I knew the science. Life taught me to see the whole person.
As a Board Certified Behavior Analyst and special educator, I’ve spent more than a decade studying why behavior happens, helping people build new skills, changing environments, looking at data, and finding strategies grounded in evidence rather than trends. I believed deeply in the science then, and I still do ecoming a mom, and everything life brought with it, changed the way I understood that science.
I learned very quickly that knowing what to do and having the capacity to do it in a hard moment are two very different things.
I was a mom who was tired. A mom who worried. A mom whose own body sometimes had very little left to give. A mom trying to keep everyone safe while also trying not to let fear run the show. And sometimes, I didn't show up the way I wanted to.
If I knew so much about behavior, why couldn't I always get my own behavior right?
Eventually, I realized I was asking myself the wrong question. I had spent years helping other people understand that behavior doesn't happen in a vacuum. Why was I expecting mine to? My behavior had context, too. My exhaustion mattered. My learning history mattered. My environment mattered. The thoughts running through my head mattered. The things I was trying desperately to control or avoid mattered.
And underneath all of it were the things that mattered most to me.
The kind of mom I wanted to be. The relationship I wanted with my children. The home I wanted to create. The things I wanted my children to learn from me, especially when life wasn't easy.
That realization changed the way I parented and eventually changed the way I wanted to support other parents.
I began leaning more deeply into an approach that didn't ask me to abandon behavior science, and instead helped me to apply it more fully. My own walk of faith has shaped that journey, too. Grace, compassion, patience, humility, forgiveness, and love became more than values I wanted to teach my children. They became values I wanted to practice in the way I parented, including extending grace to myself when I inevitably got it wrong.
I stopped believing that good parenting meant always staying calm, always responding correctly, or somehow reaching a place where the hard moments stopped being hard. I started believing much more deeply in understanding, flexibility, repair, and returning to what matters.
And that's where Peaks of Joy really comes from.
Life isn’t lived at the peak.
I didn't create Peaks of Joy because I discovered the perfect way to parent.
I created it because I stopped believing perfect parenting was the goal.
I believe parents deserve more than another expert telling them exactly what to say or handing them another strategy without helping them understand why it might work. I want you to understand your child's behavior, but I also want you to understand your own.
I want you to know how to look at what's happening with curiosity instead of immediately assuming you or your child are doing something wrong. I want you to have evidence-based tools and know how to decide whether they're actually working. And I want you to be able to ask:
What matters to me here? What am I trying to teach? Who do I want to be in this moment? And what's one workable step in that direction?
Because some seasons of parenting really do feel like standing on top of the mountains, and some feel very much like walking through a valley.
The goal isn't to stay at the peak, it’s to have the clarity and confidence to move through the valleys, and know there is more joy to be found in this journey.