The 4 Most Important Parenting Lessons I Learned in 2013

This October marked two years home with our youngest boys, adopted from Uganda in 2011. The first year was pure survival. We spend most of our days just trying to make it, adjusting to our new normal. This year was different.

Over the last twelve months, my husband Joel and I realized we needed to learn how to parent differently if our family was going to do more than simply survive. Our trusted, traditional parenting model simply didn’t work. We a needed fresh approach.

We began reading about parenting children from “hard places”—children like ours who have endured significant early trauma, and don’t respond to  traditional, consequence-based methods. Thanks to the work of Dr. Karyn Purvis, and her Trust-Based Relational (TBRI) model of parenting, we were able to view our children with new, more compassionate eyes. We began to see progress, and finally felt like we had found an approach that made sense. Continue at Megan Hyatt Miller