Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘rules’

During years of work in the education field, I have found that good routines are great for establishing good habits in kids. If your kids have bad TV habits and they watch for too long or too many unhealthy shows, a good routine can help them stay away from the TV and choose more beneficial activities.

Routines are a good way to give kids a stable atmosphere and make them feel certain in their life. The massive change in routine is one of the reasons kids’ world is so shaken and they tend to watch too much TV when their parents go through a relationship breakdown.

I think a good routine is a great parenting technique not only for overcoming the TV addiction but for many other habits you want to instill in your kids. An established routine encapsulates many of your rules and boundaries. If you are a regular reader in this site, you already know I believe that rules give kids a sense of certainty and define to them the safety limits in the world they live in. Therefore, a routine plays a big part in making your kids feel safe.

As a life coach, I teach my clients emotional intelligence and I find that “learning to feel” is helpful (and, unfortunately, very much needed) in personal development. Our slogan at Be Happy in LIFE is “Happiness is a choice” and we see our goal as coaches to teach people how to feel happy and how to choose happiness.

I once said (OK, I have said it hundreds of time) that kids believe everything you tell them. The younger they are, the truer this statement is. Parents do not know they are lucky that their young kids do not question them as much as they should. In fact, because kids do not doubt what their parents say, I would like to encourage all the parents reading this post to take advantage of this phenomenon and plant good thoughts and beliefs in your kids’ little minds. So if you are a parent and you want to learn how to plant good thoughts in your children’s mind, buckle up and enjoy the ride.

I think I have written about school uniform and its (negative) educational value many times, yet somehow, I do not have the feeling I have written enough. I hope you can read my frustration with this topic in my sarcasm, because I am not happy at all.

Every person feels anxiety sometimes. It is a natural reaction to what is perceived as danger – an evolution of the “fight or flight” response. While for most people, experiencing anxiety in small doses is normal and healthy, for others, feeling anxious about the future or about situations over which they have no control may cause real interference with daily living. It is the frequency of the fear and the perception of danger, when in fact there may be no real danger, which causes anxious people to avoid participating in “normal” activities.

Unlike “right and wrong”, which are viewed as absolute and indisputable, there are cases where someone controls the situation and simply enforces his or her personal preferences. It is a subjective type of black and white thinking.

If you think about it, from the day you are born, everyone around you tells you what is right and what is wrong. In previous generations, parents used “the carrot and the stick” to teach kids about right and wrong. Anger and punishment were the stick and smiles and rewards were the carrots. Some parents, following the example of their own parents, even used real sticks, belts and denying of physical touch as punishment, while using physical gestures like a hug and a kiss to say, “You’ve made me proud”.

Whether we like it or not, problems are part of life. Success is not about what happens to us in life, but about what we do with it – the good and the bad. One of people’s irrational rules of living is the expectation to be able always to find a solution to a problem, [...]

Everyone has rules for establishing self-worth. Just like the need for approval forms in our early years, due to our relationship with people who are significant to us, our definition of self-worth comes from them too. Parents and educators are the main source of our thoughts about our self-worth.

Most people do not like to talk about their rules, but they have them for everything. There are rules for living, rules for dying, rules for work, rules for home, rules for riding the bus and rules for eating in a restaurant.