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Sit with your child for 5 minutes and explain that there's never a reason to make fun of someone for their height, their weight, their skin tone, their home life or the things they enjoy.
Explain there's nothing wrong with wearing the same shoes every day.
Explain to them that a used backpack carries the same dreams as a new one.
Teach them not to exclude anyone for "being different".
Explain to them that teasing hurts and that school is for going to LEARN, NOT to compete or spread negativity.
Remind them some kids don't go home to loving families so it's important to be kind. IT ALL STARTS AT HOME!
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Explain there's nothing wrong with wearing the same shoes every day.
Explain to them that a used backpack carries the same dreams as a new one.
Teach them not to exclude anyone for "being different".
Explain to them that teasing hurts and that school is for going to LEARN, NOT to compete or spread negativity.
Remind them some kids don't go home to loving families so it's important to be kind. IT ALL STARTS AT HOME!
author unknown
Popcorn is prepared in the same pot,
in the same heat,
in the same oil
and yet...
the kernels do NOT pop at the same time.
Don't compare your child to others.
Their turn to POP is coming!
Welcome To Holland
Welcome To Holland
By Emily Perl Kingsley
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......
When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."
"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."
But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.
But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.
Chores and Chore Charts
Nice News by Rebekah Brandees
Every generation, new philosophies emerge to help parents raise happy, well-adjusted children, from authoritative parenting in the 1960s to attachment parenting in the ’90s and the more recent gentle parenting, practiced by scores of millennial moms and dads.
But according to a significant body of research, there’s one aspect of child-rearing that truly sets kids up for success in adulthood: assigning them chores. That’s right — to reach the top of the ladder later in life, youngsters should start by scrubbing the dishes and taking out the trash.
The long-running Harvard Grant Study was launched in 1938 and is now on its second generation of participants. One of the groundbreaking research’s many takeaways is that professional success as an adult was associated with having done chores as a child — and the earlier those chores started, the more pronounced that link was.
Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former dean at Stanford University and author of How to Raise an Adult, offered Business Insider some insight on why that is.
“By making them do chores — taking out the garbage, doing their own laundry — they realize ‘I have to do the work of life in order to be part of life,’” she told the outlet. “‘It’s not just about me and what I need in this moment, but that I’m part of an ecosystem. I’m part of a family. I’m part of a workplace.’”
And there may be shorter-term benefits as well (other than a clean house). A 2019 study analyzed data from nearly 10,000 kids who entered kindergarten in 2011 and participated in one of the National Center for Education Statistics’ Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies. That first year, parents reported on how often their children performed chores. Then, in third grade, the kids themselves responded to questionnaires and took academic assessments.
“The frequency of chores in kindergarten was positively associated with a child’s perception of social, academic, and life satisfaction competencies in the third grade, independent of sex, family income, and parent education,” the authors wrote. Additionally, they noted that performing any chores at all in kindergarten was associated with improved math scores three years later.
Another study, from the University of Minnesota, analyzed data from 84 young adults who were tracked over a 20-year period. It found that the best predictor of success in a person’s mid-20s was having participated in household tasks at the age of 3 or 4. In fact, if the kids hadn’t started taking on chores until the age of 15 or 16, the association was reversed. “The participation backfired and those subjects were less ‘successful,’” a UM news release notes.
If you’re wondering what tikes that young can actually do to help out, the answer is plenty. What’s most important is simply getting them involved, ensuring they feel like an essential part of that aforementioned ecosystem.
“When kids are really young, they want to help you rake leaves or prepare dinner,” Richard Bromfield, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School, explained to The Boston Globe. “Take those opportunities to let kids help. Those moments are infused with love and connection.”
Let Them Snooze: Teens Should Sleep In on Weekends — It May Boost Their Mental Health, Study Suggests
Let Them Snooze: Teens Should Sleep In on Weekends — It May Boost Their Mental Health, Study Suggests
This article was originally written by Stephen Beech for SWNS
Instead of opening your teenager’s blinds as soon as the sun comes up Saturday morning, you might want to let them keep snoozing. A new study suggests that sleeping in on the weekend to catch up on sleep lost during the week can boost young people’s mental well-being.
Researchers from the University of Oregon and the State University of New York Upstate Medical University looked at data involving over 1,000 people ages 16-24. They found that those who caught some extra z’s on Saturday and Sunday were 41% less likely to experience depressive symptoms than those who didn’t.
Teens and young adults commonly face sleep challenges and are at a heightened risk for depression — this study offers one of the first glimpses at the connection between that risk and weekend catch-up sleep.
It’s typical for teens to rack up a sleep deficit during the week because of the many demands on their time and attention, including school, social life, extracurricular activities, and after-school jobs. “Sleep researchers and clinicians have long recommended that adolescents get eight to 10 hours of sleep at a regular time every day of the week, but that’s just not practical for a lot of adolescents, or people generally,” co-author Melynda Casement said in a press release.
She emphasized that the eight to 10 hours advice is still the ideal, but when it isn’t possible, catching up on shuteye during the weekend may lower the risk of depressive symptoms. “It’s normal for teens to be night owls, so let them catch up on sleep on weekends if they can’t get enough sleep during the week because that’s likely to be somewhat protective,” she explained.
Data was drawn from a national survey in which participants reported their bedtimes and wake-up times during the week and weekend. That info was used to calculate their weekend catch-up sleep: the difference between the average sleep per weekend day and the average sleep per weekday. Subjects also answered questions on their emotional well-being, and were considered as having symptoms of depression if they shared that they felt sad or depressed daily.
Circadian rhythms — the body’s internal clock — shift during adolescence, making it harder for most teens to fall asleep as early as they did when they were younger.
“Instead of being a morning lark, you’re going to become more of a night owl,” Casement said. “And sleep onset keeps progressively delaying in adolescence until age 18 to 20. After that, you start becoming more morning larkish again.”
A natural sleep window for many teens is to nod off around 11 p.m. and wake up at 8 a.m, but that conflicts with early start times at most high schools. As a result, many U.S. sleep scientists and health care providers support public health campaigns to start schools later.
Casement noted that depression is one of the leading causes of disability among 16- to 24-year-olds, where “disability” is defined broadly as impairment of daily functioning, such as missing or being late to work, or generally struggling to meet responsibilities.
She added: “It makes that age range of particular interest in trying to understand risk factors for depression and how those might relate to delivery of interventions.”
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