Welcome! I’m glad you’re here.
I’m Carrien, a writer and parent mentor.
I help parents raise resilient children.
My passion for helping parents to protect their children and raise them to be resilient has extended to creating resources that have helped thousands of refugee and migrant families on the Thailand/Myanmar border through my work with The Charis Project, which my husband and I are the co-founders of.
I am personally the mother of 6 amazing and rather resilient humans, who have managed to thrive in spite of being dragged around the world by their parents and their extremely unconventional upbringing.
I know what it’s like to feel overwhelmed and not like the parent you want to be. I want to help you get past that and thrive personally so you can help your children flourish also.
Speak to your own heart with kindness so that what flows out of it to your children are words of life that give them strength and resilience.
A bit of background…
I live in a big pink house in the country near a small town on the Thai/Myanmar border with my husband, our 6 children, 1 little snake hunting dog, and an indeterminate and ever changing number of cats. There are a lot of other critters living at our house; bats, snakes, frogs, toads, fish in the pond, geckos, and all sorts of insects. My children spend their days climbing fruit trees, reading in hammocks, drawing, writing, painting, building things out of anything they can find, using online resources to build math and science skills, cooking, baking, alternately embracing and resisting the acquisition of a second language, and constantly asking if they can watch shows. They have never attended a traditional school.
In 2010 my husband Aaron and I founded the The Charis Project, with a lot of help from you, the readers of this blog. In 2013 we moved our whole family to Thailand, just 7km from the Myanmar border, to better lead the programs we were developing.At The Charis Project we work to protect children through a holistic series of interventions for families in crisis that help to heal and strengthen families and give them the courage to stay together. One of our goals is to reduce the trafficking and institutionalization of children, which are symptoms of a deeper problem of family breakdown due to poverty and displacement. When we heal the root causes, the symptoms go away.
In Thailand I create Family Education Resources and Curriculum. These equip parents with the skills and knowledge they need to and give their children the best start at life and help them become strong and healthy adults.
Welcome to the space where I talk about life.
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| I’m breastfeeding a baby while riding an elephant with a toddler asleep on my leg.That pretty much sums it up. |
This blog has been around since 2006. A lot can happen in that time.
I’ve grown up quite a bit since I started it. I know that writing this
blog has been a part of that journey. This is the space where I tell the story I’m living, in all
it’s stumbling broken glory.