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Treat your children as you would treat an adult! This isn’t as obvious as it sounds! But if you want your children to start listening to what you ask them to do, it is an important step in the right direction. The motivation for me to write this post was personal. I was desperately trying to get my small daughter to bed a few nights ago. However, it was a night where my husband had ended up in hospital (minor problem) and I had to get the kids to bed quickly so I could take him an overnight bag.

Sibling fighting is one of the most common and hardest problems parents face. It can feel incessant when children argue and fight over every tiny thing and are so horrible to each other. You feel like you can’t leave them on their own and yet, when your children are separate, they are the lovely kids that you hoped you would have. Sibling fighting can drive parents to the end of their tether.

As a parent, one of the hardest things to deal with is when your child has a temper tantrum. With a 2 or 3-year-old, if you’re lucky, other parents may nod and smile at you and say, ‘Ah the terrible twos’ or ‘Oh yes, I had a threenager too!’ If you’re unlucky you will be around people that haven’t got small children, maybe in a shopping centre or on a bus or train and you will see people staring at you and you will feel very judged.

Does your child not want to go back to school? If so, we have the same problem in our house at the end of every school holiday! I can almost predict the first time my son will say, “I don’t want to go to school tomorrow” the day before school starts and will then repeat on and off for the following 12-24 hours. If your children are also like this it can be quite worrying.

One great problem that many parents face is how to reward their children without facing a huge financial drain in the form of ever more toys, and without adding to their children’s sugar load. While chocolate buttons are fine for potty training, as children grow older it gets harder to think of how to reward them, and yet, no matter how old your child is (or even your partner!) everyone likes praise and rewards.

You may be someone who has never heard the term ‘descriptive praise’ or perhaps you know something about it but don’t fully get it. I studied descriptive praise as part of a Masters I did about 12 years ago when I used the work of Carol Dweck (the founder of the DP movement) to try and improve the resilience of pupils in my year group at school. At the time, all my friends were having children and I talked to them a lot about the importance of using descriptive praise.