After seven years of marriage, Gretchen and Jill Rode were ready to add a child to their lives. The two Lutheran pastors in St. Paul, Minnesota applied to the infant
Keeping Your Cool When Your Kids Are Losing Theirs
It is disheartening to feel you are losing your cool with your children as often as they are losing theirs! Keeping your cool while your kids are losing theirs is
Celebrating Pride Month: Why Reading LGBTQ+ Books is Essential for Children
As we celebrate Pride Month, we are reminded that inclusivity and acceptance are values that should be fostered from an early age. One powerful way to introduce children to the
Understanding the Losses Foster & Kinship Kids Experience
When your family welcomes a new foster child or a relative child for kinship care, it’s critical to recognize that this child is experiencing grief and loss. Regardless of how
Prenatal Exposure – Part 2: Parenting Tweens and Teens
What is Prenatal Exposure? While a mother is pregnant, using drugs or drinking alcohol of any kind can cause malformations in a developing baby. It’s difficult to separate the effects
Prenatal Exposure – Part 1: Parenting Babies through Elementary Ages
In the adoptive, foster, and kinship community, there’s often a wide range of what parents know about the child’s birth parents. Frequently, information about the birth mother’s prenatal care can
5 Tips to Help Grandparents Raising Grandchildren
There are many factors that lead to grandparents raising grandchildren. There are just as many factors that make this a hard row to hoe at this stage of your life.
Are You Ready for Transracial Adoptive Parenting?
Parenting an adopted child requires extra attention to issues you might not need when raising biological children. Additional layers exist when you are preparing to adopt a child of another
The Ultimate Social Media Safety Guide for Kids
The following excerpt was pulled from a piece written by Octav Fedor for AntivirusGuide, published on September 12, 2022, read the complete original post here. It’s estimated that 60% of
2 Essential Tips to Avoid Triggering & Being Triggered By Your Kids
Parenting our kids through challenging behaviors like lying, stealing, tantrums, or defiance can be exhausting and frustrating. When stressed, it’s hard to manage our emotions and theirs simultaneously. The challenge
