For those of you who don’t know me, I am Kaleigh, a Child and Family Therapist in Portland, OR. I have spent over a decade of my life working with children in some capacity, as professional nanny, a teacher, a therapist, and now as a parent to a delightful and active three year old boy.
I set out to write a blog about parenting as part of my therapy practice. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what to write about and researching other blogs and books about parenting. Over the years, I’ve read lots of information from different sources on how children develop, how to best discipline or teach them, and how to raise intelligent, resilient children. At first I thought I would write a more informational blog – ideas, suggestions, tips, research, stories and lessons from my time with children. But I realized that there is a lot of that out there already written by people who are far more knowledgeable than I am about those topics.
So while I’ll provide some information along the way, what I’d like to primarily share here instead is writing and stories that express some of the deeper aspects of parenting – not just tools to help teach your kids emotional regulation, but to explore our emotional process as parents as well and what the common road blocks are to use being the parents we want to be. To explore the modern culture around parenting and how to help our kids and families build rich emotional lives while maintaining our own mental health as parents.
I hope you find it useful. I will, of course, welcome questions from readers so I know what you’re most interested in and I’d love to have a conversational “question and answer” format for some of my posts as well.
Happy reading!