Tips for a Stress-Free Lifestyle (6)

This is the 6th and final part of the series “60 Tips for a Stress-Free Lifestyle”, bringing you another set of 10 tips to reduce stress and enjoy life. Keep your eye out for the tips you can use right away and every day for maximum effect, and be a peaceful role model to your kids.

Tip #51: Listen to music you love

Music is made up of different vibrations that relax the brain. People use music for meditation and for therapy. When you listen to music you love, your body calms down. If you want to help your kids relax, find music they love and ask them to listen to it.

Research has found that cows produced more milk when they listened to Mozart. Listening to Bach was found to increase children’s performance.

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4 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was 15

In my life, age 15 was the turning point. 4 months before my 16th birthday, I woke up and discovered that the life I lived was an illusion and I opened up to a new life.

For me, 16 was the sweetest thing there was. Life was divided into before and after – before my awakening and after it. Later on in life, there were many times when I wished I could send my 15-year-old self some wisdom to make her life easier.

Here are the things I would send back in time.

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While You Were Sleeping

Whether we like it or not, parents are human beings. What can we do?

So sometimes, we have bad days. Sometimes, we need something to be proud of, because otherwise, we would feel pretty bad about ourselves. Sometimes, we just need reassurance that things will get better, preferably thanks to us. This is why we have kids.

If you are working a full time job, fostering aspirations of promotion and glory, you may be spending much of your time at work, or at least being preoccupied with it. When you come home, you are not in the best of moods, your head is filled with things that still need to be done, by you, for which the due date has not moved, despite the sad fact you have not done them today.

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Monkey See, Monkey Do

This week, I have read (again) an alarming statistic about the rate of divorce and the devastating effect of divorce on children. When I think about my parents, I know I need to thank them in every way I can for being able to handle all the conflicts between them and reach their 50th anniversary.

Conflicts between parents are inevitable. After all, Mom and Dad are two separate people, coming from different backgrounds and sharing life together – a house, romance, kids and finances – in hope of making it the best experience ever.

In research done in 1982 (R.E. Emery) and 1990 (E. Mark), it was found that even young kids are strongly hurt by their parents’ conflicts. It is actually possible to measure parents’ anger through their kids’ psychological, behavioral an emotional state. When I worked with groups of 2-4 year-olds, I could tell when there was tension at home or when one of the parents was away from home.

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20 Things You Should Never Say to Your Teens

Somewhere between parents and teens, the messages of love and caring get lost. Bringing fear and anxiety from their own experiences, parents sometimes forget what works and what doesn’t. It is amazing to find that the sentences we say to our teens are the same sentences we hated when our parents said to us.

A long time ago, one of the mothers in my early childhood center brought me a book about expressions mothers use. I laughed really hard and I could swear the author wrote the book about my mom. Is it possible, I wondered, that all moms uses the same phrases?

Well, surprise, surprise, when I talk to teenagers, regardless of their gender or cultural background, they all claim parents of teens use the same expressions. You have heard one, you have heard them all!

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Tips for a Stress-Free Lifestyle (5)

Welcome to the 5th part of the series. I hope you have found the previous tips helpful in bringing control and peace into your daily life.

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Readathon: Pay Per Read

Boy reading with flashlight under the blanket

Noff is my 3rd child coming home with a note from school, which offers parents to pay their kids to read books. Since we arrived here in Australia, each of our kids has come home with some “incentive to encourage children to read” project, aiming to entice children to read more by participating in a “Readathon” – a reading marathon.

1. Kids go home with a form asking Mom and Dad to give them permission to participate in the marathon.

2. The kids need to go to grownup friends and relative (grandparents are the best victims for this) and ask them to commit to paying a certain amount of money for every book they read.

3. Then, the kids read as many books as they can.

4. At the end of the marathon, they bring the signed sheet with the payment and the money goes to the school.

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Going Out: To Tell or Not to Tell the Kids?

As a parent, I am sure you are familiar with the “Mommy and Daddy are going out” storm. You put the kids to bed, kiss them good night, wait until everything is quiet, you sneak the babysitter in and just as you are about to leave, you hear a tiny, not-at-all-sleepy voice calling out, “Where are you going?”

In the next few minutes, you do you best to reassure your kids that you will be back, that the babysitter is a good and reliable person, who will take good care of them, and besides, you are going to be back in no time.

Alas, the little ones have you all figured out, and they cling to you, wail, throw themselves on the floor, pretend to be sick and put on various other unethical displays of utter desperation.

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How Do You Feel About Abortions?

silhouette of a baby inside a transparent fruit, symbolizing abortion

Did you know?

There are about 46 million abortions worldwide every year.

There are about 126,000 abortions worldwide every day.

On a worldwide average, each woman will go through at least 1 abortion in her lifetime.

Only 22% of abortions take place in developed countries.

Only 26 million (56.5% of the 46 million a year) are legal.

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Hush Little Baby – Good Sleeping Habits for Kids

When my daughter was born, I did not attend a sleeping school to learn about good sleeping habits. Sure enough, we were so excited with the arrival of the new baby that we tried to spend every second with her. When she was 11 months old, we discovered that we did not have a life.

Eden was a “no-sleep baby”. She just did not want to go to sleep. Once she closed her eyes and stopped moving, she would sleep really well, so I am not complaining, because this meant that I rarely had to wake up in the middle of the night. But, the difficulty I had was in getting her to go to bed and fall sleep.

Even now, when she is 19 years old, we still see every night the struggle between her body and her mind. Her body tells her to go to bed and her mind still thinks that sleeping is the greatest waste of time.

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