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January 2019

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Natural Strength Parenting™, Parenting Tips, Parents

Discussing Job Loss, Unemployment or Disruption in Employment With Your Children

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A parent’s job loss or any significant change or disruption to your employment status can be difficult on the entire family. Especially your children. Your children know when something’s wrong. They are sensitive to changes at home, and it can be stressful for them. If you’re a parent facing an employment gap or disruption, here are some tips to talk to your kids about the situation. First, take some time to collect your thoughts and manage your own emotions about the change in your employment status; especially If the disruption was sudden or unexpected. These changes can be stressful and your children will certainly pick up on your emotions. Take a mindful moment to calm your mind before talking with them. A simple breathing exercise, a quick walk around the block, or a moment to write down some of your thoughts can help you clear your head and organize your thoughts all while utilizing your strengths of love and perspective. When you do talk to your children, be honest with them about the situation. Let them know about the change as soon as you can and answer any questions they may have. Allow them to guide the conversation. Ask them what it is they would like to know about the situation. They will be curious about the situation and may have questions you cannot answer or may not be ready to. Keep your answers age appropriate and lean into your family’s values. Try and keep the conversation brief, but meaningful and be sure to note their reactions. Set an intention to follow up again in a few days. Explain how the situation may affect the family. A change in employment will be accompanied by changes in your family’s routine. You’ll quickly discover that these changes can be stressful for your children and for you! Explain that you may be home more often, but will be busy seeking new opportunities and may need to shift your schedule with little notice to network or go to an interview. Discuss possible lifestyle changes as well. This is an opportunity to develop your family’s strength of perseverance. A night out at the movies may become a night at home watching an old favorite DVD or Blu-Ray. Dinner out may turn into your kids helping prepare their favorite meals at home.  If your children are old enough you can teach them about the strength of prudence by discussing finances and the economic struggles that may accompany a prolonged period of unemployment. Go, Team! Now that you have your family together and are talking about this situation, what’s next? Develop a plan for moving forward. Maybe Dad never had the chance to drive the kids to school, or Mom missed one too many games or dance recitals because she was working late. Plan a new routine around your new situation. Use your strength of creativity to maximize any extra time you have together as a family. Involving your children in the plans will help them feel connected and may mitigate some of the stress they are feeling. Focus on their strengths of curiosity and love of learning by allowing them to take the lead on planning fun family activities. Take this time to imagine what the rest of this year could look like if you genuinely connect with your family by focusing on everyone’s strengths, taking time for mindfulness and being more intentional with the time you have together. Parent Strong. Parent Mindfully. Parent Purposefully. A period of unemployment can be a tough time for your family. Now more than ever, it is important to focus on your family’s strengths, be intentional with your parenting, and take time for mindfulness. Beech Acres Parenting Center offers Natural Strength Parenting™ Coaching which can help you navigate this and many other parenting challenges. Your first session is free. Use this session to help you develop strategies for discussing this or other parenting challenges with your kids. 

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Setting Intentions For Your Head, Heart and Hands In 2019

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Imagine what this year could look like if you take the time to genuinely connect with your family and with yourself by focusing on your strengths, taking time for mindfulness and being more intentional with the time you have together? HEAD Focus on your love of learning to improve your family’s overall well being. For Your Family A new year brings about new opportunities to improve yourself and the world around you. One way to do this is to involve your entire family in home improvement projects. Have a room that needs to be painted, a bookshelf that needs to be built, perhaps an outdoor landscaping project? These are great opportunities to develop your families’ strengths of love of learning, teamwork, and creativity by researching, planning, and executing these projects together. Watch “how-to” videos together. YouTube provides a vast wealth of knowledge for these types of projects. Research paint colors by understanding the science behind how colors mix to make new colors. Discover how planting certain trees or flowers in your yard can have a positive impact on the local and global ecosystem. These fun projects can bring your family together, increase your happiness, reduce stress, and improve your overall well being. For Yourself Take the start of the new year as a fresh opportunity to finally begin that new thing you’ve been wanting to learn. Maybe you’ve always wanted to learn a second language. Perhaps you want to learn an instrument or learn to draw or paint. This year set an intention to get started. Once you’ve done that, create some milestones for yourself to ensure accountability. Doing something like this for yourself develops your strengths of love of learning, bravery, and perseverance. Heart Focus on your strength of love to build your family’s emotional health. For Your Family Spending quality time with those we love is critical to our emotional health. This year be intentional about the time you spend with your family. If you have busy schedules, as most families do, set a time each day to spend just 15 minutes together. If it is unrealistic to have dinner or read together every night, be creative. Make the most out of those rides to school, practices, doctor appointments or therapy sessions. Ask powerful questions and listen expansively to their answers. Take a mindful moment together before you start your day by completing a breathing exercise. Your smartwatch or smartphone can probably help here. And always remember to end each day with a hug! Setting these intentions to spend quality time together each day increases the likelihood of actually spending time together. For Yourself Try this brief exercise to center yourself and focus on love, hope, and sense of meaning. Place your hand on your heart. While your hand is on your heart think about someone who has recently made a positive impact on your life. Can you set an intention to write that person a message of gratitude for what they have done for you? This exercise not only gives you pause to focus on your own heart but affords you the opportunity to connect or reconnect with those you love. Hands Focus on appreciating Beauty and Excellence by getting active and having fun! For Your Family Let’s play! Getting your daughter to ballet practice on time and making sure your son understands the right bus route to take to get to school certainly are important, but don’t forget to take some time for fun. Try putting together a puzzle, assembling a Lego set, or simply coloring a picture together. Kids still love slime! There are plenty of recipes, colors, and even easy to use kits you can find online. Host your own “baking” challenge. You’ll get to work with your hands, spend time together and end up with a delicious dessert or after school treat. Working on any of these projects engages your strengths of teamwork, zest, and appreciation of beauty and excellence. These moments together can be fun and special. Make the most of them. For Yourself Any of the activities for your family can also be done solo as well. You’d be surprised how relaxing coloring can be. Doing something active alone can be refreshing and fun. Set an intention to complete that yard work you’ve been putting off or plant a garden. While you’re outdoors take a moment to appreciate the beauty of your yard, the trees, and the nature all around you. Spend time journaling, actually writing down or typing out your thoughts and feelings can relieve stress and calm your mind. You can also use this as an opportunity to connect with others. We communicate so much beyond the words we say to one another. Is that an opportunity for you to be intentional and help someone (family, member, neighbor, co-worker)? Shovel a neighbor’s driveway or simply offer to open a door for a co-worker. These intentional gestures can mean a lot. Click here to download this activity and set intentions with your family today! 

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Natural Strength Parenting™

Build Your Child’s Strengths with Natural Strength Parenting™

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Did you know building on your child’s innate strengths can help improve their overall well being? Natural Strength Parenting™ is Beech Acres Parenting Center’s unique approach to parenting. Natural Strength Parenting™ encourages parents to be intentional and mindful with their parenting while focusing on their child’s innate strengths. This approach equips parents with tools, strategies and understanding to make a positive influence on your child’s mental health. We promise these skills aren’t hard, and more of your conversations will be about what’s going right vs. what they did wrong! Learn more about Natural Strength Parenting™ by calling 513-231-6630 or by clicking here. Or get started today with this 7-day test course! 

Jim Mason, Mental Health, Natural Strength Parenting™, Strengths

Natural Strength Parenting™ Uncovering the Strengths of all Children with a Mindful Framework for Intentional Growth

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Natural Strength Parenting™ (NSP™) is Beech Acres Parenting Center’s distinct approach to parenting. Natural Strength Parenting™ integrates the concepts of intentionality and mindfulness to help parents better see and encourage their children’s unique, innate strengths. Research supports the benefits of each of these three ideas in helping all types of people achieve their goals. However, Beech Acres Parenting Center is the first organization to recognize the power of combining intentionality, mindfulness, and strengths into one foundational approach to parenting. Intentionality. Mindfulness. Strengths. Okay, these are the pillars of NSP™, but how do the three ideas fit together? That question had been on Jim Mason’s mind for quite a while, “What the three practices create together; that’s what’s special to me.” Natural Strength Parenting™ is the culmination of 170 years of parenting experience at Beech Acres Parenting Center. It’s a natural evolution for the organization as we look forward over the next 170 years. “The world is changing rapidly and creating a lot of stress for everyone,” Jim said. “What will the future look like, and how will that affect the family? We need new ways of thinking and relating to each other in order to survive and thrive. Natural Strength Parenting™ provides a blueprint for doing so.” Following are definitions of each pillar and how they fit together: Intentional; Discern your unique purpose, create the life you envision and clarify the values you will teach your children. Natural Strength Parenting™ was founded on the belief that each of us is born with our own unique purpose in life to contribute to the world. Many of us struggle to figure out what that is, some never do. Personal motivation is found when our purpose is discovered. Purposeful living is about making our inner life match our outer self. It’s the energy that moves us joyfully from day to day. Author Steven Covey has made famous the phrase, ‘Start with the end in mind.’ We ask parents to imagine the legacy they want to leave their children and the values they want them to have when they become adults. To be intentional is to live a proactive, purposeful life instead of a reactive life on auto-pilot. Strength-Based; Discover and develop one’s natural gifts to create a sense of mastery, empowerment, and connection with one’s passion. Everyone is born with unique natural gifts. While intentionality provides the vision for the future we want, our natural strengths provide the fuel we need to achieve it. By living from our known strengths, our lives can shift from burdensome to gratifying. Jim explained, “I have seen thousands of vulnerable children in my career, many with very serious internal problems and external obstacles. Yet, every single child had some sort of spark inside, a spark that may have been stifled or diminished by traumatic events. When they discovered their natural gifts, they invariably found hope and blossomed.” “A parent’s most important job is to help her child find his or her unique sparks (strengths) and nurture those sparks to a positive bene t for them and society,” Jim said. “In fact, our life’s purpose often derives from the dynamic relationship between our natural strengths and our environment.” By focusing on natural strengths, parents can promote a life with a deeper sense of meaning, joy, and passion….not just for their children, but themselves as well. Parents who encourage their children’s strengths can help them reach their incredible potential. As we come to understand and practice our natural gifts, we become stronger and more self-confident. This builds the resilience and skills to resist the myriad negative influences surrounding us. Our passions ignite an energy that motivates us to pursue what is truly important and valuable to us. It is the best preventive medicine available! Beech Acres Parenting Center utilizes the VIA Character Strengths Survey to discover each parent and child’s unique mix of strengths. It takes less than 30 minutes to complete on-line but can provide a lifetime of helpful information. “There are many different strengths tools available. We use the VIA because of its universality for everyone,” Jim explained. Mindful; Be present, fully engaged and accepting in the moment. The effort to be intentional and to develop strengths is not simply a theory, nor is it complicated. But, as the saying goes, you must be present to win! The practice of Natural Strength Parenting™ requires that we are present in the moment and paying attention, nonjudgmentally, to what is happening. We can only see our child’s strengths if our minds are open to them and purposely noticing what she/he is doing. Likewise, we can only set a specific intention for the future if we are aware of our current situation. So, mindfulness simply means paying attention, on purpose, in each moment without judgment, to what is happening around me. Mindfulness provides us with the basic ability to be intentional and strength-based. In that way, mindfulness is the glue that holds the whole Natural Strength Parenting™ approach together. Jim informed, “When we are really paying attention in each moment, and not judging who is saying or doing whatever, we have an amazing opportunity to connect with our kids in ways that are truly magical.” Putting it all together. In a recent poll of Greater Cincinnati parents commissioned by Beech Acres, 44% of parents surveyed said, “understanding their kids’ mental health” is “very or extremely important” to me. Those same parents also told us they are interested in “building on my child’s innate strengths”. That’s good news. It is interesting that a high percentage of parents are concerned about their children’s mental health, yet also seem to understand that building on that child’s unique strengths will help increase their coping skills. Natural Strength Parenting™ is designed to help parents do just that. Seeing and nurturing our child’s innate strengths helps build the personal resilience that leads to good mental health and well-being. Natural Strength Parenting™ is at the core of all we do at Beech Acres Parenting Center and is

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Beech Acres, Natural Strength Parenting™

Beech Acres Parenting Center, Serving Parents, Families, and Children In Greater Cincinnati

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At Beech Acres Parenting Center, we uncover the natural gifts of children by unleashing the power of parents and caregivers. As a contemporary parenting center, we serve parents, families, and children in the Greater Cincinnati area through a wide range of services including foster care and adoption, mental health support, parent coaching and much more. All of our programs are based in Natural Strength Parenting™ our unique approach to parenting which enables parents to unlock their own potential by building on their unique strengths. Get started on strengthening your family today by contacting us to learn more.  

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