“BAD” Parenting and “MISTAKES.” How BrainMoves can help YOU Parent Positively and be Kinder to Yourself + Three Parenting Tips
By: Diane Malik Published on: 07/08/2025Being a mother or father to a preschooler can feel like an impossible job. If it is your first child or your third, sometimes you may feel like you are one day before a complicated review and you forgot to hand in a work project or that you have been given a new role but have no onboarding for how it should happen. Of course, mistakes will happen. Your child is unique; you are unique. Every situation is unique. There is no guidebook. There’s also no black and white. Remember that part of childhood development is transitioning from black-and-white thinking into a more nuanced way of reviewing our world. When we’re stressed, we, as adults, can sometimes revert back to that childhood black-and-white thinking. What does this mean for parenting? You may feel a situation is disastrous: Maybe you’ve said the wrong thing and the child cried, you lost your temper, or maybe you forgot something important like a parent-teacher meeting or a doctor’s appointment. Perhaps you simply overcommitted yourself and you don’t feel “present.” In that moment it may feel like the exact opposite of what should have happened HAS happened and you feel guilty. Your brain could process this as “Oh, that was a mistake. That was BAD.”
BrainMoves for more Peaceful Transitions at Home
By: Diane Malik Published on: 09/07/2025Last week, we talked about how transitions between activities in a preschool classroom can be a challenge. Well, we know the same thing can happen at home. Preschool brains and bodies can respond intensely to stimuli, interruptions of games, or when asked to participate in necessary quiet times for naps. They can also struggle with pauses in motion, such as waiting for a snack, meal, or in line at the grocery store with a parent. Today, we are going to match some specific BrainMoves movements to specific at-home transitions to make your family’s time together more calm and fun.
My Son's Room is Finally Clean! A BrainMove Success Story
By: Diane Malik Published on: 28/06/2025When Billy's mom called to schedule a BrainMoves session for her six year old son she told me that nothing she did was helping her son keep his room clean. Clothes, shoes, toys and blankets were spilling out of his closet...
BrainMoves and Coping with Overwhelm
By: Diane Malik Published on: 02/04/2025When we reach the edge of our capacity as humans, our sympathetic nervous system takes over to keep us safe. This system triggers involuntary bodily reactions and influences our emotional responses. When our stomach clenches, our mind goes blank, we freeze, or we snap and say something sarcastic—or even involuntarily apologize—we are executing one of three preprogrammed survival reactions in our bodies: freeze, fight or flight.
