Should My Child Repeat a Year at School?

Last week, I got another letter asking “Why and when should children repeat a year of school?” Here is the letter and my answer for you to read, because I get many similar questions and I am sure many parents will find the answer useful.

“My daughter is 8 years old and will go to year 5 this year. She is quite young for her class and is studying with much older children. She is academically an average child and it is quite stressful to keep her where she is. We work very hard at home. Many a times she has mentioned that she finds Math difficult, but the teacher feels she is ready for the next class.

My daughter has a couple of good friends in the class but finds it difficult to be make new friends. When she does not win in various competitive activities, she gets very disheartened as she feels she really worked hard for it. I can understand it’s not easy to compete with older children. Many times, she finds it difficult to complain the teacher about the girls who trouble her, so in a way I would say she is not mature. On the other hand, she is a confident girl. She does speech and drama, dance and other few activities. We feel she should repeat the year, we have been toying with this since last couple of years but now we feel it is high time.

I am concerned about two things: my daughter is quite tall and since she is in year 4, will she cope well emotionally?

I am quite stressed as the school starts next week and we need to talk to the school management. Please can you advise if this is the right way for her?”

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How to Encourage: Ronit’s List of Compliments

Drawing of hand with the words You Are Beautiful

Since I wrote the first chapter of the compliments series, I have received some requests from readers to give them some ideas about compliments, so I thought it may be a good exercise to make a list of 100 compliments we can give others that will cover different areas of life.

By limiting myself to phrases that only focus on the other person and not on myself (because complimenting is giving, not taking credit and focusing on yourself), I got to 182.

Here’s my list of compliments. I suggest that you mark the compliments you find useful, change them to suit your needs and keep them somewhere handy. Then, refer to the examples when you need a compliment idea.

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How to Accept Compliments with Grace

As I said in Compliments: Give to Receive, most people don’t receive many compliments, because they don’t give many compliments to others, and this is caused by not feeling good about themselves. I hope everyone started the compliment challenge and that you already see the impact on your own confidence and sense of wellbeing.

Not feeling good about yourself also makes you feel uncomfortable when someone else gives you a compliment. As you might expect, an awkward response to a compliment will discourage the other person from giving you any more compliments.

In this post, you will learn how to accept compliments with grace.

Some people are not used to compliments, so they are shocked when someone says something good about them. Most people say something that reduces the compliment, like “It was nothing”, “You should have seen me do it last time” or “This time was not that good”, which is just like getting a gift from someone and saying, “Sorry, I can’t accept your gift, because I don’t deserve it”…

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Compliments: Give to Receive

Giving and receiving compliments are very important communication skills that boost our self-confidence and the confidence of the people around us. We grow up in a society that struggles with giving and receiving compliments. People are stingy at the giving end and uncomfortable at the receiving end.

What many people don’t realize is that complimenting others is a projection of a trait, skill or beauty that we see in ourselves. It is a gift of kindness that when we give, we also receive.

Recently, I ran leadership training with a group of high school students and we talked about compliments. It took us 10 hours to change the lives of all those students and increase their self-confidence ratings by 20% to 50%. Yes, in just 10 hours of a very busy training day, we change their attitude towards themselves and other people.

One of the leaders came to me in the evening, after the session with the parents, to say “Thank you”. She said that the part about compliments was very meaningful for her. She felt that it was a shame they didn’t teach communication skills in primary school and that it was important to give compliments to others, and even more important to accept compliments. On the ride home, I thought about it and realized I had never written about compliments in my blog, so I thanked this girl for bringing it to my attention.

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How to Prepare Your Child for the First Day of School

Boy smiling apprehensively on the first day of school

Recently, I got a request from a friend to help her prepare her son for school. When she went with him to soccer practice, she realized he was on his own, not really following the coach’s instructions or mixing with the other kids. Then, when she registered him for school, she met parents who told her about their own kids and she felt she was neglecting her son by thinking he would learn everything he needed at school. When she asked me about the academic requirements, she was a bit surprised when I told her that other skills were as important, maybe even more important, than reading and math.

The first day of school is a very happy moment for every family. If the new student is not your first child, you probably know the drill. The excitement is still there with less anxiety. But if this is your first child, you can feel the excitement bubbling in your stomach in anticipation. The sense of pride is mixed with worry.

Is my child ready for school?

Am I ready for school?

First timers, parents and kids alike, can ease the process of starting school by preparing ahead of time and using the right focus. They should start the preparations early and do not rely solely on the school’s orientation days.

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10 Life Philosophies for Peace of Mind

Life is full of stress and it can be hard to achieve peace of mind. Many people don’t even remember the last time they felt at peace.

Life coaching helps people understand that peace and stress are in our mind and we can control them by changing what we think. Once we understand that we are what we think, we can change our life by choosing to think other things.

Here are 10 quotes that can be adopted as life philosophies. With these philosophies, we can manage tough times, we can be happy and relaxed, avoid stress, be successful and take control over our life, rather than feel that life is happening to us and we are at the mercy of our circumstances.

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Be Positive! Why? Because you worth it!

Think Do Be Positive written on a blackboard

In recent years, we hear about being positive as a major aspect of happiness and success. Most people want to be positive, but don’t know how. When I talk to people about being positive, they say that they learned at school how to read and how to do basic math, they learned how to ride a bike and help at home, but no one ever taught them how to be positive. Therefore, it is one thing to understand why it is important to be positive, but another thing to actually be positive.

This is why I tell people that I should call my program Happy Being instead of Be Happy, because first we need to understand that happiness is important and then we need to learn how to be happy – how to make it a state of being.

Research done in North Carolina by psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has found out that being positive is important not only for our immediate success but also for long-term happiness.

Lions and snakes

When we have negative thoughts, we activate the primitive brain. Over there, all we see are lions and snakes that are a threat. Our body goes into a “fight or flight” mode and shuts all other thinking mechanisms in order to focus on the threat in front of us. Thinking, analyzing, evaluating, prioritizing, connecting, thinking creatively and considering efficiency are all luxuries that the brain is unable to do while under threat.

Happiness does not reside in the primitive brain, so it is important to notice when you go there. If you are scared, angry, aggressive, withdrawn, anxious, worried or upset, you are in the primitive brain. Your body has taken over your mind and you are out of control.

Take a deep breath! Try to think of something good and happy. Go to a happy place in your imagination. You need to convince your brain that what is happening to you is not a real lion and not a real snake. Only after you do that, you can change your emotional state and start thinking clearly.

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Kids under Stress: How to Deal with Stress the Easy Way

In Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists, I covered easy ways to diagnose symptoms of stress in children, without having to go to psychiatrists that are very likely give your child medication that might prevent them from developing coping mechanisms and might damage them for life.

Once you have confirmed the stress, you will want to know how to deal with stress and start helping your child. So here is a list of easy solutions you can use at home to help your child cope. No Psychiatrists. No Medication. These methods take the same time to work as medication does, are just as effective and have no side effects, so they are much better in the long run.

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Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists

Boy looking worried. Worrying too often can be one of many stress symptoms

Stress is the epidemic of the modern world. All health concerns are associated with stress and as time goes on, stress goes up and stress symptoms show earlier and earlier in life. I was shocked to discover that psychiatrists now prescribe drugs to children as young as 3 years old!

Yes, instead of teaching children to deal with the feelings they have, which is what emotional intelligence is all about, we give them drugs that prevent their body from coping and developing the mechanisms to cope with stress.

Use of drugs to manage stress prevents the body from producing chemicals to calm the body. Over time, the stress increases and we have to increase the use of drugs to cope with natural and healthy life processes. Sadness, disappointment and anger are all healthy feelings, essential for our survival. The use of drugs to suppress them sends a message to the body that they are not healthy feelings for us and makes us helpless and powerless.

As a parent, I have a strong desire to keep my kids away from therapists (yes, even doctors, as much as I can). Why? Because for some reason, kids who are in therapy for a long time form the belief that something is wrong with them. As a life coach and special education professional, I can tell you that working with disabilities and learning difficulties is much easier than working with a child that thinks something is wrong with him or her.

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Distracted Drivers Kill and Die

Yes, it’s a harsh thing to say, but distracted drivers kill people and distracted drivers die unnecessarily.

My nephew is dead. He was a young man, just starting his adult life, and he did nothing wrong. He was riding his motorcycle, having had zero accidents and zero fines for 4 years, when a distracted driver in a car driver failed to stop at a stop sign, smashed into him and killed him on the spot.

Any life lost is not only lost by the person who died. This accident, caused by a tiny distraction, cost many people’s lives. My nephew is dead, but his family, and many people he was connected too, lost something that will never be returned. The pain of his close family is something that will never heal. Death and injuries due to distracted drivers leave scar that never heal.

My nephew and our family cannot change the past, even though we’ve tried. But we can prevent other families from experiencing the pain and devastation that comes with such accidents.

It is important to understand that every accident is a mistake. No one causes it intentionally. No one wants to injure or kill anyone else. No one wants to live with the massive pain and guilt on their conscience and ruin their own life. This is why it is called an accident, but many accidents happen due to some form of distraction.

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