The thought of an outdoor family photo strikes fear in the hearts of most parents with young children. This experience can leave even the best parents feeling utterly powerless against both the weather and their children’s behavior. The stress starts even before picture day arrives. Finding coordinated outfits and keeping everyone’s hair perfectly combed is a challenge all its own. This humbling and expensive rite of passage leaves many parents wishing for one thing above all else: Please Lord, let them smile!
Let’s face it, situations like this can bring out the worst not only in our children, but also in us as parents. This was the case during what will certainly be known for all time as the Monroe Family Picture Fiasco of 2009. But from the mess of our poor handling of the situation came a real opportunity for better understanding and a chance to learn from our mistakes.
Because of the impact of their histories, children from hard places often lack the experience in effectively communicating their needs and wants, complying with requests and instructions and knowing how to navigate basic aspects of relationships in a healthy way. At the same time, what these children need most to help them heal and learn is not punishment, but practice.
Dr. Karyn Purvis and her colleagues have developed some basic scripts to help parents (and other caregivers) teach children essential relationship skills and important life values. Rather than immediately resorting to lectures, consequences or punishments, this approach actually gives your child practice at “getting it right.” By using these scripts consistently to both teach and reinforce, you have the opportunity to correct while connecting and a result truly help your child begin to overcome the effects of his/her past and together move toward a more hopeful and joy-filled future.
In this brief video, Dr. Karyn Purvis explains why it is important for parents to find creative ways to help children from hard places learn life values. She also provides a helpful demonstration of one of these creative approaches involving the use of puppet play.
For adoptive and foster parents, developing strong connections with children when they are young is often challenging. As children grow older, or when older children come into our families, these challenges often increase.
Dr. Karyn Purvis spoke at the 2010 Tapestry Adoption & Foster Care Conference in October 2010, where she shared her insight and practical advice about how parents can effectively connect with older children. You can listen to the audio from this session below:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
In this brief video, Dr. Karyn Purvis explains the benefits of parents sharing appropriate amounts of power with their children through choice giving, compromises and other means. By sharing power appropriately with their children, parents can teach them to communicate effectively about their needs and fears, rather than resorting to behaviors, and can help them develop a strong foundation that will serve them well as they grow older.
Children from hard places are often impacted in many different ways by their histories. One of the most profound, yet often overlooked, is the way in which these children’s sensory processing is affected.
The new educational video, A Sensory World: Making Sense of Sensory Disorders, produced by the TCU Institute of Child Development features Dr. Karyn Purvis and offers insights about how sensory processing disorders make it difficult for many children to function at home and school, and can be the underlying cause of behavioral problems. The video provides parents and professionals with the insights they need to learn to recognize signs of sensory disorders as well as the practical strategies to help parents and children effectively deal with the them. In addition, child development researchers Dr. Karyn Purvis and Dr. David Cross, and Carol Kranowitz, author of The Out-of-Sync Child, provide a number of playful activities to help children improve their self-esteem and overcome everyday struggles that hamper their success.
Children from hard places have unique histories and needs. As a result, parents of these children need to learn how to love and parent them well. This requires that parents not only learn strategies that will be effective in helping them heal, but they will also need to ‘un-learn’ previous ways of parenting — whether those be parenting strategies that were successful with their biological children, ways that they themselves were parented or parenting approaches that others in their church or circle of friends are using.
In this brief video, Dr. Purvis explains the need for parents to focus specifically on the child that God has called them to love and care for, and to parent that child in a way that can bring hope, healing and joy.
Parents often focus much of their attention on obtaining the right skills and strategies to effectively deal with misbehavior — and this is for good reason. All parents of children from hard places need to understand how to address misbehavior in ways that correct while still connecting. But parents also need to understand the importance of setting their child up to succeed.
In this brief video, Dr. Purvis explains why it is important for parents to set thier child up to succeed, and she talks about some practical ways parents can begin to do that.
Created To Connect: A Christian’s Guide to The Connected Child is a study guide created by Dr. Karyn Purvis and Michael & Amy Monroe to help illuminate the biblical principles that serve as the foundation for the philosophy and the interventions detailed in Dr. Purvis’ book, The Connected Child. This study guide is designed to help adoptive and foster parents better understand how to build strong and lasting connections with their children, and is ideal for use in small groups as well as by individuals or couples.
Watch as Dr. Purvis provides practical insight to parents about how they can effectively correct their children while still empowering and connecting with them.