How Kids Learn Best

If you are a parent of kids who go to school, you have probably heard many times expressions like “I hate homework”, “I hate school” or “I don’t want to learn”. As easy and fun as learning at school may seem, it can be hard work for many kids.

I believe that learning is harder when you do not understand why you should learn, how you learn and what you gain from learning. Unfortunately, most kids do not know what happens to them in the process of learning, so they only see the pain associated with it, instead of the pleasure.

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8 Best Ways to Treat Your Teens

Last week, I talked about the 8 worst ways to treat your teens. These were nagging, telling them what to do, punishing them, lecturing, screaming/shouting/yelling, using guilt, begging and bribing.

As I promised, I will dedicate this post to the best ways to treat teens. I do hope you get lots of inspiration and understanding from it and establish a better communication with your teens.

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Assume Coaching Position

Without being taught parenting skills, many parents miss clues that their kids are having a problem. They just move along, expecting their kids to behave “normally”, which the kids can do for a while, but then the burden becomes too heavy for them to carry and they lash out, withdraw or show other signs of distress. The parents are then surprised and get upset at the “unacceptable behavior”. Sounds familiar?

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8 Worst Ways to Treat Your Teens

Teens are a challenge for many parents. With growth of hair and size (my 13-year-old son is 15cm taller than I am already), with the development of their emotions and thinking, parents go through growth too and the communication between parents and teens changes.

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Teen Mocktail Party

A few weeks ago, my son Tsoof had a birthday party. As a 13-year-old, a day party was not cool enough anymore, so he asked to have an evening party – a dancing party.

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Irrational Rules of Living – Anxiety

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.

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Irrational Rules of Living – My Way or the Highway

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.

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Irrational Rules of Living – Right and Wrong

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”.

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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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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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