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.
In the Hearts of Kids
Being grownups, parents are often busy with grownup things. Being kids, parents often assume their children are busy with kid things. So when something happens that we classify as “a grownup thing”, we may assume our kids will simply ignore it or perhaps not fully comprehend it. Sometimes, we are so wrong.
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Do As I Do
In one of the newsletters I get regularly, I received a link to the article titled “Social media…dirty word or essential skill?” I am sure most parents with Internet access and a teen or two would vote for “dirty word”, considering their kids’ obsessive texting, chatting and emailing.
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Learning? What learning?
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?
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How to Cure a Forgetful Kid
This is a question I got from a mother:
“I have a 13-year-old son who is a forgetful kid. I ask him to bring notes from school and he forgets them. He forgets his homework, he forgets to bring messages from school, he forgets he has a test, he forgets we have plans in the family. I talked to his teachers and we agreed to communicate between us but he keeps forgetting his communication book. I feel lost and I do not understand why he is so forgetful in things that are important and remembers his computer stuff well.
What can I do?”
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Recipe for Teen Disaster
Children’s behavior is the concern of many parents. Kids can be diagnosed with ADD, ADHD or ODD, when in fact, it is the various choices their parents have made throughout the course of their kids’ lives that make kids act the way they do. Yes, I know this is hard to accept, but I believe that if you were to give me a normal child – boy or girl – I could, by making a simple choice to act in a particular way, single-handedly turn this child into a problematic beast with social problems, difficulties with authority, declining academic achievement, lack of motivation, depression, anger and anxiety, just to name a few.
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Opposition Defiance Disorder – What an ODD Name
Opposition Defiance Disorder (ODD) is another name people who like labels use when they need a budget for helping children. Someone has worked very hard and probably spent many dollars to research kids and teens (they say ODD can start as early as 1-3 years of age) and come up with a nice label. Since ADHD worked so well, ODD should work quite well too. Labels are a good way to attract funds, but I am not sure they are good to make things better.
A Month Away from School
Recently, we took the kids out of school for a month of holiday. Usually, we do our best to avoid missing school, not because we think our kids cannot catch up, but because they are doing so many wonderful and exciting things at school that we would not want them to miss all the fun (Can you believe it? They would not want to miss it either – strange kids…). This time, we had no choice.
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Parenting for Tomorrow
Here is a typical scene in many homes these days: you come in the door, pass by the living room and see the TV on and one or two kids holding something in their hand, with a wire leading to just under the TV. They kids are totally absorbed in what is happening on the screen and ignore you completely, while pressing buttons and pushing little levers on the box in their hands.
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When Your Mom is a Chef
When I tell people my mom is a chef, they look at me in respect. It is natural. As a daughter to a chef, people think you have the advantage of knowing all the trade secrets. In the old days, knowledge went from parents to children and special knowledge in cooking was a woman’s way of finding a match. My mom always said to me that the way to a man’s heart was through his belly. This worked well for her, because my dad loves her cooking.
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