Lerner Child Development Blog
Open access to my full library of over 150 blogs is now available by becoming a member of Lerner Child Development (LCD). Scroll through thumbnails below or see the button to explore all the blogs by topic.
This subscription service enables me to continue to provide in-depth, reality-based content drawn from more than three decades of helping families solve their most vexing childrearing challenges.
In addition to access to my blogs, subscription to LCD includes several new interactive learning opportunities with me each month: a live, open Q&A and quarterly webinars on key topics. Members are also entered for two monthly drawings for a free 30-min consultation.
Note that I have made some of my most popular blogs available for free.
Blogs By Categories
- All Most Popular Blogs
- Big Reactors
- Building Resilience
- Challenging behaviors
- Cooperation
- Emotional Regulation
- Food Challenges
- Highly Sensitive Children
- Limit-Setting With Love
- Low Frustration Tolerance
- Mealtime
- No Power Struggles
- Parental Self Awareness
- Parental Self Regulation
- Physical Aggression
- Positive Discipline
- Potty Learning
- Regression
- School Related Issues
- Separation and Divorce
- Sibling Issues
- Sleep
- Social challenges
- challenging behaviors
- lying
- masking
- positive parenting
- separation anxiety
- social emotional development
- stress
The Trouble With Transitions: Why They Are So Hard For Some Kids And How To Help
My four-year-old was very hesitant when I signed her up for gymnastics class. After a few sessions, she started to join in and now she LOVES it. I can’t get her out of there when class is over. But every week, when it’s time to go back, she fights tooth and nail, insisting she doesn’t want to go. It’s like Groundhog’s Day. I just don’t get it.
This phenomenon is one that many parents I work with find confounding and frustrating, understandably. Where is the learning curve?
As I help parents do the detective work to figure out the root cause of why their kids react this way, in most cases the challenge is making the transition, not their feelings about the activity. Once the child is engaged in the experience, they love it—whether it is school, dance class, jujitsu, art, or going to the playground. As one mom reported just earlier today: “This weekend we told Bodie (5) that we were going to the playground to meet some friends. He melted down, screaming that he wasn’t going; that he hates the playground, and he hates the children we were meeting there. We held firm and got him there, which was really, really hard and uncomfortable. But within minutes he was having the best time playing with the child he had claimed to detest just minutes earlier."