Family MattersPractical Parenting Blog

Just Kidding

Kids are very gullible. They love colors and sounds and quickly catch on to new trends and new celebrities. Being young, unfortunately, they do not notice to the messages being delivered straight into their little brains in bright color and pleasant sound.

Our 8-year-old daughter Noff brings home a kids’ magazine called Just Kidding. The name is great and so is some of the content, offering riddles, jokes and general information our kids proudly quote for us. Alas, the good stuff spans about 11 pages out of 48. All the rest is advertising, some of which is cleverly disguised as articles.

Ronit and I were pretty happy about this magazine at first, because our kids like to read, seemed to enjoy the contents and even benefited from having something to talk about at dinner time.

However, through some weird coincidence, one particular magazine lost its cover page and the bare contents found their way to our office desk, where we had a chance to examine them more closely.

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Alcohol for Teens

This week, I was at a conference and I had a talk about my book for teenagers with a woman named Jill. As often happens, our conversation turned into a “bitching session” about teenagers.

“Last night, I picked up my 15-year-old daughter from a party. I’m one of the rare parents who still come to pick their kids up. The rest takes a taxi”, she complained, “When I arrived, there were lots of police cars around”.

“Did anything bad happen?” I asked, worried.

“Oh, no, that’s usual. Every time she goes to a party, someone does silly things and the police arrive”.

My 20-year-old daughter and my 14-year-old son had never participated in a party where the police arrived, so I asked her, “What do you mean by ‘silly things’?”

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Responsible Parenting

When someone becomes a parent, it usually starts by being handed a small bundle. The bundle typically weighs around 3kg (6lbs), makes sweet sounds, looks cute and feels nice and warm. That moment feels so great, most parents list it high on their list of the greatest moments of their life.

Hidden inside that bundle, there is something much heavier, though. Nobody can see it – not the doctor, not the nurses and not the security guard that watches you as you leave the hospital with your new baby – but it is there. As a parent, you start feeling its burden pretty quickly. More often than not, as soon as you are back home and the door closes behind you.

One day, you left your home looking like a big balloon or helping one, but essentially being an independent person, and the next, you return being bound to a tiny helpless creature you must care for even when it sleeps, at the expense of your time, your energy, your comfortable old routine, all your other interests and even your relationships with your partner.

Man, that’s heavy!

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Home Alone

As you may know, Ronit is away now for over 3 weeks. She is away just before the end of the school year in Australia, when ceremonies and special events abound and when “my plate” fuller than ever with things to do, not to mention the printing of her new book.

We have never had to separate like this before. It was always me who went away for military service or business. When Ronit went away once, the kids went with her and I only had to take care of myself.

Many men I know would be pretty scared in my situation. Many women I know would do anything to avoid leaving their kids with their husbands for extended periods, saying the men would have no idea how to handle the kids. “They couldn’t boil an egg to save their life”, some of them say.

The truth is I was scared of this too, but not for the same reasons.

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How to Raise Organized Kids

Kids are not born with organizing and planning skills and do not automatically adopt them, even if their parents are planning junkies. They need to be taught how to be organized gradually, as their mental abilities develop.

My 20-year-old daughter Eden is so organized she managed to work full time in a very demanding job, study psychology full time and get 100% and 99% on two of her university assignments. If Tsoof had to do what she did, he would not have a chance.

But…

At the age of 13, Eden could not plan ahead very well, much like most of the kids and teens I work with.

Just last term, during the school break, I discussed with my busy son Tsoof how to prepare for his last term of school. Because he is a busy kid who performs and rehearses during school hours, he misses many hours and even whole days of school.

The reason I talked to him about it was that the previous term had been too hectic and there had been mornings when he had gotten up and lacked his usual spark about going to school “Yay, today I have…” He had been nearly exhausted, so I hoped that preparing for his last term would make it easier on him.

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Happiness is a Choice

Happiness is probably the thing people dedicate their life to achieve the most. Their definition of happiness is different from one to another, but when they focus on a relationship, they want to be happy in that relationship, when they focus on money, they want to be happy with their financial situation, when they try to be healthy, they want to be happy with their body and wellbeing and when they spend time with their kids, they want to be happy in their parenting. Happiness covers every area of life. Life is a journey to many destinations, but in all of them, we seek to be happy.

So the big question is “How to achieve happiness?”

Would you like to have a happiness manual?

Who wouldn’t?

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Make a list: Excuses

As a life coach whose task is to help people reach their full potential and live the life they want, I hear endless excuses about why people are not living the life they want already. One day, I said to myself that I would make a list of those excuses and then I realized it was not such a bad idea. If I had a list of my excuses, I could easily recognize when I was anchoring myself or dragging myself backwards.

It is no coincidence people who do not live the life they want have tons of excuses and successful people do not. Excusing is a habit. George Washington said “99% of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses”. If you feel like a failure in any area of your life, find your excuses.

In my workshops, I always tell how I was kicked out of school in 10th Grade for having too many failures on my report card. When participants ask me why, I say, “There were many objective reasons, but they are bad excuses, so I prefer not to dwell on them. Whatever the objective reasons, we still have the choice to respond differently”.

This post is part 25 of 49 in the series Make a List

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TV Diet (17): More Healthy Alternatives

Last week, I described some healthy alternatives to watching too much TV. You may have already found some ideas you can work with. Today, I will describe even more alternatives, which should give you and your kids more options.

This post is part 17 of 18 in the series TV Diet

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Things Teens Discover Too Late

In the last 25 years, while I was working with teens and collecting information for my book Be Special, Be Yourself for Teenagers, I have discovered many important things about being a teenager. It was funny to discover these things when I was no longer a teen myself. This is the paradox of being a teen – you only understand what has happened to you when you are no longer a teen. Catch 22, don’t you think?

Fundamentally, I do not believe anything is “too late”. There is always something you can do with a new learning to improve your situation now and in the future. However, many bits of information have lot less value when your situation changes.

How many times have you said, “I wish I knew this when I was a teen?”

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TV Diet (15): Routine

During years of work in the education field, I have found that good routines are great for establishing good habits in kids. If your kids have bad TV habits and they watch for too long or too many unhealthy shows, a good routine can help them stay away from the TV and choose more beneficial activities.

Routines are a good way to give kids a stable atmosphere and make them feel certain in their life. The massive change in routine is one of the reasons kids’ world is so shaken and they tend to watch too much TV when their parents go through a relationship breakdown.

I think a good routine is a great parenting technique not only for overcoming the TV addiction but for many other habits you want to instill in your kids. An established routine encapsulates many of your rules and boundaries. If you are a regular reader in this site, you already know I believe that rules give kids a sense of certainty and define to them the safety limits in the world they live in. Therefore, a routine plays a big part in making your kids feel safe.

This post is part 15 of 18 in the series TV Diet

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