Family Matters: Practical Parenting Blog

Formal vs. Informal Learning: Which is The Best During COVID-19?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many parents ask themselves if formal education is enough to give their kids what they need. What was normal before COVID-19 is not the same now. I suggest informal learning instead.

I believe many good things came out of COVID-19. For example, some of my nephews blossomed with remote learning. Unfortunately, some of them, who had been brilliant students before, just collapsed.

Lately, the parents of many of the children I coach told me of real challenges at home. I believe this difficult period highlights challenges each family already had before. The uncertainty, the restrictions, the financial burden, and the isolation just added more pressure into the system and the system no longer copes.

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100 Easy Ways of Entertaining Kids During COVID-19

Many parents are looking for easy ways of entertaining kids, but that’s happening now more than ever before. The restrictions that came with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic have created challenges for many families around the world.

Usually, kids spend a lot of time at school. Their time is full of learning, variety, and activities to keep them interested and occupied. It’s very hard to get bored at school. So, parents just need to entertain them in the afternoons.

Now, however, they spend most, if not all, of their time at home. This period is very difficult for them because they locked up and bored out of their little mind. Finding entertaining things to do is a much bigger challenge than it normally is.

Fortunately, you’re at the right place and I’m here to help!

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How to Inspire Your Kids’ Natural Kindness

Humans are kind in nature. Just watch young children. They are born with natural kindness. This is the main reason it’s so wonderful to be around children. They constantly give and engage in a way that makes you want to give in return.

Research has found that kindness is contagious. If you want to see it in action, try smiling at people as you pass them on the street. Smiling is an act of kindness! And when you smile, people smile back.

When babies see a puppet show with kind and affectionate characters, followed by rude and mean ones, they prefer the kind puppets. Yes, they were just babies. But they have an innate ability to mirror their surroundings. They can notice the tone of the voice and actions.

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If I Only Knew: How to Learn from the Past

Have you ever said to yourself, “If only I knew [something], my life would be better now”? I know I have. Let’s look at how we can use this question to learn from the past, heal, and have a better future.

When I was a younger everyone wanted to be smart. Everyone praised high academic achievements and tried to get them. Yet even when I started to get good grades, which wasn’t easy for me, I still had the feeling they weren’t enough.

I was surrounded by smart people who got amazing grades, but they weren’t happy, and I didn’t envy them. Eventually, I realized that being wise is more useful than being smart.

This post is part 47 of 47 in the series Make a List

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Amazing Awakened Spirit in a Beautiful Teenager

Teens have a bad reputation. People often label them as rebellious, difficult and even troubled. Over the years, I’ve worked with many teens, and some of them have an awakened spirit that blew me away.

Jordan was a 17-year-old boy who came to see me because he had some difficulties with his parents. When I read his parents’ description of him, and the description he had written about himself, I knew he was different. No doubt about it. I just didn’t know how much.

His parents wrote he had been clingy as a child, had no friends, didn’t listen to them and had no direction in life. But when I read his own description, I was very confused. The way he described himself – his desires, challenges and what he wanted from his coaching – was in total contradiction to what his parents wrote about him. This was an issue for sure.

This post is part of 19 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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Amazing Natural Treatment for Hyperactive Attention Deficit Disorder

Children with learning difficulties are very close to my heart. I’ve written about kids with Hyperactive Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD) before and shared tips and strategies to help them live a happy, fulfilling life. It makes me very happy when readers share their stories and tell me how they’ve used my tips to improve their ADHD child’s life for the better.

Claire is the mother of a boy with ADD/ADHD. She came to this blog and read some of the posts about ways to manage Hyperactive Attention Deficit Disorder. After just one month of trying some of the techniques, her son became a happier child, and she became a happier mom.

When she felt she was on the right track, she sent me a very happy and positive update on her son’s progress and how she’d used my tips. So I asked if I could share her emails with other moms.

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How to Vaporize Psychological Pain with Psychological Painkillers

Everyone understands what physical pain is. And the medical world is full of treatments and painkillers to eliminate this pain. But psychological pain is not that well-known and treating it is a bit more challenging.

Physical pain comes from damage to the tissues of the body. Psychological pain is a suffering with no apparent physical origin. You can even say that all the feelings we don’t like – sadness, grief, anger, contempt, frustration, rage, depression, etc. – are forms psychological pain.

Physical pain is often localized, temporary and associated with some harmful or damaging physical trigger. Psychological pain is a more generalized, lasting, unpleasant feeling resulting from an inability of to cope with emotional challenges. But sometimes, it manifests just like physical pain does.

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Seize the Day: Are You Using or Losing Your Time?

Time is precious. Some say that time is the only thing we really have. Most people know the expressions “Carpe diem”, “Seize the day” and “Seize the present”, but only few actually live by them.

Time keeps moving forward. Often, we feel like it’s just flown past us and are out of time. So, we need to learn to appreciate the time we have and use it wisely. We all have the same 24 hours every day. We should make the most of them.

We say that children have no concept of time. My 3-year-old granddaughter has reached the stage of recognizing past and present. For her, the past is “yesterday”, and the future is “tomorrow”. That’s advanced for her age, but limited compared to an adult’s understanding of time.

But I wonder about this view.

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This Is How To Take Charge Of Your Life

Many people want to take charge of their life, but simply don’t know how to. It’s one thing to understand that taking charge is important and another thing to actually do it. If you’re looking for tips that will help you, keep reading!

I wasn’t always in charge of my life. For my first 16 years, other people and circumstances ruled everything. I had no control whatsoever and my life looked, well, out of control.

I was sailing in the sea of life without a captain and was knocked around from side to side, crashing and tumbling when strong winds came. Without direction, without resources, with no captain and no crew to support me, every breeze turned into a storm.

For every two steps forward, I took one step back. Even when I made progress, I still felt I was going nowhere.

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The Truth about Why We Send Our Kids to School

There is a point in every parent’s journey where you ask yourself, “Why do I send my kids to school?” Over the last 33 years, I’ve worked with many parents. And I can tell you that most of them didn’t have a good answer to this question.

Have you ever reached this point in your parenting?

What was your answer?

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