Blog

Sparkler: Start Your Engines! Sparkler Activities for Little Engineers

This blog post is provided by our friends at Sparkler; for more posts like this one please visit their blog page at: playsparkler.org/blog/     Start Your Engines! Sparkler Activities for Little Engineers Sparkler has thousands of activities designed to help children (5 and under) build important early skills and spark passions. Here are a […]

IEP: Supports vs Services

  Now that school is in full swing, if you have a child with an IEP or 504 plan you may be meeting to discuss additional accommodations being added. But what is the difference between Supports and Services? Because there certainly is one, but these terms seem to be interchanged frequently which can have an […]

Should I be regularly screening my child for Developmental concerns?

When you go to the pediatrician for your child’s 9, 18 and 36 month appointments, you’ll likely be asked to complete the Ages and Stages Developmental Questionnaire (ASQ). This questionnaire is used to gauge where your child is at developmentally and if any concerns should arise, your pediatrician can make referrals for services. However there […]

Screen Time Savvy: Managing Your Child’s Digital Diet with Dr. Jenny Radesky

Our Friends over at the Sparkler app sat down with Dr. Jenny Radesky the director of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics at the University of Michigan, and she authored the American Academy of Pediatrics’ screen time guidelines. Her research focuses on the intersection of mobile technology, parenting, parent-child interaction, and child development. Dr. Radesky chatted with Sparkler about screen […]

Understanding Attachment Styles: Nurturing Secure Connections in Parenting

Since we’ve been talking about Parenting we should also talk about Attachment styles. Our attachment starts in the womb, what our parent goes through, their emotional state, and stress all are connected to us. Attachment is the way our caregivers interact with us and how their interactions with us impacts our own relationships and how […]

Parenting Styles: Sub Types

Since we we talked about the main Parenting types last week, we can talk about the 6 Parenting subtypes and how they impact families.   Free-Range Parenting Helicopter Parenting Snowplow Parenting Lighthouse Parenting Attachment Parenting Tiger Parenting   Free-Range Parenting Free-Range Parenting used to get a lot of flack, parents who use this style were […]

Parenting Styles

No one parenting style is “right” and realistically parents don’t just parent with one style 100% of the time.  What we know about parenting styles is that each style can affect children’s behaviors, self-esteem, relationships and academic success.   So, what are the styles? There are 4 parenting styles that have been identified: Authoritarian Authoritative […]

How To Ask Your Child About Their Day

As parents we want to know about our kids day, but often times when we ask how their day went their response is something like: “I don’t know”, “It was fine/okay/good”, or my favorite “I don’t remember”. So, how do we get them to open up to us to talk about what they learned or […]

Bullying 101: Who, Why and How

At some point in everyone’s life we’ve all been bullied and/or have been a bully, it tends to be unavoidable. So, lets learn what bullying is, who is bullied, why bullies do what they do and how we can arm our children with the knowledge of how to deal with bullies.   Who Tends to […]