I remember it from the time I was young. We loved celebrating the holidays with my mom’s side of the family, where there were many kids and lots of space. Grandpa and Grandma gave us candy and we slept on the floor and stayed awake until late at night, sharing silly jokes. Dad’s side of the family was not as much fun and every year, when the time came and dad said we were celebrating with his family, we were counting the seconds for the holiday to end.
This post contains a downloadable and printable list of the 60 tips for a stress-free lifestyle to make it easy for you to follow them and share them.
As a parent, I’m sure you’ve heard the whine “It’s not fair!” more than once. I would venture a guess that your response on some occasions was “Well, life isn’t (always) fair”. But have you ever stopped to think about the idea of fairness and how it affects your life and the life of your kids?
For me, there are some issues with this idea of fairness. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, and here’s how I see it.
The expectation that things will be fair is based on some external entity running things and making sure everybody gets their fair share.
Read Personal Power is Remarkably Better than Fairness or Justice »
Occasionally, the question “Are motorcycles worth the risk?” comes up when someone wants to buy one. It’s rather topical in our family, so I wanted to share a story for the benefit of other families having this discussion.
It was Monday morning and I had just taken my 7-year-old daughter to school. On the way back, I passed my son’s high school. As usual, the high school intersection was full of parents dropping their kids off.
I turned left after a motorcycle. A parked car started making a U-turn and hit the motorcycle! The rider flew in the air over 30 meters and his motorcycle dragged on the ground after him.
Read Are Motorcycles Worth the Risk? What You Need to Consider »
Many parents struggle with keeping their kids busy. One of the things parents hate hearing the most is “I’m bored”. Parents are very busy nowadays and feel they need money to give their kids what they want.
Weekends and holidays are the main stressful times for parents and many of us need a holiday after the holidays to recover, because keeping the kids busy can be hard work.
But in fact, there are many fun and exciting activities you can do with your kids with little or no money at all. You just need to look around a bit.
Today, we are going to explore the way conflicts influence self-esteem and how learning good conflict resolution can boost your self-esteem.
Most of our conflicts with others are caused by mixed or contradicting interests. One person wants something and the other wants something else, and many times, it is impossible to compromise because there is nothing in the middle, or at least, both parties THINK there is nothing in the middle.
The main problem with conflict is that it is a magnifier. If you have low self-esteem and you find yourself in conflict, your low self-esteem will become even lower and you will have more doubts about yourself.
Kids behave differently at home and parents wonder many times about the difference between them and the teachers. Some parents are surprised when a teacher says, “Your child is an angel in my class”.
I remember my mom coming home from a parent-teacher meeting in my sister’s class and saying, “It was as if we were talking about a different girl” (she did not say this about me, because I was trouble in both places).
Over 23 years of teaching, I have been asked many questions regarding school and home, teachers and parents.
As you know, teenagers are very close to my heart. At the age of 16, I decided it was time for people to change their attitude towards teens if they want them to change their attitude towards their life and the adults in their life. Especially parents of teenagers.
I was a bit shocked to realize that the relationship I had with my parents from an early age had led us into constant conflict during my teen years.
Until that point, I thought all teens hated their parents. I thought all parents of teenagers lost their kids’ respect and trust during adolescence. I knew that having these thoughts did not help teenagers or their parents.
Read Parents of Teenagers: This is How to Destroy Your Relationship »
Some parents have aggressive kids. Some parents have nice kids, who behave aggressively sometimes.
Teens, for example, because they are in “the argumentative age”, have more conflicts with their parents and this creates an endless cycle of disciplinary action, which creates arguments, which bring more discipline and then more arguments…
Not all kids know they need to be easy to parent. When they are born, no one tells them they need to do everything their parents expect of them. Or what to do when there are conflicts of expectations.
Read Aggressive Kids »
Last week, I wrote about the things that parents say that turn off communication between them and their teens. Today, I would like to talk about the buttons teens push to set their parents off and “make” them lose their minds.
From their early years, kids have an inherent sense of their parents’ weaknesses. They learn it by themselves – they do not need to go to school to study what works and what does not work. They are so sophisticated, they can tell you what works on Daddy and what works on Mommy, even if they are very different.
It is amazing sometimes to see a young baby, stepping as much as possible on the toes of his parents and making them behave in funny ways. This thing works both ways. Our children know us so well, they can make us do silly things out of joy or out of anger or guilt.
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