Are Parents Best Teachers?

Parents start educational process since the birth of their children, and never stop teaching. Firstly, this corresponds to the parental role in nature. These are the instincts from the deepest depths of our subconsciousness that prompt every parent to sacrifice part of themselves in order to help next generation confidently face objective reality and deal with difficulties of their well being.

Toddler Winter Craft

Once the days are shorter and colder, entertaining an active toddler can become really hard work. This is where your list of toddler winter craft ideas also becomes your life line and your sanity. As a parent there is one place you can never avoid - the kitchen, hence this is the best place to stick your list of toddler winter craft ideas.

Toddler Toys That Can Help Your Baby Walk

Toddler toys that can help your baby walk - using toddler push toys to your advantage and how to buy them

Amongst all the kinds of toddler toys that you will buy for your little one, a push toys is the most essential. Apart from the fact that these toys are an absolute must for encouraging basic motor skills like standing, walking and running in your toddler, they often turn out to be one of the all time favourites. These push toddler toys are also multifunctional and it does take a while before your child actually outgrows them.

Right Brain Kids at Home - 7 Secrets to Teach Your Kids Life Skills Start From Right Brain Training

Right Brain is creativity, imagination etc. Children at age 3 to 6 are very dominant in their right brain. They are creative, imaginative, asking lots of surprising questions. Parents have to be often observed this behavior and find the correct ways to teach them how to make use of this talent!

Here I share the 7 Secrets to Teach Your Kids Life Skills Start from Right Brain

Discipline and Punishment - The Key Differences Between These Two Terms

The words discipline and punishment are often used to mean the same thing. However, they are very different from each other. Discipline is the technique of helping a child to learn self-control and how to behave in a way that is socially acceptable to others. Discipline should always focus on the positive reinforcement and self esteem of the child. The purpose of discipline is to help a child learn how to control their behavior and emotions and should be further reinforced with firm reminders. Punishment is a style of discipline. There are several forms of physical punishment including spanking or hitting. And, there are psychological punishments such as taking away privileges or sending a child to their room. The purpose of punishment is control the unacceptable behavior.

The Importance of Self Regulation for Kids

Self regulation is the ability of a person to control and direct one's own feelings, thoughts, and actions. It is important that you practice it everyday. Your decisions and behaviors depend on it. When you are not able to have this skill, then you will fail to do better socially, mentally and academically. Practicing self-regulation starting from your childhood will teach you to become more patient, skillful and successful. Your parents and teachers are the important guides on how to regulate or control your self. Here are some important keys on the importance of self regulation.

A Guide to Baby Care

Studies show that breastfeeding is the best way for a parent in baby care. This is because it avoids defects that the child may face if it goes without. Natal advice is that you should feed your baby breast milk exclusively for the first six months. The reason is that it will improve your baby's immune system and ensure that it does not fall sick each time. In addition to that, the correct baby care is very much dependant on how safely and faster your child grows and develops in its late life years. If it is your first time having a kid, then you need to be in charge of your baby's nutrition to ensure that it is getting the best in life. Baby care also dictates that you need before selecting any nutrition products; you need to consult your pediatrician. This is because there are a lot of products in the market such that it will get confusing on which is the best one.

Easy Tips For Potty Training For Girls

Parents have a special moment when they are with their little ones and those remain as sweet memories for them for their entire life. Most parents think that potty training toddlers is quite difficult. You love to be with your little ones but when it comes to changing the diapers of the child and that too the dirty ones it becomes really difficult. Now to help parents and ease their work there are so many potty training programs available for parents online. All the parents go through this problem when they have to clean their little one's potty and wish if they could get some alternative way wherein they did not have to do this.

Making Predictions are Fun During Reading Aloud With Kids

A special type of question are prediction questions that ask children to make an informed guess about what will happen next in a story. Prediction questions develop children's logical thinking skills. The key is this: Do not only ask for a prediction, also ask for the reasoning behind the prediction. The principle we must bear in mind is: the quality of a prediction is determined not by what actually happens next in the book but by the quality of the reasoning behind the prediction.

Government Assistance For Single Mothers - Daycare Support For Single Parents

Nearly all single parents have to work to meet their financial needs. It is not possible for them to look after their preschool children while at work. Daycare assistance is expensive so they require some sort of arrangement which is affordable. A number of groups recognize this and offer their help by arranging inexpensive daycare support.

Stages of Child Development

Child development is a concern for all parents; in fact, many parents worry as to whether their child is experiencing the normal stages of child development. Because childhood development encompasses mental, emotional, social, physical and language abilities, tracking developmental milestones is a great way to ensure that your young one is growing at a healthy rate.

Four Year Old Child-ages and Stages of Development

Characteristics of 4 year old children

If three is the age of doing, four is the age of finding out. The two words most frequently used by a four-year-old are Why and how. He is also a doer who lives in the here and now. So when you say, "Let's hurry and clean the house and we can go to the circus tomorrow," you are really pushing his buttons. Yesterday means nothing. Tomorrow is a vague promise. However, he can get very excited about coming events, but, because he cannot grasp the meaning of time, he may ask, "Is it tomorrow yet?"

A typical four-year-old offers more enthusiastic help than children of most other ages. He wants to please you so much.

Keep reading to learn about physical, emotional, social and mental development as well as realistic expectations for assuming personal responsibility.

How to Teach Your Child Positive Thought Skills

Parents understand the value of teaching their children math skills, the alphabet, tying their shoes and instilling social skills. What is less obvious is that children also need assistance in learning positive patterns of thought.
Here are five ways to teach your child the skills of positive thought.

Can a bedtime routine anchor the entire day?

The components of a bedtime routine will vary, of course, from family to family, but being consistent is important for everyone in the family. I strive to balance four important things:
cleaning up and getting ready for the next day getting ready for bed reviewing the day transition time with a parent

Advantages of Single Parent Families

Single parents often worry that their children will somehow be damaged from living in a single parent family. While a single parent family may not be the ideal situation for raising children, many two-parent families are also less than desirable. Kids can actually benefit from living in a single parent family.

Like It or Not, Kids Grow with Violence

Like most of the parents, you are probably against guns. Real guns.  At the  mere sight of them, your knees turn to jelly. A gunless society is ideal but only  law-abiding citizens can make it one. If guns are in the hands of goons, who will  protect the gunless citizens?

Nowadays, it’s hard to tell who are the law enforcers  and the law-breakers.  You must be able to enforce “toys for peace” in your home. You should be  conscious about this, as your boys and girls graduate from plastic toys that go “bang bang” to water guns. What are popular now are air soft guns using plastic  pellets. They are quite expensive.

This is probably one step ahead of video or role-playing games, where one  uses the computer or imagination. In war games, they can act it out. You  probably don’t notice it but when your kids start playing war games, their  relationship skills improve. They become a team with a hobby to share. It’s good,  clean fun. Nobody gets hurt. They wear protective goggles or face masks, long  sleeves and long pants. (It seems there are some adults who join, not to play, but to hurt.)

The children’s justifications should never change your stand about toy  guns. They know they can never ask you to buy such guns for them. (So they’d  probably try asking their other parent.) Besides, you reaction is always economic:  “How much? That’s a month’s groceries! No way!”  But when violence is deliberate, such as in hazing, then that’s a different  story. This is no longer a game. The pain is real. It is not like those “blood pellets”  you can wipe away when the game is over. You can actually have blood on your hands.

Hazing does not teach brotherhood. It teaches revenge. So this batch was made to take a gulp of milk, spit it out, and pass the same glass down the line. From a half-filled glass, by the time it gets to the last guy, it’s nearly full. Next year, this same batch will do the same, or worse, to their neophytes. And so the violence escalates.

Is this a rite of passage every boy must undergo to be a man, or a girl to be a woman? A father, especially one who got by without joining any fraternity, is  proof enough that fraternities are not necessary. If by brotherhood, it means cheating by test paper leaks and connections, then you shouldn’t want that for your children.

They say the culture of violence is bred by violence in comics, movies and  television. That enough exposure to violence can dull one’s sense and one can become insensitive to gore and blood. Power can be such a heady experience.  Guns or even a car can give one a feeling of power. You’ve seen houseboys transformed into veritable kings of the road, once they get behind the steering wheel. Can you imagine those out of school youth recruited to be security guards and issued guns?

What can we do about this culture of violence? Parents ask the schools to be stricter with those involved in frat violence. For students, the best thing is to boycott fraternities. Those who join are mostly insecure students from the province who really need some form of brotherhood, as they are new in the city or university. They do not know that one can pass the course and find jobs based on one’s merits.

Fratmen are popular with girls. Well, girls, frat membership does not make a man – especially when the measure is whether one can stand a beating and be able to beat up others in turn. Fraternities will eventually die if there will be no new recruits.

Aside from limiting your children’s exposure to violence in mass media, you have to teach them how to handle power. With power come greater responsibilities. Being a true leader means humility and service, not giving orders to slaves. Moreover, fellowship can be achieved without undergoing or inflicting pain.

You can’t completely protect your children from violence since it exists in their environment. The most you could do is to arm your children with values so that, in time, when they encounter violence, they will know what to do and hopefully make the right decision.

Tips for Doing Parent Chief Duty,

There are five more tips for doing parent chief duty, which is;

1. Trust your personal insights into your child, but also continue to educate yourself as a parent.
Allow me to say once more, that I venture to write upon subjects bearing on home education with the greatest deference to mothers; believing, that in virtue of their peculiar insight into the dispositions of their own children, they are blest with both knowledge and power in the management of them which lookers-on can only admire from afar. At the same time, there is such a thing as a science of education, that does not come by intuition, in the knowledge of which it is possible to bring up a child entirely according to natural law, which is also Divine law, in the keeping of which there is great reward

2. Remember that educating your child as a whole person requires flexibility as you deal with each unique individual.
The central thought, or rather body of thought, upon which I found, is the somewhat obvious fact that the child is a person with all the possibilities and powers included in personality

Parents are very jealous over the individuality of their children; they mistrust the tendency to develop all on the same plan; and this instinctive jealousy is right; for, supposing that education really did consist in systematised efforts to draw out every power that is in us, why, we should all develop on the same lines, be as like as ‘two peas,’ and (should we not?) die of weariness of one another!

We believe that children are human beings at their best and sweetest, but also at their weakest and least wise. We are careful not to dilute life for them, but to present such portions to them in such quantities as they can readily receive

3. Give your child a natural home atmosphere in which to learn, rather than in a contrived “child environment.”
When we say that ‘education is an atmosphere,’ we do not mean that a childshould be isolated in what may be called a ‘child-environment’ especially adapted and prepared, but that we should take into account the educational value of his natural home atmosphere, both as regards persons and things, and should let him live freely among his proper conditions. It stultifies a child to bring down his world to the ‘child’s’ level

It is not an environment that these want, a set of artificial relations carefully constructed, but an atmosphere which nobody has been at pains to constitute. It is there, about the child, his natural element, precisely as the atmosphere of the earth is about us. It is thrown off, as it were, from persons and things, stirred by events, sweetened by love, ventilated, kept in motion, by the regulated action of common sense. We all know the natural conditions under which a child should live; how he shares household ways with his mother, romps with his father, is teased by his brothers and petted by his sisters; is taught by his tumbles; learns self-denial by the baby’s needs, the delightfulness of furniture by playing at battle and siege with sofa and table; learns veneration for the old by the visits of his great-grandmother; how to live with his equals by the chums he gathers round him; learns intimacy with animals from his dog and cat; delight in the fields where the buttercups grow and greater delight in the blackberry hedges. And, what tempered ‘fusion of classes’ is so effective as a child’s intimacy with his betters, and also with cook and housemaid, blacksmith and joiner, with everybody who comes in his way? Children have a genius for this sort of general intimacy, a valuable part of their education; care and guidance are needed, of course, lest admiring friends should make fools of them, but no compounded ‘environment’ could make up for this fresh air, this wholesome wind blowing now from one point, now from another

4. Consider postponing formal school lessons until your child is six.
We begin the definite ‘school’ education of children when they are six; they are no doubt capable of beginning a year or two earlier but the fact is that nature and circumstances have provided such a wide field of education for young children that it seems better to abstain from requiring direct intellectual efforts until they have arrived at that age

5. Remember that your child is learning by leaps and bounds during his early years, simply from observing and interacting with everything around him.
Does the child eat or drink, does he come, or go, or play—all the time he is being educated, though he is as little aware of it as he is of the act of breathing. Let us consider, in the first two years of life they manage to get through more intellectual effort than any following two years can show.

The child has inborn cravings after all we have given him.

Just as the healthy child must have his dinner and his bed, so too does he crave for knowledge, perfection, beauty, power, society; and all he wants is opportunity. Give him opportunities of loving and learning, and he will love and learn, for ‘ ’tis his nature to.’ Whoever has taken note of the sweet reasonableness, the quick intelligence, the bright imaginings of a child, will think the fuss we make about the right studies for developing these is like asking, How shall we get a hungry man to eat his dinner?

Parent Chief Duty

Keep in mind that to

“educate” means to help form

a child’s mind, character, or

physical ability. Education

encompasses all that you do to

cultivate, nourish, and train

your child as a person.

I love Charlotte Masson ideas about parent chief duty.  She told us that the first is to understand that bringing up and educating your child is the most important job in society. Not only in the school but but far more in the home, because it is more than anything else the home influences brought to bear upon the

child that determine the character and career of the future man or woman

Then, to form in our child right habits of thinking and behaving “By ‘education is a discipline,’ we mean the discipline of habits, formed definitelyand thoughtfully, whether habits of mind or body” I agrred with her. I believede tht this is the min lesson for our young children. Just delay your writing and reading acalculating until your children is well behave

Then Nourish your child’s mind with loving, right, and noble ideas. Now that life, which we call education, receives only one kind of sustenance; it grows upon ideas. The duty of parents is to sustain a child’s inner life with ideas as they sustain his body with food. The child has affinities with evil as well as with good; therefore, hedge him about from any chance lodgment of evil ideas. In saying that ‘education is a life,’ the need of intellectual and moral as well as of physical sustenance is implied. The mind feeds on ideas, and therefore children should have a generous curriculum

In the early days of a child’s life it makes little apparent difference whether we educate with a notion of filling a receptacle, inscribing a tablet, moulding plastic matter, or nourishing a life, but as a child grows we shall perceive that only those ideas which have fed his life, are taken into his being; all the rest is cast away or is,

like sawdust in the system, an impediment and an injury

Then Masson remind us to  Make sure everything you give your child is wholesome and nourishing,including the atmosphere in which he grows. The parents’ chief care is, that that which they supply shall be wholesome and nourishing, whether in the way of picture-books, lessons, playmates, bread and milk, or mother’s love.

Every look of gentleness and tone of reverence, every word of kindness and act of help, passes into the thought-environment, the very atmosphere which the child breathes; he does not think of these things, may never think of them, but all his life long they excite that ‘vague appetency towards something’ out of which most of his actions spring. Oh, wonderful and dreadful presence of the little child in the midst!

That he should take direction and inspiration from all the casual life about him, should make our poor words and ways the starting-point from which, and in the direction of which, he develops—this is a thought which makes the best of us hold our breath. There is no way of escape for parents; they must needs be as ‘inspirers’ to their children, because about them hangs, as its atmosphere about a planet, the thought-environment of the child, from which he derives those enduring ideas which express themselves as a life-long ‘appetency’ towards things sordid or things lovely, things earthly or divine

The Best School Preparation

Most of us have been taught that knowing letters, numbers, shapes and colors are the keys to being ready to begin school. Mothers often speak of their child’s school readiness saying, "She knows the alphabet and most letter sounds and can count to twenty." But actually children don’t need academic knowledge before they start school - they really need listening skills, a good attention span, and fine motor skills.

Recently I read an article in which someone had asked a bunch of kindergarten teachers and a bunch of mothers of preschoolers what skills children needed before they started kindergarten. There was no overlap at all between the answers of the two groups! The mothers all mentioned academic things like letters and numbers. The teachers said listening skills, fine motor skills, and self discipline

So there’s nothing wrong with letters and numbers. But all the non-academic activities that people recommend for preschoolers are actually better preparation for school. Reading to your child develops listening skills and attention span. Projects like putting together puzzles, stringing beads, and cutting construction paper all develop fine motor skills and attention span. So does participating in household chores and cooking. There’s a lot of learning in sweeping a floor, planting a garden, or baking a batch of cookies - don’t sell them short! And of course, nature walks and trips to the zoo or train station or children’s museum develop curiosity and a love of learning. That’s probably the best school preparation of all.

Kids point of view: Life as One Big Commercial Break

Television today is still a “baby sitter” both for adults and preschoolers. When people are bored or simply want to rest, they watch TV. Some are not really interested to watch at all. They need the TV to put them to sleep. As soon as you turn it off, they wake up.

With the remote control, watching TV can be a dizzying experience. I get confused with what characters go with what plot. What with that mysterious hand switching channels during commercial breaks, you find yourself following several shows at the same time. Sometimes you have to shout, “stop!” and confiscate the remote control. “Please decide which program you want and stick to it”.

That was supposed to be final but what’s this switching channel again?

“Mom, there are commercial breaks!” would be the excuse. Today’s TV imports still have family-oriented shows and the rest are soap operas, game shows and their local counterparts which include slapsticks or tearjerkers, noontime variety shows, movie personalities’ song and dance, and movie Dom’s gossip sessions. These are the kinds of shows very young children are exposed to. Most of these are shown at times when kids are awake and those of school age are already home. Programming leaves much to be desired.

The crucial thing about TV is, it is a powerful medium. Repetitious subliminal messages are being exploited by advertisements that target kids. They are mesmerized by commercials. Cigarette and liquor ads suggest, “It is good to smoke and drink” without warning about its dangers. They often show images of sophisticated living.

Teachers reveal their frustration with college students who have limited concentration that usually lasts only for 15 minutes due to commercial gap syndrome. They suffer from what noted psychologists term “attention deficit disorder”.

Moreover, these teachers lament. Kids raised by TV hardly read, preconditioned as they are by TV-spoon feeding. (How many students actually read a book for their term paper? If they do, they choose a very short book but most just rent a DVD version.) There is nothing wrong with this audiovisual education like “The Planet Earth” but reading is entirely different from watching. Reading develops the imagination unlike TV, where the camera can focus on the smallest detail.

The fast pacing of images gives the illusion that “life is never continuous...it is fragmentalized; it is made up of commercial breaks. And if one doesn’t like what is seen and heard, one can change channels”. In reality, one can “change channels” in one’s mind and switch to fantasy.

Television’s powerful medium can be utilized in a positive way. Already public service ads by both the station and advertiser are being shown. It aims to educate the public on traffic and safety rules. Effective communication must be two-way. TV programs now feature citizens’ woes and call the attention of the
concerned government agency or ask citizens’ cooperation in government programs. Not surprisingly, this produces faster results.

It is hoped that the government will subsidize alternative TV productions that will really give wholesome entertainment, education and develop local talent rather than the superstar “mentality” and its subsequent commercial rating that dominates the industry today.

In the high-tech world of communications via satellites, fax and computers, our children are bombarded with instant, varied and conflicting messages. It is easy to be carried away with images of fun and make-believe like the Idol Stars that seem to be getting more and more hallucinatory and lead an aimless life. Or children of the TV generation might be indecisive due to themyriad choices they are confronted with.

This is real life. There is no instant replay or fast-forward. “Changing channels” needs a lot of thinking and weighing of consequences, advantages and disadvantages.

There is great pressure not to be traditional. Don’t apologize. You can still be progressive and choose traditional values. Indeed, your children need to have an anchor and a focus – good old-fashioned principles and priorities. Start from now to your young children