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Home » Family Matters » Parenting

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Posts about parenting – parenting tips, parenting advice, parenting skills, how to raise happy kids, great activities to do with children, parenting teens and how to be happy as a parent

Best Family Quotes by Virginia Satir

Virginia Satir

The family quotes in this post were written by Virginia Satir, the mother of Family Therapy. I appreciate her and have learned a lot from her over the years, and some of her best quotes hang where I can read them again and again.

Virginia Satir’s quotes about family and her philosophy about family relationships have become a great compass for me. I would like to share them with you and inspire you to consider and adopt her ideas about family.

One of the reasons I enjoyed Virginia Satir’s work was that she started as an educator, and so did I. I have a soft spot for people who are educators as, because I think their spin on their work is different and more effective.

Read Best Family Quotes by Virginia Satir »

January 30, 2019 by Ronit Baras In: Parenting Tags: acceptance / judgment / tolerance, affirmations, family matters, how to, practical parenting / parents, quotes, self confidence / self esteem / self worth, society, wisdom

Best Family Quotes

Happy family on Whitehaven beach

Quotes have been part of my life and personal growth since I was 16 years old. For the first time, I had my own room. I took a sheet of think paper that looked like an old scroll, burned its edges with a candle, wrote some quotes on it (by hand) and put on to my wall with sticky tape.

Recently, my sister helped my parents’ house clean up and found the quotes I left there 38 years ago. One of them was a family quote from the book Illusions by Richard Bach, which I had received as a gift.

This book has made a huge impression on my life and the family quote I chose changed the way I looked at life. Before reading the book, the definition of family was very simple for me. Family was a group of people related by blood. It included Mom and Dad, the people who gave birth to you and raised you, and your siblings, the children born to the same parents. Back then, we hardly had blended families or adopted children, and I never questioned this definition.

Until I read Illusions. One quote in there changed my definition of Family.

“The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely, do members of one family, grow up under the same roof”

— Richard Bach

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November 14, 2018 by Ronit Baras In: Parenting Tags: family matters, happiness, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, positive attitude tips, practical parenting / parents, quotes, responsibility

Open Home: Guests Welcome

Guests raising their glasses at a party

Good families don’t just happen. They are made with awareness and action. As a parent, I encourage you to write family goals, so you can lead your family to a happy, healthy and wealthy lifestyle. I didn’t grow up in an open home, and I decided to change that, so I set some goal.

In this post, I want to share one of my family goals, which I wrote to replace a behavior form my parents’ home I didn’t like at all – closed doors.

My mom was always preoccupied with what other people thought about her. I never blamed her for it. Well, that’s not true. When I was very young, I even hated her for it. It was exhausting.

Anyway, when I was 16 years old, I realized that this was how she had grown up. What other people think about her was her reason for living. She dedicated much of her life to please people whose opinion mattered to her. This took over her life and, as her children, also ruled our lives.

One thing that bothered her greatly was having a clean house. The problem was not that she wanted the house to be clean, but that she panicked whenever we had guests.

This post is part 6 of 6 in the series Family Goals

Read Open Home: Guests Welcome »

November 7, 2018 by Ronit Baras In: Parenting Tags: acceptance / judgment / tolerance, change, family matters, goals / goal setting, lifestyle, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, practical parenting / parents

My Personal Tips for Important Family Goals

Father playing water games with 3 kids

This post is personal, because I’ve been asked by people to share my view of the ideal family and how I reached that point in life when parenting was such bliss for me.

I have to say that I don’t think we are the ideal family. We have ups and down and challenges with our children. We just sort them out quickly and in a very efficient way.

Why do I say that? Because even if you are doing all the right things – give good instructions and coordinate things with your partner – you’ll face traffic jams. For more about this, read the Family Goals series from the start.

Why? Because that’s life. You take a deep breath, overtake the traffic jam and sometimes just need to meditate until the road is clear from glass scattered on the road from someone else’s accident but there is no life without it. I clarify this because some of my clients just collapse when they think they do everything well and still, there are parenting accidents.

So, here I’m sharing some of my goals (I’ve had thousands over the years). I hope it’ll give you some ideas of what you can aim for. Take only the goals that matches your philosophy in life. Remember, most of our decision making is done by the subconscious mind, if a goal that I chose to peruse is against something you have in your subconscious, you’ll go through lots of self-sabotage and experience lots of frustration.

This post is part 5 of 6 in the series Family Goals

Read My Personal Tips for Important Family Goals »

October 24, 2018 by Ronit Baras In: Parenting Tags: dreams, family matters, goals / goal setting, how to, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, practical parenting / parents, responsibility, success

Sharing Clothes in the Family

Eden, Tsoof, Noff and Ayla

Over the years, I’ve set thousands of goals, and still do. Not because I haven’t achieved my goals, but because my family grows and evolves, and I never stop adding wants and desires, with action, into my family journey. As an example, here is how I’ve achieved the goal of sharing clothes in the family.

The first time I asked the hard questions was the time I woke up. You need courage to do that and I had it when I was 16 years old. I asked myself “What do I not like about my family and how can I change my life without getting rid of any family members?” Obviously, getting rid of my family was not an option, and understanding this was enlightening by itself.

I asked and asked and asked for weeks without an answer. Then, it hit me that the answer was to change myself. That was a very hard understanding and I went through some resistance to it for a while.

I believed my family members “wronged” me and changing myself meant they could keep doing what they’d always done, which was unfair!

Fairness has always been my weakness (still is in some ways). I’ve always wanted things to be fair and had this internal sense of justice my family just didn’t get.

So, I asked myself “What does fairness mean?” It was amazing what came up, which was different from the dictionary definition of the word.

This post is part 4 of 6 in the series Family Goals

Read Sharing Clothes in the Family »

October 3, 2018 by Ronit Baras In: Parenting Tags: action, change, dreams, family matters, goals / goal setting, how to, justice, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, practical parenting / parents, responsibility, siblings, success

Opening Gifts in Public: What Do You Think?

Gift Boxes

This week, my daughter Noff came from a get-together with some of her friends. One of the friends she met had known her since primary school and had come to every one of her birthday parties, which we throw every year. She told Noff she appreciated that we never opened gifts in front of the guests.

I thought that every family faces the question about opening gifts in public at some point, and it is better to have a philosophy about it than to deal with the challenge again and again.

in this post, I would like to share with you my philosophy.

It all started many years ago, when I was in 2nd Grade. In my hometown, it was the tradition that on Friday evenings, children would invite their classmates to a birthday party. Luckily for me, the tradition was to invite the whole class. Otherwise, I would probably attend 3-4 birthday parties a year.

Since this was common and we had about 35-40 kids in a class, we had a birthday party roughly every week. Not all the kids were allowed do have a party at home. Since it was costly, most of the those who could have a party were rich and I was one of the poor kids. The first time I had a party at my house was when I was 17 years old.

Read Opening Gifts in Public: What Do You Think? »

September 26, 2018 by Ronit Baras In: Parenting Tags: acceptance / judgment / tolerance, choice, poll, practical parenting / parents, social skills

Goals and Actions

Family watching the sunset by a lake

In the first post of the family goals series, I introduced “the taxi driver” – the part of our mind we need to work with to make changes. When we want to make changes, it’s like directing a taxi driver to take us to a desired destination. I shared a list of questions we must answer to give our “taxi driver” good directions.

In the post on family goal setting, I explained how to use the answers to those questions to write goals and how to write them in the way that will help us make the desired change.

In this post, I would like to talk about how focus helps the driver navigate the ride to suit your needs and get to the destination faster.

Many people say that they know what they want, but they don’t know how to get it. It is true that sometimes, the goal seems so far-fetched or hard-to-get that people feel overwhelmed and freeze. It is as if they know the destination, but don’t know which path to take to get there.

The thing is you don’t need to find the path. You just need to focus on what you want, and the “taxi driver” will do the rest. If you dedicate time to clarify your goals, that will help your taxi driver achieve them for you in a way that aligns the most with what you want.

This post is part 3 of 6 in the series Family Goals

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September 12, 2018 by Ronit Baras In: Parenting Tags: action, dreams, family matters, goals / goal setting, how to, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, practical parenting / parents, responsibility, success

Choosing the Right Career Path for Your Kids

Noff Baras in an Audrey Hebpurn pose

Parents worry about their children choosing the right career path. Some people start these worries very early in their kids’ life. I know parents who have registered their babies to a special daycare center when the mother discovered she was pregnant.

Don’t get me wrong, I think education is important and planning children’s future is important too, but choosing a child’s career path before he or she is born?

I met Miguel when he contacted me about child coaching. He wanted me to work with his son, Luca. When I asked him and his wife to tell me about Luca, they only had negative things to say right from the start.

This post is part of 18 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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August 29, 2018 by Ronit Baras In: Parenting Tags: acceptance / judgment / tolerance, career, control, dreams, motivation, practical parenting / parents, success

I’m Disappointed in You!

Boy sitting sadly on a stone step after someone said to him "I'm disappointed in you"

Think of the last time anyone said to you, “I’m disappointed in you”. How did that make you feel?

Being disappointed is part of life. I guess it is one of the greatest challenges in life. Realizing that life is not happening the way you want and managing to push through despite it.

Although being disappointed is part of life, being disappointed in others should not be. When I work with my life coaching clients, we deal with a lot of disappointment. Sadly, what hurts them most is not self-disappointment – that things didn’t happen the way they “should have” – but being a disappointment to someone close.

When I think of all the times I have heard this, I can see two groups of people that express disappointment in my clients: teachers and parents, in this order. I dare say that they cause a lot of damage.

Disappointment is “sadness or displeasure caused by the non-fulfilment of one’s hopes or expectations”. Therefore, saying to someone, “I’m disappointed in you”, is telling that person he or she is not fulfilling your hopes and expectations.

Who are you to cause someone a bad feeling for not fulfilling your expectations?

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August 22, 2018 by Ronit Baras In: Education / Learning, Parenting Tags: abuse, acceptance / judgment / tolerance, affirmations, expectation, failure, guilt, k-12 education, kids / children, motivation, practical parenting / parents, role model, self confidence / self esteem / self worth, teaching / teachers, trust

Family Goal Setting: Set Yourself Up for Success

Father and daughters blowing bubbles

Family goal setting is very important. If you’ve had a chance to read the post about family goals, you know that for a family to be happy and successful, you need driven parents who give good instructions to their “taxi driver”.

The taxi driver is the “creature” we have in our mind that at any point in time, asks us “where would you like me to take you?” and to do a good job, he needs two sets of coordinates – pickup point and destination – and very clear and specific instructions.

If you’ve answered the tough questions in the previous post, you should now have a better perspective on what you want your family to be like. You are already in better shape than most of the parents in the world.

I can tell you that in my personal research of thousands of parents, most of them didn’t know what they wanted. They were the kind of passengers that tell their driver, “Drive”, without saying where. They say, “I don’t know what to expect. Just take me to where most people go”. This guarantees they will get lost and bump into lots of traffic jams.

This post is part 2 of 6 in the series Family Goals

Read Family Goal Setting: Set Yourself Up for Success »

August 15, 2018 by Ronit Baras In: Parenting Tags: dreams, family matters, goals / goal setting, how to, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, practical parenting / parents, questions, responsibility, success

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