Archive for August, 2008

Mainstream belief regarding identity theory tends to portray adolescents as the sole agents involved in their identity development.

However, a new article in the Journal of Research on Adolescence reveals that parents are concerned, involved, and reflective participants in their children’s identity formation.

Elli Schachter, PhD, of Bar Ilan University and Jonathan Ventura of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studied parents, adolescents, and educators affiliated with the Orthodox Jewry in Israel.

Researchers documented and described parents that invested a great amount of time and effort thinking about their children’s identity, even fashioning their own lives with their children’s future identities in mind.

The parents demonstrated the extent to which they saw themselves as active participants in their children’s identity formation.

They reflected on how best to form relationships with their children, what environments to choose for their children that would best serve some vision of what they hope their children will become, and how they hope their children will come to see themselves.

Such thinking and planning can be very complex, taking into account broad socio-cultural factors, personal psychological dynamics, and ethical concerns.

Read more at Medical News Today

It’s important for a child to learn to be independent and care for himself.

But how do you know when a child is old and mature enough to stay alone?

In general, a child younger than age 10 probably isn’t ready.

But when it comes to older children, the Nemours Foundation says the time may be right to forgo a babysitter if your child:

• Feels comfortable with the prospect of staying alone.
• Shows a sense of responsibility with chores, doing homework, and following rules and directions.
• Stays calm in difficult or unexpected situations, and knows how to handle them.
• Clearly understands and regularly follows rules.
• Knows basic first aid.
• Knows and follows rules for staying away from strangers.

Source: Yahoo News

Kids’ fighting is a common thing. Did you see your children arguing all the time? Did you experience the change in the environment at home with their fight? Of course every family with kids faces this type of problem.

Don’t worry that you are the only parents who have such kids. You are not alone who is facing this problem.

You might have faced some difficult times where you felt tough to handle with. Many parents are facing this type of problem in their homes.

If you are also one of them who come across such situation where it is difficult to deal, you can follow some simple steps, which limit the fighting of kids.

Tips to limit the kids fight!

Fighting is one of the best ways for kids to make you notice them. In order to avoid them fighting, it is better for you to ignore their fight, so that they only calm themselves, but do not ignore them when they are in fight with any weapons.

When you see your kids are cooperative, do not miss the opportunity to praise them. Encourage your kids that they are doing a good job when they are working together. They may forget it soon, but repeatedly if you praise them, they can slowly understand what you are expecting from them.

Troubled children hurt their classmates’ math and reading scores and worsen their behavior, according to new research by economists.

The researchers linked domestic violence cases to 4.6 percent of the elementary school students in their sample.

These children scored nearly 4 percentile points lower on standardized reading and math scores than their peers whose parents were not involved in domestic violence cases.

In addition, the children from households linked to domestic violence were 44 percent more likely to have been suspended from school and 28 percent more likely to have been disciplined for bad behavior. The impact was seen across genders, races and income levels.

Not only did children from troubled homes suffer, however: Test scores fell and behavior problems increased for their classmates as well.

Troubled boys caused the bulk of the disruption, and the largest effects were on other boys. Indeed, adding just one troubled boy to a class of 20 children reduces the standardized reading and math scores of other boys in the room by nearly two percentile points.

And adding just one troubled boy to a class of 20 students increases the likelihood that another boy in the class will commit a disciplinary infraction by 17 percent.

We resort to bribing children some or the other time. Bribes are gifts or rewards that influence children to do a specific action.

But, it rapidly becomes addictive for the child and the behavior becomes more and more scandalous in the expectations of achieving better and better rewards.

So, for parents who are looking for an alternative to defeat the effects of bribery, here are a few tips:

• Make use of those words with which your child can able to understand your feelings of upset. Never assume that your child knows the reason why you are upset and unhappy.

• If something goes wrong with the child, make her realize the mistake and ask the child to say sorry immediately.

• Instantaneously responding to the incident ensures that your child realizes her behavior to be intolerable. It is good to educate kids about the “good” and “bad” deeds.

• Never feel guilty of your behavior towards scolding your child. It is an obligation to teach your child the right manners and proper behavior. It is great if you calmly observe the child and take an appropriate consequence to the incident.

Spanking has been, and still is, a common method of child discipline used by American parents.

But mothers who report that they or their partner spanked their child in the past year are nearly three times more likely to state that they also used harsher forms of punishment than those who say their child was not spanked, according to a new study led by the Injury Prevention Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Such punishments included behaviors considered physically abusive by the researchers, such as beating, burning, kicking, hitting with an object somewhere other than the buttocks, or shaking a child less than 2 years old.

“In addition, increases in the frequency of spanking are associated with increased odds of abuse, and mothers who report spanking on the buttocks with an object such as a belt or a switch are nine times more likely to report abuse, compared to mothers who report no spanking with an object,” said Adam J. Zolotor, M.D., the study’s lead author.

Although some surveys show evidence of a modest decline in spanking over the last 30 years, recent surveys show that up to 90 percent of children between the ages of 3 and 5 years are spanked by their parents at least occasionally.

Parents with children, who are school going, generally complains about their inability to make their children study for sometime with concentration.

If it is exams time then it is more tough time for the parents to get their children sit down and study.

Some children are not that motivated and some have short attention span, which cannot make them to focus on studies for more time.

Children with this short attention span do not have patience to listen or wait until their turn to talk. Also, it is hard for them to complete the task left in the middle if they are interrupted.

If your child has short attention span, you need to create a comfortable atmosphere for your child where there is a chance of improvement in the attention span.

Tips to improve attention span in your child!

Instead of forcing your child to study, it is better for you to set a study routine for your child, so that they will not feel the studies as burden.

Set fixed timings for sleep also, but before doing so remember to know when your child feels easy to concentrate; is it the early mornings or in the late evenings. Accordingly, you set the sleep timings for your child.

The new law reforming federal consumer protections has been hailed as the best improvement in child safety laws since the 1970s. But the law’s protections don’t kick in right away. Here’s how to keep your kids safe right now:

1. Don’t buy toys with rare Earth magnets. These popular toys with super-powerful magnets have killed one child and injured at least 86 others by damaging the children’s intestines after the tiny magnets were swallowed.

Although 8 million of these toys have been recalled, toy manufacturers don’t seem to have figured out how to make toys that will keep the magnets safely enclosed. Not worth the risk.

2. Shun metal jewelry for kids. Time and again, children have been poisoned when they chew or swallow jewelry containing excessive amounts of toxic lead.

A California investigation last fall found that 18 percent of children’s jewelry sold at big retailers violated the state’s strict lead standard. The new federal consumer protection law requires kids’ jewelry to be lead free in six months. In the meantime, plastic is a safer bet.

3. Be suspicious of brightly painted wooden and plastic toys. Multiple recalls over the past year have shown that the old system failed to protect kids from toys with toxic lead paint.

Becoming a dad is not an achievement for every man, but if your children say that you are a great dad, then there are no words to express that moment.

Being a great father to the children is a real achievement in the life.

Every father feels that he should be the best dad as much as possible for the children.

Of course, everyone will have their own views of becoming a good father, but they tend to miss something in becoming a great father.

Here are some tips on how to become a great father.

Tips to become a great dad!

As a father, the main role for you is to protect your kids from bad habits. For example, if you have a habit of cigarette smoking, then immediately quit smoking as this is not good for their health and this may become a habit to your children in the future.

Also, it is important for them to learn safety habits. Being a father, it is your duty to teach them safety habits of daily activities. For example, if you wear a seatbelt when you are in a car, then they will learn from you and follow you.

If you are a parent, you’re probably familiar with a few of the following statements; “He hit me,” “She looked at me,” “He ate the last Cheeto — he’s such a pig,” “She used my eraser,” “He thought about poking me,” “He cheated,” “He got to sit in the front last time,” “He’s such a loser!”

And as a parent, you are expected to solve the problem fairly by determining who started the argument, which by now has evolved into something completely unrelated to the original spat.

With both children accusing each other of heinous acts while simultaneously denying each other’s allegations, getting to the root of the problem becomes more difficult than solving global warming.

Even if you successfully end one argument, it’s usually not long before another one starts because, in kid world, there are just so many things to fight about.

It could be the basketball that no one wanted six months ago that is now deflated in a corner of the garage covered in spider webs.

If one child wants it, another will fight for it. A piece of lint from the carpet can become a sought-after treasure, with one child screaming he found it first, so finders keepers.