In this 8-session course, you will learn practical strategies for making daily life with young children less stressful and more satisfying.
We deal with the important and difficult issues of early childhood with 8 essential topics.
- 8 week course
- 5-8 person cohort
- 1 hr live discussions weekly
$300 Begins January 2024
8 Modules
1 Age Appropriate Expectations.
2 Schedules & Routines.
3 Dealing with Feelings.
4 Eliciting Cooperation.
5 Alternatives to Punishment.
6 Resolving Conflict.
7 Praise and Encouragement.
8 Developing Autonomy.
The Approach
Think about how you learned something you do well; chances are, that knowledge was not just poured into you passively by someone else. It was something you thought about, tried out and practiced, and then tweaked if it didn’t work well. In other words, your becoming proficient was an active process. Learning how to parent well follows this same process: thinking, discussing, practicing. It is not instinctive or easy.
Completing thinking prompts before each session gives you the opportunity to think deeply about the topic. This enables you to reflect on what you already know and believe and what you would like to learn more about or how you would like to change your interactions with your children. Doing this “inside your head” reflection prepares you to get the most out of our live meetings.
One-hour live discussions on zoom: In these small group, intimate sessions, we discuss our everyday parenting challenges. Together, we will troubleshoot, share what’s working, figure out how to tweak what’s not, and learn strategies and tools. No lectures, no formal Q&A, no FAQs; instead, this thinking outside your head enables us to benefit from one another’s experience and learn new skills collectively.
Practice is essential! After thinking about and discussing new strategies, we need to practice them. Often in a high-stakes parenting moment, we forget all the strategies! That’s why we provide you with “At a Glance” reminders – PDFs you can print and hang around the house.
The Constructivist Parenting approach is based on respect and empathy for our children and for ourselves.
If we want our children to respect us, then we need to respect them and to actively model that respect. We need to set clear and reasonable limits, and to be patient with them and with ourselves. And we need to have fun doing it!
Anita Caref
Mother of three adult children, Grandmother of two
Teacher, Adult Education Professional,
Parent Educator
Nada Czapary
Mother of three adult children, Grandmother of two
Teacher, Adult Education Professional,
Parent Educator
Testimonials from the Previous Cohort
The Resolving Conflict module really brought it all together for me because it synthesizes much of the information and strategies from the previous sessions, and it is something that I use some component of on a daily basis with my kiddos.
The Dealing with Feelings module was very helpful in a practical way and has helped me express my real and sometimes negative feelings to my kids in a way that is not blaming, which is great modelling. I can
tell them, “I don’t like cleaning up the kitchen by myself”, and they actually tend to respond in a positive way. This is just one example but there are many others I use, including expressing feelings via art or even through hand signals that we’ve created, since verbal expression can sometimes be hard for little ones.
’m grateful I got the opportunity to participate in the first cohort of Constructivist Parenting with Anita. I found her to be a very loving soul with all the best attributes of an effective teacher. She is really committed to helping others improve their parenting skills with the goal of improving parent-child relationships for the long haul. We went through detailed lessons from how to engage cooperation to problem solving with your children to schedules and routines. There was ample opportunity to share personal experiences and get feedback directly from Anita to help with your specific circumstances. This course gave me the understanding that parenting is brain science! I feel better equipped to meet my children where they are at developmentally with detailed strategies and a support network from the class.
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