Archive for the 'Child Development' Category

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.

If your child is aggressive, he tends to pinch others. It senses like a shock when a baby pinches.

Did you ever try to know the reason why your baby pinched you?

Actually, when your baby reaches the milestone of 6-9 months, she/he becomes stronger and can able to manage the body.

The baby can bite [toddler biting], pinch, tug, grab, and reach, but the baby is not so aggressive that she/he feels to hurt others.

When the baby reaches the milestone of 9-12 months, the baby will have angry feelings that can change from time to time.

During this period, they can show their real anger. It is true that when the children are discouraged, they behave inappropriately.

For example, when the parents ignore them from other activities, they become aggressive because they believe that you are paying attention to something or someone else and they need immediate attention towards them.

When you still say the children to go away, then this aggressive behavior worsens, but if you pay attention the result will be completely different.

Also, when you grab anything from them or if they do not get anything, which they would like to have, then you can see the real anger in their faces.

Is your child having learning disability? Are you exasperated with your kids’ learning disability? Children with learning disability face problems in processing sensory information with which their routine activities at school and work interferes.

Learning disability (LD) is a neurological condition that affects the ability of the brain to perform specific tasks — sending, receiving, processing, communicating, or storing information.

Experts estimate that at least 10 percent of all children have learning disabilities.

LD children possess normal or above average intelligence but often mistakenly labeled as being sharp but lazy.

You can see learning disability in children through the difference between their learning capacity and actual learning ability, as the brain finds difficulty in understanding certain signals and averts from processing the signals’ information [Child learning for good education].

Detecting learning disability in children is more possible when the child begins schooling and finds difficulty in gaining, understanding, organizing, remembering, and expressing fundamental academic skills. Children with LD have following symptoms:

• Difficulty in listening, understanding, or speaking spoken language
• Trouble understanding, remembering and following simple instructions
• Taking long pause before identifying pictures, colors and objects

Even among low-income families, mothers with greater social and economic resources were more supportive in parenting their children than those with fewer resources, which in turn influenced the children’s cognitive performance.

That’s the main finding of a new study that considers how economic factors and parenting quality jointly influence children’s development.

The researchers examined 2,089 low-income mothers and their children, who took part in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Study, visiting homes when the children were 14, 24, and 36 months old.

During the visits, researchers measured the quality of parenting (by observing interactions between mothers and their children, and by observing the home environment) and families’ economic resources (specifically, per capita income) to determine how these factors influence children’s cognitive development.

They also looked at the influence of factors such as mothers’ education, children’s birth weight, how often mothers read on their own, and where children’s fathers lived, and sought to learn whether children influence the way their parents interact with them.

Families’ economic resources and the quality of parenting each played a unique role in contributing to children’s cognitive development, the study found.

Emotion in life starts right from a very young age. All kids undergo emotions once in a while.

Moreover, kids are similar to the adults in feeling all types of emotions–happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and many other feelings.

However, children cannot always understand what is happening with them and may not know properly what to do when they feel a particular type of emotion.

As children cannot express their emotions clearly, parents often misread their emotions as sadness or anger [Controlling anger in children].

On the other hand, children occasionally feel emotions very strongly and fluctuate easily from one emotion to the other (happiness to misery) when they get frustrated.

Thus, identifying emotions in children is sometimes very difficult for parents.

Tips to help children manage their emotions

As a parent, help your child understand how to react to a particular emotion when it arises. Also, teach how to manage emotions.

Learning these skills can benefit your child in many ways: emotionally intelligent, able to control emotions effectively, make feel good about themselves, cope with others freely, understand other’s feelings easily, attain less impulsive behaviors, self-confident, focus on things with better attention, and academically very active.

Approximately 45 percent of the children in the United States are using Internet.

So, it is necessary for you to note the hazards that the kids are vulnerable to by this Internet.

Being a parent, there are some important points that you need to know regarding Internet safety for kids.

There is a lot of content available in the Internet that is not good for children in addition to the educational material such as nudity, material related to sexual explicit, and also material related to tobacco, alcohol, and drugs, etc.

As such, in order to avoid such dangers, you should have good communication with your kids in helping them to avoid the risks associated by using Internet. It is very important to educate your kids about the things to be safer when they are online or off line.

Safety tips for the kids to travel through the internet world

Educate your children not to disclose any personal information in the Internet without your permission, such as address, phone number, your work address and phone number, your children’s school name, its location, its address, etc.

It will be alright when your two-year-old kid gets more food on face than into the mouth, finger-licking, or spreads food out of the plate, instead of eating.

But, what if it continues in their later stages? It creates a kind of indecency and bad manners [Child discipline].

Of course, children don’t get table manners naturally.

However, teaching basic table manners as how to sit properly, make use of a napkin, how to use the spoon or fork and many more at the right age can make your child learn better social etiquettes and well appreciated.

Basic Table Manners For Kids

• Teach your kid to greet everyone and invite to join the table, when eating all together. Ask him to sit erectly without hunching over the plate. Make your kid position himself properly by keeping his wrists on the table or hands on his laps. Keep his legs close to the chair. Tell not to stretch them out, making inconvenience to others.

• Teach him to behave properly at the table. Avoid coarse behaviors such as playing games, conversing with mouth full, nose blowing, tooth picking, reading/drawing at the table. Alternatively, ask him to take an excuse before leaving the table to go to restroom.

Many kids spend their time in front of television before they enter school.

According to the American academy of pediatrics (AAP), children aged above two years should watch not more than one to two hours daily.

If your kid is spending much time in front of television, he can face different problems, which include:

Health problems: If your kid spends much time in front of television, there are more chances to become obese. When your kid watches television, they will not be physically active. They will sit in front of TV and eat snacks that are unhealthy, which can lead to obesity.

Behavior problems: According to the Researches, children who watch lot of television are more aggressive to deal with problems than children who watch television less. They are even more likely to engage in careless sexual behavior.

Social problems: If your kid spends much time in front of TV, they will not move with friends as other kids who spend less time in front of TV. These children can get easily bored, tend to be less imaginative and have very few hobbies and interests.

Infant growth chart is usually used by the doctor to know the health conditions and whether your child is growing normally or not.

There are some infant growth chart facts and how they are related to your infant’s health.

The infant growth chart is used by the doctor as standard part for check ups and how your child is growing compared to other children of same gender and age.

This is also helpful in knowing whether the children are developing proportionately or not.

For example, if a child is growing in the same pattern for the 2 years and suddenly if there is any change in his growth, it means that there is some health problem. This can be known by looking at the growth chart.

The factors that affect the infant growth chart are gender, genetics, health problems, physical activity, nutrition, hormones and environment.

There might not be any problem if the growth patterns are different in your child. Your child will be interpreted by the doctor at their overall genetic background, environment, well-being or other developmental milestones met by your child.

Breast feeding is the best way for feeding baby because the breast milk contains the resistant power. There are many benefits of breast milk.

• The nutrients needed for your baby are present in breast milk.
• Your baby can digest this milk easily.
• It provides the immunity and protects your baby against diseases.
• It will be at right temperature and is available at right time for your baby.

Feeding baby involves the breast milk which contains all the nutrients that are required for your baby’s growth. Breast milk is rich in vitamins and minerals, carbohydrates, proteins and fats in proper proportions.

10 Tips for feeding baby by breast feeding:

• Just one hour after delivery, you have to breast feed your child.
• The milk produced from the mother in first three days will be yellow in color (colostrum) that is healthy for your baby.
• Your baby may not need any thing except your breast milk for 4-6 months.
• If your baby urinates for minimum 6 times in 24 hours, she may be getting enough of your milk.
• You need not worry if your baby undergoes watery motions until your baby passes adequate urine and is active.