understand why people do what they do, how we can improve our personal relationships, and how the human mind works in shaping our lives.
This research eventually lead me to the parent-child relationship as being a primary driver of the mindsets we hold, how we perceive ourselves and our place in the world, and how we make sense of our experiences in life. There are, of course, many other factors that directly influence these aspects of our lives, but the parent-child relationship plays a pivotal and central role in shaping the ways in which those other factors shape and influence us.
Looking back at my own childhood and my relationship with my parents, I can now see many ways in which those experiences directly shaped how I parented our two children — for better and for worse.
In hindsight, knowing now what we didn’t know then, my wife and I made many, many mistakes in how we handled discipline, bedtime training, the use of timeouts and consequences, overseeing peer relationships, and managing the use of technology with our kids.
Thankfully, we did get a few key things right along the way and we all look back on our experience as a family as being loving, filled with happy memories and many fun times together. I have regrets about the things we handled poorly, but I can now make sense of why we did what we did and have a clear understanding of what we should have done instead.
We can’t change the past, but we can learn from the past to create a better future. That is my mission — to help parents create a better future with their children.
The past 28 years experience with our own kids, combined with new insights and best practices from the fields of neuroscience, child development, and positive-psychology coaching, became my inspiration for creating the “Out of the Box Parenting” framework. This framework and the related coaching programs were specifically designed to help empower parents to build deeply connected and more effective relationships with their child(ren).
The most essential and foundational theme of this framework is that our success as parents comes primarily from who we are being with and for our child(ren) — not from discovering the latest, greatest tips and tricks for “what to do when” with them.
Those tips and tricks may work in the short-term for us as parents, but they often end up impeding the healthy emotional development and maturity of our children in the long-term. They can also result in more frustration, emotional wounding and undesirable behavior from both children and parents alike.
If you’re interested in exploring and experiencing a less-frustrating, more effective, and development-friendly approach to parenting, I’d love to help you along that journey.
You probably already noticed that there aren’t any buy-buttons on my website. The best way to see if there’s a good fit between us is to have a conversation. Regardless of what we decide, I promise it will be of value to you. Let’s talk — my contact information is below, with a link to schedule a call or Zoom meeting.
