Valerie Pearman always dreamed of getting her writings published.

Arianna Huffington’s recent visit to the Island inspired the 63-year-old to take it a step further.

Mrs Pearman got in touch with Huffington Post, her online news and blog site, and pitched a story idea. Her article “My Top Ten Parenting Tips” has garnered a lot of positive feedback over the past few weeks; she’s hoping to follow it up with some children’s books in the near future.

Q: So how did that opportunity come about?

A: I am a media buff so I look at all different news sites from around the world. Huffington Post is one I also enjoy, especially when it comes to their entertainment section. So when I heard the founder Arianna Huffington was coming to Bermuda to speak I immediately signed up. It was during that event she talked about someone who had created a blog and had over a million hits. I thought to myself “how many hits could I actually get?”.

Later in the talk Ms Huffington gave out her e-mail address and encouraged people to contact her. I mentioned my idea for a column in an e-mail and she responded to me right away and said she would get her senior editor for blogs to contact me. They did and just said, “Write something of about 600 to 800 words and send it my way”. It ended up being “my top ten list” for parenting tips and they even came back to say they liked what I wrote.

What was the inspiration behind the story?

My blog post was a list of things I believe parents should do with their children to build and foster a strong relationship. I believe I’ve been very successful at raising my daughter, Chesney. She’s a talented, giving and successful person and hasn’t given me any major problems at all. We are also very close and have always been that way. This was actually a really exciting opportunity for me because I had always said I wanted to write children’s books. Chesney was actually the one who encouraged me to finally do it. She said, “I don’t know why you haven’t done any writing yet. You have been saying you want to do this for the last 20 years.”

What factors do you think make you a “successful mom”?

I’ve always been involved in Chesney’s activities from the time she was born to now, as a 30-year-old adult. I also passed on my love to travel to her from a young age. Travelling is something in particular I think parents should do with their children.

We’ve been everywhere together from Alaska, Hawaii, Scandinavia and all throughout Europe. I think those experiences helped to make us even closer. She didn’t mind travelling everywhere with me. You find sometimes a lot of teens or older children don’t want to travel with their parents or do things with their parents, but that wasn’t an issue for us.

Were there any challenges you experienced as a mom?

I think parenting just came naturally to me. I didn’t think it was rough or difficult. I worked in the medical profession, so I’m not sure if that nurturing side helped. Yeah, there were books on parenting that I was given, but I didn’t read those until some years later.

I was a single parent, so it was always important to me to make sure she had positive male role models in her life. Those men took grandfather and father roles and another played a brotherly role, even though he was her godfather. So I had a lot of support, which made a huge difference to her upbringing.

I think it would have definitely been a lot more challenging without that. I was also a mature parent and didn’t have Chesney until I was 33 years old and had already done pretty much everything I had wanted to do. From my point of view it’s important to be able to afford to have children, so you can provide them with the best you can give. Children take all your money.

You’ve mentioned that the two of you were quite close. Why do you suppose that was?

Well, we always communicated. By communicating I think you build strong bonds with your children. It also gives them the freedom to talk to you about anything rather than always running to their friends.

I’ve tried to always make sure we had an open relationship and never really discriminated about what was said to me in conversation. Chesney’s friends used to be surprised that she would come to me with things, but I think that was also how I was raised. I always had an extremely close relationship with my mom, Alice Pearman, and that inspired me to want to continue that on with my daughter.

What went into preparing for the article?

I think it took me about an hour because it was just the different things that have worked for me throughout the years coming to my head. Then obviously I had to proofread it a bunch of times. Some of my tips are things like making learning fun. Each morning when I would be driving Chesney to school in the car we would play little games to make the ride more enjoyable. We would count the different coloured cars we saw, for instance red, or count the number of trees en route to school.

Those kinds of things helped with counting, but in a fun way. We would also watch a lot of educational shows like National Geographic. I think that is a great resource for people who don’t have the funds to go to different places so they can get an idea of what other parts of the world are like. One time her class was talking about the glaciers and Chesney said she had seen one in real life. Her classmates didn’t believe her, but we had seen them on a trip to Alaska.

What’s next for you with your writing?

This has been so exciting for me. I think I will probably do something else to keep it going. Maybe take my list of tips and expand on it so it can be turned into a children’s book.

• See her full blog post at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/valerie-pearman/my-top-10-parenting-tips_b_7146402.html