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How to Survive as a Working Parent

July 29, 2011 by Leave a Comment
My sister and her baby. 

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Working parents often struggle to keep track of children, schedules, activities and related events. The key to successfully doing this is time management and to get the entire family involved.

When you start out each new week, you and your spouse should sit down and plan out the schedule for each day. Get a large calendar that be hung near or put on the refrigerator and list the various events for the week on it. This way everyone can see it and keep track of what is happening when. This helps to avoid scheduling conflicts and to figure out logistics for taking children to different activities.

You both should also plan out the chore list for the week. Your children can be a great source of help when it comes to household chores such as cleaning, doing laundry, taking care of pets and the lawn. This is also a great opportunity to teach them responsibility and give them a part in running things. Make sure that each child understands his or her list of duties and be vigilant about them completing them.

If you have young children, finding a good quality daycare can make your life much easier. You can ask friends and family members for recommendations of good places to look at. Make use of the Internet and locate trusted daycare centers in canada 411. You want to find a center that offers a wide variety of activities for your children, is certified and adequately staffed. By taking the time to plan out the week and get your children involved, you can have a successful time as a working parent.

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Tips for Working Parents of School-Age Kids

July 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

DALLAS - JUNE 15: Khalid Johnson, age 8, asks...

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It can be challenging for working parents to balance career obligations with spending quality time with their kids. Working parents may also have concerns about their children’s safety if the kids must be home alone when they come home from school.

There are things you can do to help streamline yours and your children’s routines as well as ensure their security when you are not there.

One simple tip is to require your kids to call you at work once they get home from school. You should teach your children not to give out personal information to strangers over the phone.

It’s a good idea to have a family policy with respect to having friends over — especially important for parents of tweens and teens! For children of all ages, talk to them about what they should do if someone stops by unannounced. If you hire a sitter, be sure they know what the rules are for your household.

In order to keep your home running smoothly, try having a family meeting each week. Tasks that can be completed in a family meeting include meal planning, assigning chores and resolving any issues that may have arisen during the previous week. You can also set time for the family to relax by having a movie night with popcorn and www.direct.tv movies and shows.

Many of today’s busy families have calendars that are chock-full of activities. If you are a working parent whose job limits the amount of time spent with your kids, be wary of overscheduling the kids. It’s important for kids to be involved in extracurricular activities, but be sure that some unscheduled time is set aside for you all to spend time together as a family.

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Is Your Child Outgrowing Dolls?

May 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Playing with dolls is an important part of growing up for many children. They allow your kids to pretend and to see what it’s like to care for a child or baby. As with many things in life, there comes a point at which dolls stop being the favorite toy and other toys begin to take precedence over them. Is this that time for your child?

 

Hand-made dolls. 

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If your children are no longer trying to match up doll outfits and doll shoes, it may be time to let them outgrow dolls. The signs are probably there by now. As time goes on, your child is going to outgrow dolls and move on to something that’s more age appropriate. It’s difficult to say at what stage of development this will occur. You know your child better than anybody else, so only you can know for certain.

 

 

When it comes time to finally sell or give away your child’s dolls, you want to make sure it’s okay with your child. Since children can sometimes be indecisive, it may ultimately come down to how often you notice your child playing with dolls. If the dolls are left at home and rarely get picked up, it may be time for your child to move on. While dolls are great for a particular part of childhood, they do get left behind as children get older. So when the time comes to put them down, be aware of it and let it run its course.

 

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Starting Your Kids in School

April 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Heiwa elementary school %u5E73%u548C%u5C0F%u5B...

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Finally sending your kids off to school is both a blessing in that they are out of the house during the day, and a curse in that they are growing up and starting the long trek toward total independence from you. While every child will inevitably grow up, many parents look down at their tot and wonder how that could ever happen.

Simply put, it starts in school. For an elementary school age child, life is all about the scary and new experience of walking into a room full of strangers, and having a fully grown stranger tell them what to do all day. To say that this is a bizarre departure from the life they had at home would be like saying that suddenly growing a tail might be a bizarre change to your anatomy. School takes a person from event based time, where life is all about the fun and fancy of the moment, into clock based time, where everything works on a rigid and identifiable schedule. The people who do best in school tend to be the best at working within this completely different environment.

Most children are a little scared when they first start their school careers. After all, it’s a weird experience and it works at changing the way they think about almost everything. While you can act like one of the infamous helicopter parents, and try to solve all of your children’s problems, a far more effective solution is to let them work through most of their trials with only gentle counsel. Some day your children won’t need you. Their training for that starts now.

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Your Child and Money

March 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

In our modern world, one of the most serious problems that billions of humans have to combat with on a daily basis is that of poverty. Lack and want can be very distressing and frustrating, especially in extreme circumstances. Thus, many parents take the necessary moves to ensure that their offsprings do not fall victims of squalor in the future. They take measures to educate their children about money.

Although it may sound exotic, you can also inculcate it right under your own roof by teaching your kids about money. One of the most important lessons that you have to let your children adopt is knowing the value and worth of money. This is not done by splashing huge sums on fancy toys or electronics but by teaching them how to save money, set up their own enterprises, watch them grow and make profits in the process. This will also let them appreciate the importance of hard work and merit.

Apart from teaching them the importance of saving and investing, other things that you must let your children desist from is corruption and self-aggrandizement. History has shown that wealth accumulated in illegitimate ways ultimately bring shame and ridicule upon the individual. You can even draw their attention to the various events and political developments happening all over the globe and let them derive a lesson or two.

Furthermore, let them know the disadvantages of wasteful spending, flamboyance and extravagance. Instead, you can teach them about the boundless merits and benefits of cheerful giving and philanthropy. It must be stressed that as a responsible parent, it is your duty to teach them sound financial principles. This, amongst other things allow them prepare for a better future.

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Coping With Teenagers

March 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment

As a parent, one of the most troublesome and stressful jobs that you can take is to raise your own children. Over the years, you bring them up in the best of manners and cater for them to the best of your ability. However, when the children are in their teenage years, you have another set of challenges to face. Teenagers are not easy to deal with, and this is true even if they are your offsprings.

What makes living with teenagers strenuous is the fact that they feel they are grown and try to assert their newly-found ‘independence’. This they do in various styles and forms. Some may decide to stop eating a meal they have been consuming for years while some of others take the more radical route of defiance.

As a parent, it is tempting to get angry and blow hot. However, this only complicates the whole issue. To cope and live harmoniously with your teenage children, you need to see the world from their own perspective. You will agree that the way a man in his 40s will look at the world will be vastly different from the way his daughter of fifteen would. Thus, it is important that you understand their pattern of thinking instead of asserting your authority angrily at every opportunity. You need to listen to them, reason with them and converse with them.

However, in as much as you may want to strike up a nice rapport, that does not mean that you have to give them too much latitude. You need to rein them in and even discipline them when necessary. Thus, it is all about balance and equilibrium. You have to give them space when needed or confined in a corner, it all depends on their circumstances. But, irrespective of the decision you make, it is important that you listen to their voices as well.

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The Family Constellation

February 23, 2011 by Leave a Comment

According to Dr. Adler’s theory on Human Social Development, the order our children are born in is one of the factors that affects our children’s growth and development. Dr. Adler attributes personality and development to five roots that impact us in our growing years. These roots are: health and appearance; socioeconomic position of the family; parental attitudes; gender role; and of course the family constellation (his term referring to birth order).

The oldest child tends to be the most responsible, because they are usually involved in helping take care of their younger siblings. Middle children receive the least attention, making them tend to have a “whatever” attitude towards many things in life. The smallest child in the family is always and forever the baby and tends to be spoiled.

We need to take these “norms” into account when we are raising our children, and especially in our expectations of our children. It isn’t realistic to expect the family’s baby, who has always had others to do things for her, to be as responsible as her oldest sister, who has taken care of her. Nor is it realistic to expect the middle child to take the same interest in family activities as the baby will.

All the same, by being aware of these tendencies we can both work to control them and utilize them to benefit our families. The utilizing these tendencies is the easy part and in fact will pretty much happen all by itself. On the other hand, trying to bring balance into our children’s lives and not allow these tendencies to get out of hand can be extremely challenging, requiring contestant diligence on our parts.

Don’t get me wrong, we shouldn’t try to eliminate these natural tendencies, they are part of our children’s lives, whether we want them to be or not. At the same time, we don’t want to mistreat a child, be it only verbally, by not appreciating them for who they are.

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Make the Most of Your Time Together

February 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

A generation ago, it was common that mom stayed at home, so she was there to hold the family together. Now, with both parents working outside the home in most cases families face a new challenge, that of having enough time together as a family in order to keep the family together as a family. It takes special effort to insure that everyone stays connected together.

One of the things that are required to make this work is an understanding of just how important your family is. Millions of children across the country are suffering because of the disintegration of the family. I’m not talking about single parent homes, I’m talking about homes where everyone lives under the same roof, but is so busy that their interaction with each other consists of the absolute minimum level of communication.

Faced with this problem what most families need to do is re-evaluate their priorities, and eliminate activities that don’t benefit the family as a whole. Friday night bowling league isn’t as important as your family, so might need to be sacrificed in order to do some activity together.

Sitting in front of the television doesn’t qualify as time together, either. Television has to be the loneliest activity known to mankind. You can be in a room filled with people, all watching some mindless program on television and have as much interaction and communication as if you were sitting in the room all by yourself.

When scheduling pressures make time together minimal, that time must be well spent. Activities which require communication, participation and interaction are an essential part of the expressions of love which we all need to survive. Our children need to tell us about their day, play a game with mom and dad and even wrestle on the living room floor. That’s making good use of your time together. While those activities may not seem important to you as an adult; to your child, they are the glue that holds you all together.

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Buying a Computer for Your Child

February 15, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The price of computers has significantly dropped from the time when they first were available for home use. If you are looking to buy a computer for your children, there are several things to keep in mind to help you find one that will fit your needs. First, consider what age your children are.

When preschool children use a computer, their needs are simple. They use a web browser to access sites where they can color cartoon pages or put puzzles together. There are sites where they can learn the names of colors, the letters of the alphabet, and how to count. You might buy educational games for your preschool children. For these types of activities, you do not need a powerful computer with lots of memory or hard drive space.

For older children, consider what type of things they will be doing on the computer. If they are interested in gaming, you will need a computer that has a good video graphic card. It should have lots of memory because these computer games need lots of computing power so that children can play them.

If you have junior high school aged children or high school aged children, you may want to have a powerful computer. If your child is interested in graphic arts, she will be using programs such as Photoshop that require processing power.

It is important that you install an antivirus software program to protect your computer from vicious virus attacks. Using PC Tools antivirus software is the best thing that you can do to protect your computer. It will monitor and block any suspicious activity on your computer that the program recognizes as being a virus. It will either delete the virus or quarantine it so that it cannot do any damage to your computer.

For peace of mind, and savings in your pocketbook, look into using a PC tools antivirus program. Some of them are even free.

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Each One an Individual

February 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment

When one has twins, especially identical twins, it is so easy to think of them as being the same. After all, they look alike, so shouldn’t they be alike? Is the thought in many of our minds; but no, they are each individuals. While they might share much in common like any siblings do, they still have unique personalities, gifts and abilities.

As with any child, the great challenge for the parents is to try and discover what each child’s individual gifts and abilities are. That way, we can help them develop those abilities into something which they can utilize to succeed in their lives. I’d have to say that this challenge can be harder with twins, as they typically do a lot of things together and can even blend their personalities to make it appear that they are the same.

Don’t be fooled by that, there is always one twin who is dominant, and what you are seeing is that twin’s personality being mirrored in the other. You may have to look closely to see that other child’s personality, and may even have to separate them for a bit, in order to have it come out more obviously.

While many mothers like to dress their twins alike, you’re actually defeating your own purpose in doing that. Oh, it looks cute, but it doesn’t help bring forth each child’s individuality. You want those twins to discover who they are, not just as part of a pair, but as individuals. So, anything that can be done to help show their differences is actually more of a help.

As your twins grow, these differences will become more acute if you let them. Watch out for the problem of the dominant child controlling the other one. Otherwise, they may never fully develop into all that they can be. Instead, they may live their whole life under the shadow of their dominant sibling.

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