ABOUT NIKKI

I’ve always wanted to know why people become who they become.

I’m just your regular Momma, you know?

I’m Nikki. I’m a mom, parenting educator, and the person behind NikkiBParenting.

I help moms understand their child’s behavior, make sense of hard parenting moments, and understand their own reactions too.

Through practical parenting tools and education, NikkiBParenting helps moms look at what may be underneath behavior, hold boundaries, build important life skills, repair after hard moments, and decide whether Child, Self, or Environment is the best place to focus first.

My goal isn’t to give you more parenting advice to memorize. It’s to help you understand what’s happening so you can choose one small, realistic shift to practice next.

Long before I had a parenting framework or a website, I was fascinated by people. Why we react the way we do. Why some things feel easy for one person and incredibly hard for another. Why the things we experience when we’re young can show up in who we become later.

I didn’t have language for all of that yet.

I just knew I wanted to understand it.

Those tough times lit a fire in me to make a difference in children’s lives.

I grew up moving around a lot, living in different states across the US. My teenage years were mostly in Illinois.

Taking care of little ones came naturally to me, even when I was still a kid myself. School was a different story. I was a sensitive, awkward kid with a lot of anxiety, and I didn’t understand why other kids acted the way they did. Some rough experiences with teachers made high school feel lonely and confusing.

In college, I got fascinated by psychology, sociology, child psychology, and child growth and development. After college, I spent years working with children in daycares in several different states.

And I was good at it. Understanding kids and knowing how to respond to them came pretty naturally to me.

I began paying attention not only to what children were doing, but what might be happening underneath it.

Why did one child shut down after a mistake while another tried again?
Why did some children need more reassurance while others fought hard for independence?
Why could the exact same approach work beautifully with one child and completely fall apart with another?

I didn’t know it then, but those were the kinds of questions that would eventually shape NikkiBParenting.

Then I became a Momma myself...

I was good with kids. Then I had my own.

Professionally, working with children felt natural to me. I had years of knowledge and experience. So I thought becoming a mom would mean I had a pretty good head start.

Cute. 😂

Knowing what to do with children and being able to do it with your own child, in your own home, when YOU are emotionally involved, are very different things.

Parenting my own child brought out emotions, reactions, and pressure in me that I never felt with someone else’s kids.

“I know so much about children. So why is this so much harder at home?”

So many of the moms I help today feel this too. They KNOW how they want to parent. They’ve read the books. They’ve saved the scripts. They understand what they’re “supposed” to do.

But when the hard moment is actually happening, that knowledge can suddenly feel much harder to use. I experienced my own version of that.

So I got curious in a whole new way. I wasn’t only asking:

“Why is my child doing this?”

I started asking:

“Why am I reacting like this too?”

And I started looking at everything around us, too.

That’s when parenting started making a lot more sense.

It didn’t happen overnight. Little by little, I started figuring out what was really going on in our hard moments, and what actually helped.

I realized the hard moments weren’t just about behavior.

Underneath them were needs like Safety, Connection, and Autonomy.

There were life skills our children were still learning, like handling disappointment, communicating, solving problems, respecting boundaries, repairing mistakes, and trusting themselves.

And there wasn’t only a child in the moment. There was also me. And there was the environment we were both trying to function in.

That eventually became what I call the Trifecta of Focus™:

Child
Self
Environment

Instead of asking only:

“How do I get this behavior to stop?”

I learned to ask:

“What is happening here, and where do I need to focus first?”

Then I opened my in-home daycare.

This was after I became a mom, once I had started figuring all of this out at home.

My daycare gave me the chance to use what I was learning with lots of different children. Different personalities. Different needs. Different family situations. Not just my own kids.

Seeing it work with so many little humans helped me understand behavior, needs, skills, and environment even more deeply.

My education, my years working with children, becoming a mom, and running my daycare all shaped the way I see parenting today.

And then I noticed something else.

Sometimes the skills I was trying to teach my children were skills I was still practicing too.

I could teach my child how to handle disappointment...

while learning that someone could be disappointed with me and I didn’t have to change my boundary.

I could teach my child that mistakes were safe...

while learning not to treat my own mistakes like emergencies.

I could teach repair after losing your cool...

while practicing how to come back and repair after my own hard moments.

We’re raising kids while re-teaching ourselves.

That doesn’t mean Mom stops being the leader.

It means our children aren’t the only humans growing inside our homes.

That’s why I created NikkiBParenting.

I don’t want to give moms another pile of parenting tips to remember.

I want to help them understand why the hard moments keep happening:

What might be underneath the behavior.
What their child is still learning.
Why the moment may be bringing something out in Mom too.
Whether Child, Self, or Environment is the best place to focus first.
And what small shift they can practice next.

Because the goal isn’t perfect parenting.

It’s building healthier family patterns through the ordinary moments we repeat again and again.

I want moms to leave NikkiBParenting thinking:

“Ohhh. That finally makes sense.”

Wondering where to start?

If you’ve read the parenting books, saved the scripts, tried to stay calm, and still find yourself thinking...

“Why does this keep happening?”

Start here.

SHOW ME WHERE TO START →