Parenting
Social Skills And School-Age Children
Social skills affect every aspect of our lives. We use social skills to appropriately foster relationships at home, work, in the homes of our friends and co-workers, and in our neighborhoods. Many children may desire to have social connections, but lack the necessary skills to interact appropriately with others. Since social skills are an important component for successful living, we need to make sure that our children acquire these skills and learn appropriate social rules.
Be Good To Yourself
As mothers, we juggle. We balance our kids with our careers with our home with our husbands with our personal time… In the equation it works out that “personal time” gets the least amount of attention. Most of us are too busy to notice or to complain—complaining doesn’t get things done and, as mothers, we are all about getting business taken care of. So, as a mother who is trying desperately to take note of what is and what is not conducive to getting it all done and remaining healthy and happy through the course of it all, here are some things that I notice make the days easier and make me healthier and happier.
Navigating the Turbulence of Adolescence
Life can be difficult, particularly for adolescents. Many young people navigate the turbulent years of adolescence and emerge into adulthood reasonably unscathed. Too many youngsters, however, feel stuck, confused and alienated. To complicate matters, they don’t feel like they have the inner resources to climb out of the mire. These youngsters are socially and emotionally “at-risk”. They may suffer from such painful symptoms as anxiety, depression or anger, and all of the self-destructive behavior patterns which follow. Often, a vicious cycle of frustration and failure begins.
Love Thy Potty as Thyself or Get On Board the Potty Train
It’s a grueling and exhausting task. It’s enough to make a grown woman cry. It’s perilous. It’s inescapable. It’s potty training. Try as we might to put it off, as parents, it is a trial we must all trudge through.
Managing A Family Crisis
I believe that a family crisis has a way of either bringing family members closer together or fragmenting relationships. There appears to be no middle ground. When a loved one is ill or dies, do the children and relatives rally around each other, or do they hold grudges, fight and feud?
Should Parents Reward Their Children?
For many years there’s been a debate about rewarding our children. Does it work? Is it effective? If so, what kind of rewards should be used? To use rewards, we establish a standard with our kids and give them something for meeting this standard. Punishment is given out in much the same way, but it’s used when certain standards of performance, behavior, etc. have not been met.
How To Manage Our Hard-Wired Youth
A friend of mine who is a high school English teacher in our local schools has been perplexed by the behavior of some of her current students. She said, “Help me understand why a third of my students can’t sit still in their desks? They wiggle, they squirm, they tap their pencils and their feet and are constantly in motion.” She is experiencing a dose of today’s “hard-wired” youngsters.
I’m Sorry. Did You Just Call Me a Stay-At-Home-Mom?
I quit my job and, even though I am writing full time and in the process of building a darkroom, by all accounts of definition I am a full time mommy (or “stay-at-home-mom”—there, I said it). I think I am going through a routine that might be familiar to women who have embarked on the brave and noble task of transitioning from independent-career-savvy-mom classically attired for her lunch meeting to harried-distracted-covered-in-peanut-butter…stay-at-home-mom.