Mom Monday Week 50 – The A-Bear

Recently, I came across a great blog on gentle parenting or, as the blogger herself puts it, on how to yell less and love more: The Orange Rhino. Many of you may already be familiar with her work. I had never heard of her experiment to live yell-free for a whole year.

Her blog provides lots of tools for calming down. Her book, which I am in the process of reading, will walk you through 30 days of learning why we yell and how to replace yelling with successful parenting techniques.

As parents, we should all take the responsibility of calming our own nerves and temper down. Only we can do that for ourselves. The world around us will never be peaceful enough, quiet enough, or perfect enough to soothe our psyche.

mom monday wk50

I applaud anybody who takes the time to share what has worked for her in that department. Showing some vulnerability in the parenting blogosphere helps, too. How many of us have read a blog and felt completely intimidated by the perfection exemplified there? 

Like Sheila of Orange Rhino fame, I have also learned that yelling does not help my parenting goals. I have never been a yeller per se, but I have lost my patience with my children more than I care to admit. So, over time, I started picking up parenting tools here and there, from books, websites, seminars and workshops – ideas on how to stay cool, besides prayer and personal devotions.

I really like the Orange Rhino products and will probably invest in some because I believe in reminders. I have already experimented with my own reminder, A-Bear, and I know it works.

An adorable plush teddy bear with an A on its tummy, A-Bear goes with me everywhere I go. It’s a long (and rather personal) story how I came to own it, but my A-Bear reminds me to tread softly around my precious children; to speak quietly and in love; to say please and thank you to them; to remain polite and respectful even when they are not.

I can use it as a pet or a stress ball. I can use it as a visual reminder. On bad hair days, A-Bear accompanies me from room to room. Desperate situations require desperate solutions, but this is one cute desperate solution. What are you doing to stay calm with your children?

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One thought on “Mom Monday Week 50 – The A-Bear

  1. Pingback: Story of the World, Vol. 3, Chapter 19

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