Dr. Frances Malone, PNP, PhD · Intuitive Parenting
Behavior & Attention: What to Try Before the System Takes Over. A clinical first-step framework for parents of children kindergarten through preteen.
"If a child's behavior shifts significantly with parenting adjustments, sleep, and food — then what exactly are we diagnosing?"
This is not a rhetorical question. It is the question I ask in every clinical encounter. A diagnosis names a pattern. It does not explain why that pattern is happening in this specific child in this specific family system.
I am not anti-diagnosis. I am not anti-medication. I have an issue with the order of operations — employing those tools before the available environmental interventions have been tried. In my clinical experience, the order matters. And the standard of care gets it wrong more often than not.
This course gives you those interventions. In sequence. In plain language. Without ideology.
You are starting to hear comments from teachers or other adults about your child's behavior, attention, or emotional regulation.
You sense something is off. You are not ready for the evaluation track — or you want to know what to try first before you go there.
You have tried reward charts. You have tried consequences. You have tried reasoning with a child who cannot yet be reasoned with in the moment.
No one has told you about the variables that actually move the needle first. This course does.
For many families, the framework in this course is sufficient. For the rest — it is the foundation that makes every subsequent intervention more effective.
Twenty-five years of pediatric clinical practice. A PhD in biobehavioral nursing from the University of Washington. NIH-funded research. Thousands of families. A deep and specific understanding of what it costs a child when the right interventions are delayed — and what becomes possible when they are not.
I am not anti-diagnosis. I am not anti-medication. I am a clinician who has watched the order of operations matter, consistently, across two and a half decades of practice.
And I built this course because the framework I use in every clinical encounter should not be gatekept behind a $1,200 consult.
I learned this on the floor. More than once. In more than one season.
There were moments with my boys — toddler years, early school years — when I could feel myself beginning to spiral. When the noise or the conflict or the sheer relentlessness of it was pulling me somewhere I didn't want to go. I learned to put myself in timeout. Literally. I would excuse myself, go to the bathroom, sit on the floor, and do what I now teach: feel my body, clear it, come back.
Sometimes I didn't make it to the bathroom in time. Sometimes I became what my boys and I came to call Scary Mama — and they knew that name because I gave it to them. I named my own behavior so they could see that I recognized its impact. That I wasn't pretending it hadn't happened. That the adult in the room was also learning.
Some of the most important moments in our relationship happened on the floor — all of us, together, after things had gotten to be too much. The tears, the holding, the coming back to each other. Me telling them it is not okay for me to yell, that I am still learning how to let people know what I need, that it takes practice. A lot of practice.
This is not a framework I developed and then stood above. It is something I live. The same tools I give you are the ones I still reach for.
Start here. See what moves. Then we go from there.
Four modules of 10–15 minutes each, recorded via Loom screen-share with slides. Available immediately. Work through it at your own pace, in the order that serves you. Includes supplemental audio recording.
This is not a parenting book. It is not a wellness program. It is a clinical framework from a PhD-trained pediatric nurse practitioner who has sat with thousands of families navigating exactly this — and who knows what moves first.
Questions? DrFrances@intuitive-parenting.org
"This is not something you learn and then implement. Some days you do well. Some days you do not. Having the grace to apologize to those caught in your learning trajectory — and to try again in each of the unfolding moments of your life — is true courage."
That is the Practice.
"Children don't need you to be perfect. Just present."
— Dr. Frances Malone, PNP, PhD