Future is not a time; it is a place- a place full of possibilities where our most coveted hopes may meet our deepest desires. A lot of things keep changing as we keep moving at a speed of 60 minutes an hour towards the future. Jessica Winch for The Telegraph says that the whole idea of jobs would undergo a radical transformation. The surefire hits of today (read banking, law and stockbroking) will become a thing of the past and unheard-of jobs will become the hot jobs of the future.
Great advice tends to be a very rare commodity. Often, some of the more mediocre ones come out in the garb of smart language or we simply assume an advice to be healthy because it is made by an elder person. This however does not change the fact that the real brilliant advices are like the Haley’s Comet. Pete Wargent for the Property Update writes how such advices should be kept for posterity by noting them down in black and white.
You do not need to take recourse to yelling in order to be authoritative. Yet, some parents make this mistake and adopt yelling as a major strategy for seeking corrections in their children. In fact, the amount of learning a child is ‘capable of’ is inversely proportional to the amount of yelling a parent is using. I was recently reading an interesting article on this topic by Sharon Silver for Popsugar Moms.
Television must have something going for it or else it would not have sustained for so long. Many of us parents would not hear of it for their children. ‘Off” is the only button on the remote control that gets used by many parents when they see their young child in front of the jukebox. However, selecting channels wisely instead of switching off the machine is the right solution says an new study according to education news.
A study focusing on sleep duration and resultant child behavior came up with telling results, says a new article from education news. As parents, we may not be too willing to admit that a small tweak with our child’s sleep-hours can bring a lot of difference. However, the study proves us just so wrong. Conducted over 33 children, from the age group 7-11, the results of the study were spread over two weeks. In the first week, children were allotted 9.3 hours of sleep and their behavior and temperamental stability was judged on a scale of 100 (100 being the worst and 0 being the best). On an average, children closed in on 50 points.
Over the course of next week, children were divided into two groups. One group was deprived of sleep by an hour while the other group was asked to sleep for an extra hour. The first scored an average of 54 while the second group averaged out at 47 (despite actually managing only 30 minutes of extra sleep). For such small fluctuations in sleep hours, parents and teachers observed a huge difference in a child’s behavior, mood swings and general agility.
Have you closely examined how an extra sleep-hour helps your child?
Parents have never been too keen on their children watching television, citing how it can completely corrupt their kids. However, the right TV channels might help children gain many virtues. This is powerfully illustrated by a new infographic from educationnews.org.
As a parent, we all would you like our children to live a fulfilled, happy life without major regrets. In this context, I have come across an interesting article recently which speaks about the major regrets that dying people generally have.
This post is about an article I read about the benefits of physical fitness to children’s learning.
It shows how physical exercises increase the volume of oxygen reaching our children’s brain and empowers their nerve cells. This way, such exercises make their brain more receptive towards studies. Their memory gets a boost, cognitive thinking patterns improve a lot and mental agility rises a few notches. Various researches prove the positive effect of physical fitness on school children.
Exercises like Resistance Training can enhance degree of concentration in children while aerobics can add to their abilities of multitasking or coordinating. Gymnastics, hiking, swimming and their likes can also increase the power of retention in our kids.
Here is the link to the original article: https://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2012/09/28/physical-activity-improves-academic-performance.aspx
Have you noticed a positive impact of regular physical exercise with your kids?
Recently I read an interesting article on why we may need a math police. Here’s a link to the original article.
The article talks about how we completely comply with the grammar police. If we use a word wrongly or inaccurately, someone (the grammar police) typically corrects us and we willingly accept the correction and carry on. However, the same is not true when it comes to math.
That’s because typically nobody acts as the “math police” and corrects math mistakes or even attempts to. In fact, we even boast publicly about how bad we are at math and how we fumble while adding up grocery items or split restaurant bills.
I personally feel that policing over math is secondary. What is more important is our personal understanding of the problem- one that comes from within. The article suggests that if we split a restaurant bill evenly as opposed to calculating everyone’s exact share, we are doing the wrong thing.
I beg to differ – it is merely a social mechanism that allows us to focus on the company of people rather than micro-management.
We are a well evolved species and if we aim to be good with letters, we should aim the same for numbers too. Mathematics is a crucial part of life that we as adults should continue to master, just as we want our children to.
So perhaps there is a need for a math police, if only to help us raise greater awareness that it is not always in our best interest to take math shortcuts or to publicly state our own ignorance rather than attempting to be accurate.
What are your views?
Kids are prone to making excuses, just to work their way out of a face-off. Here are the top 3 excuses according to a recent parent survey at imom.com.
Though this might just be the truth, you have to be doubly careful about it. It is very easy for children to get deviated. When you ask them why they failed to perform a chore- “I forgot” is their stock reply. It may be a smart idea to ask them to finish a work the moment you assign it to them. Sometimes, the work does not require being done immediately. For such chores or errands, you can always have them write down the job (and keep checking daily).
This is another racket that children run. To bail themselves out of a situation, they come up with excuses like “Its Anna’s turn to clean the attic” or “I did it the last time, John is supposed to do it this week”. It must be made clear to children that parents are not fools and if they feel that a child should do a work- even if out of turn- there must be a reason behind it.
Often children play the blame game to seek exit from a difficult situation. As parents, you should explain them- “Well! Your sibling might have ‘acted’ wrongly but you are the one who ‘reacted’ equally badly. So how are you any better?”
It is important to teach your child that they can always choose their reactions in life; well-judged reactions would make them responsible humans and poor ones would make them weak individuals- a person who always keeps finding an exit route.
Do you have any top excuses that you are dealing with?
