Family Matters

When young kids go to any formal education, their knowledge of colors is checked. Colors are an easy way to check learning and it is possible to start teaching the colors at a very early age. Kids as young as 2 years old can learn their colors and build good learning connections in their brain. The earlier they start, the better it is for their learning abilities.

Before you start it, parenting seems daunting. You could be in for years of giving up your personal freedoms to one or more creatures who become more and more demanding as they grow older, while you run around trying to satisfy their insatiable appetite for your time and your money. Indeed, without using The Tao of Parenting, this could be the case, but it does not have to be.

Yesterday, during a session with two of my parenting clients, they asked me again, “Why do you send your kids to school?” My answer was “Because kids are like mice - they need friends”. Research on mice and relationship has found that mice that spent their time with other mice live longer - as a matter a fact, twice as long - than mice who lived on their own. Happy kids, just like happy mice, need company and this is the main reason for sending kids to school.

If you want your kids to study well and succeed in everything they do, first you need to make sure they have the right fuel to make their body function. Many people think that success at school is totally connected to how smart kids are but unfortunately, kids’ “smartness” is highly effected by the way they manage their body.

Many times, we do not know if kids actually know things, because they are too young to tell us. In fact, they know a lot more than they can tell. As parents, we can sometimes ask our kids questions that are simply too advanced for them, conclude they do not know the answer and become disappointed with their lack of knowledge. This does not have to be so.

Who is not afraid of tests?

When I was a school kid (and not a very good one, mind you), I hated tests. I used to be so scared I was sick on the day. Sometimes, this worked and I got to stay at home, but most of the times I still had to go to school and take the test. The more I was afraid of tests, the worse my grades were. You could say that the worse I thought I would do, the more I feared the test.

If you are a parent of kids who go to school, you have probably heard many times expressions like “I hate homework”, “I hate school” or “I don’t want to learn”. As easy and fun as learning at school may seem, it can be hard work for many kids.

I believe that learning is harder when you do not understand why you should learn, how you learn and what you gain from learning. Unfortunately, most kids do not know what happens to them in the process of learning, so they only see the pain associated with it, instead of the pleasure.

Only 3% of teens going into higher education straight after high school actually finish their choice of study and work in that profession for about 5 years after finishing studying.

If you are a teacher or a parent of a child who struggles with writing, here are some things you can do to help make life easier for them. Remember, they do not need to be labeled. They do not need a stamp of “Dyslexia” or “ADHD”. If you find they are struggling, lend them a helping hand and change some of the classroom rules to suite their need.

As parents, we all want our kids to do well. So we look for ways to measure and track whether they are doing well. Not having gone through parenting school, most of us resort to what our parents have done with us, which is focus on the grades we “brought back home” from school. As long as the kids’ grades are good, they must be doing fine, right?