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The Power of Bilingualism

My introduction to learning languages and bilingualism happened 24 years ago, when we moved to Texas, USA, and our daughter started to learn English. As a Special Education teacher, I knew she would be fine, but as a mother, I was scared, because at the age of 4, with the language of a 10 year old, I was afraid she would be left behind.

She wasn’t!

Since then, I have been working with inspiring people who specialize in language acquisition and with many children of migrants around the world. I have learned that parents and teachers play an important role in supporting language development. If they understand the challenges and consider the myths around language, they can help kids with healthy language acquisition.

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Men vs. Women: 6 Stereotypical Differences

For many years, I stayed out of the “men vs. women” debate, mainly because of my dad. He is an old man who grew up in a very patriarchal and chauvinistic society, yet is the most admirable example of gender equality.

My dad cooked, took care of the kids, helped us with our did homework, cleaned the house (inside and outside), brushed our hair, did arts and craft and was never ashamed of any of it. He had four daughters and one son and I thought he was fair and equal in his attitude to boys and girls.

In fact, my dad’s behavior cluttered my outlook on life in a way, because whenever I heard someone talking about the stereotypical man, I said, “This is not true, because my dad is different”. Now, I have to admit that I was wrong. There is something true about the stereotypes about men and my dad was the odd one out.

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Children with Auditory Processing Disorders or Not?

I went to study special education to help children and adults with learning difficulties. When I started my journey, over 30 years ago, I thought there were many people with learning difficulties. I still think there are, but in the past, I was convinced they were “organic” – physical, possibly genetic – and therefore hard to change.

Now, after seeing so many children and people of all ages, I think that social attitude creates or aggravates the problems in many cases. Many people have small difficulties that are blown out of proportion and labeled as disorders.

Auditory processing disorders are very popular and easily labeled, even among very young children. Every year that passes, I hear about younger and younger kids with auditory processing disorders. Recently, I even talked to a mother whose son was one year old and she insisted he had an auditory processing disorder. I am qualified enough to know that I cannot assess a child for APD at one year of age.

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Assertiveness: Successful Communication Summary

You can learn assertiveness skills at any stage of life and you can always improve them and gain more respect for yourself and others. In this post, I have gathered all of my assertiveness tips in one big list. I hope this summary will be useful for you and for your children and students.

If we create a society full of assertive people, we will not have conflicts and we will live with each other with respect, so pass this along to everyone you know.

This post is part 6 of 6 in the series Assetiveness

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Assertiveness: Know Your Rights

So far, I have covered things that affect our ability to be assertive. This post adds some tips on how to know your rights, keep them and be assertive about them. I hope they will help you on your quest to develop your emotional intelligence and communicate with assertiveness.

When you are assertive, you express yourself with confidence without hurting others. You are firm, not a bully. You are clear, not manipulative. You are honest, not aggressive. Healthy communication is based on honesty, clarity and confidence.

First, you have to know your rights in every communication. It takes two to tango and when one has more rights than the other does, this will not be an assertive relationship. I suggest teaching kids these rights too and giving them opportunities to practice them.

This post is part 5 of 6 in the series Assetiveness

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Assertiveness: Live by Your Own Standards

Assertiveness is a helpful skill in life, yet most people do not have it. They do not have it because they could not learn it at home or from anyone else except professionals. You see, the people who teach assertiveness must be very confident and not afraid that you might use assertiveness with them, and these people are hard to find.

Am I assertive all the time? No, not really. Sometimes, I choose avoidance or aggression, and every time I use them, I feel uncomfortable. They either hurt me or others, which is not very good. Still, I aim to use assertiveness in my communication with others and most of the time, I do.

Assertiveness requires confidence to express your own thoughts and feeling without fear and without the need, desire or intention to hurt anyone else. It is important to distinguish between having the intention to hurt and actually hurting someone else.

This post is part 4 of 6 in the series Assetiveness

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Be Your Child’s Speech Therapist with Mouth Gym

Over the last 30 years, I have had a chance to see many children with speech difficulties. Children who do not speak properly may sound cute at first, but this might become an obstacle as they grow up. At some stage, their parents stress about it and take them to a speech therapist or a speech pathologist.

But parents can fix some of the speech problems very easily. This post includes my tips for fixing one of the major speech difficulties – physical sound production. Hundreds of parents around the world have used them and changed their children’s life. If your child has trouble pronouncing words, you do not need a speech therapist. Using the suggestions below will do the same for your child.

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The Expectations Paradox: Mindfulness is the Cure

In the last two posts about the expectations paradox, I explained how expectations from others and ourselves can cause us lots of pain and why respect and acceptance are the keys to overcoming them. It is much better to be prepared for the future than to try to control a specific outcome. Today, I will describe how to develop respect and acceptance with mindfulness.

Mindfulness is a state of reflection with no judgment. This state is similar to mediation. We observe and do not let the ego interfere with our observation and tempt us to label and judge what we experience. In a mindfulness state, we do not give a rating to the event, thought or feeling. We only name it. In a higher state of mindfulness, even naming it is not necessary. We just notice.

I remember the first time I mediated. Gal and I were in California at a meditation course. Every week, we learned a different kind of meditation. We did walking, eating, light, mantra and visualizing meditations and we were very confused. Millions of thoughts ran through our minds and we had no control over them. When we got home, we went to sleep and felt overwhelmed.

This post is part 3 of 3 in the series The Expectations Paradox

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The Expectations Paradox: Self-inflicted Pain

In the last post about the paradox of expectations, I explained how unmet expectations can bring lots of misery to life when we do not understand them properly. Today, I will explore additional aspects of expectations and what happens to us when our expectations are not met.

Many people think that expectations are part of their identity. They expect so much of themselves that they believe this gives them the “right” to expect the same from others. I am sure that if you examine the definition of arrogance (“having or revealing an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance or abilities”), you will see someone who expects a lot from themselves and from others as arrogant. Thinking highly of yourself is great, but expecting others to fulfill your expectations is not!

Most people care a lot about what others think about them. They are in the approval trap and have the disease to please. It is very hard to be assertive and to take care of your own interests when you are busy pleasing others. It may be easier when you are young, but it becomes more complicated during the teenage years, when you realize that that some of the expectations of those around you contradict others.

More people find the pain we experience from unmet expectations unbearable. They think that life is hard when things do not happen the way they expect them to. But this is only because they believe life is supposed to work as they expect.

This post is part 2 of 3 in the series The Expectations Paradox

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The Devastating Relationship between Expectations and Conflicts

Conflicts determine the quality of every relationship. Even the most loving couples, friends or family members face conflict in their life. It is because we are different people, with different life experiences, tendencies, desires, fears, challenges and upbringing.

Every moment in time, whether we have judged it as a negative, positive or neutral, has molded us into the people we are today. We can define ourselves as the accumulation of all those split-second moments of experience and how they have affected us.

It is important to remember that even twins, having the same genetic code, do not have the same path in life, because each of them was in a different place in their mother’s womb, was born at a different time, has a different name and reacts differently to the same experiences. As hard as it may be to accept, the chances that two people will go through the same experience and come out of it the same way is zero.

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