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