Teaching Emotions to Children

Teaching Emotions to Children

Faber and Mazlish in their classic “How to Talk So Kids Will Listen And How To Listen So Kids Will Talk” offer some great advice on teaching emotions, to which  I’ve added my own elucidation and explanation. Please keep in mind that these points are an ideal which may be difficult for many parents to fully achieve. Therefore we must have patience with ourselves, keeping in mind that doing as much as we can will be of great benefit to our children.

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Potty Training 101

Potty Training 101

It may seem from reading my blog that I claim to be a parenting expert. While I do feel that I have some interesting and worthwhile advice to offer parents on various topics, on the topic of getting children potty trained early, however, I am no expert at all. All of my boys trained very late. Yet for potty training 101 I do have some advice to offer you, and that is that toilet training is best done later when the child is emotionally ready for it, as opposed to pressuring him or her to train early or by some arbitrary age. 

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How to Discipline a Child: Helpful Tips

How to Discipline a Child: Helpful Tips

In considering how to discipline a child, remember that if you have to enforce a limit in a particular area and the child is unhappy with it, try to cushion the blow by giving an extra freedom or privilege somewhere else. This will make the child more likely to comply with the limit. Say, “You can’t climb on the rocks, but you can go on the swings.” Say, “You can’t bounce the ball in the living room, but you can in the hallway by the door.” 

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Anger Management For Kids

Anger Management For Kids

It can be frightening if your child gets angry. You feel like he or she is going to lose control. How many tantrums and anger fits can you handle? Some children can be irritable frequently and this is upsetting. A parent might think, “What’s wrong with me that my child is not happy.” So in considering anger management for kids, there are two stages in dealing with the problem, 1) preventing them from being generated in the first place, and 2) resolving the angry feelings once they have arisen.

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Decision Making for Kids

Decision Making for Kids

Decision making for kids is a difficult skill that takes practice to master. Many adults have trouble making decisions, so one can imagine how challenging it is for children. How do we help our child learn how to make good choices? The answer is we allow him to struggle to a certain extent with an age-appropriate decision, but when it gets to a point that it is beyond his ability, it may be healthier to make the decision for him in a way that is supportive of the child’s desires. In other words, it is sometimes necessary to help the child make the decision that he really wants to make. 

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How to set limits for your child

How to set limits for your child

Are you frustrated by your child's breaking rules? Is there a constant power struggle between you and him or her? Do you feel powerless and that things sometimes get out of control? Does she just not seem to listen? Learning how to set limits for your child can be extremely challenging but keeping a few pointers in mind can make things go much more smoothly. Please bear in mind that the principles expressed here represent an ideal parenting goal, and one should not expect to achieve these ideals perfectly.

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Two of the Most Important Parenting Techniques

Two of the Most Important Parenting Techniques

When a child is upset, when a child has a problem, when a child has conflict, try to reflect his feelings back to him. Always deal with the feelings first before you do anything else. Reflecting means verbalizing and labelling the feelings he is experiencing and showing the child that you are aware that he has those feelings. Let's say a child comes home and reports a conflict with someone else. Before you give advice, criticize, or blame, say, “What he said must've really hurt your feelings,” or, “That must've been very frustrating,” or “That must have made you angry.” 

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How to Get Kids to Clean Up

How to Get Kids to Clean Up

“My kids make such a mess,” is a common complaint of many parents. “I'm sick of cleaning up after them, they need to clean up their own mess.” This is a reasonable position, but how is it accomplished? Asking children to clean up often simply generates resistance. It may be more difficult to get them to clean up than it is to just clean it up yourself.   Threats and punishments don't seem to work very well either. My clinical experience shows that they just result in more misbehavior and not very much cleaning.

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One of the Most Important Parenting Principles: Fulfilling the Child’s Needs

One of the Most Important Parenting Principles: Fulfilling the Child’s Needs

A very important parenting principle to remember is that it is the parents’ job to fulfill the child's physical, emotional and intellectual needs, but it is not the job of the child to fulfill the needs of his parents. In this sense the parent child relationship is truly unidirectional. It is the parents’ job to give to the child as selflessly as possible, and the child is not expected to give back until he's relatively mature.

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Don’t Want To Be a Helicopter Parent? Help your Child Develop Healthy Autonomy

Don’t Want To Be a Helicopter Parent? Help your Child Develop Healthy Autonomy

Some parents engage in what’s called “Helicopter parenting”, where they swoop in to do everything for their children, and never let them struggle with tasks or do anything for themselves. When taken to an extreme, this certainly doesn’t seem to be advisable as it prevents children from developing a healthy sense of autonomy, independence and self-determination. However on the other hand, we know that being a parent means performing endless acts of kindness towards our children, to give selflessly. This is good for the parents, as they learn to become noble givers, and good for the children, who become filled up to overflowing with those acts of kindness, and in turn by example learn to be kind to others as well. So if I pour a glass of milk for a 6 year old am I doing him a kindness, since he may be too tired, frustrated or immature to pour it for himself, or if I let him pour it, am I doing him the greater kindness of letting him learn responsibility and autonomy?

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Anger Management For Parents

Anger Management For Parents

Our children’s misbehavior may sometimes infuriate us. They may misbehave frequently, and the resulting anger we as parents feel should not necessarily be disregarded or condemned, as it is sometimes a natural reaction. However, yelling at the children or retaliating in some way always seems on reflection to be counterproductive and emotionally harmful to both parent and child. Moreover, it often doesn’t seem to prevent the behavior from repeating itself!

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The Most Important Factor in a Child’s Education: Joy in Learning!

The Most Important Factor in a Child’s Education: Joy in Learning!

The most important factor in a child’s education is the extent to which we teach him to enjoy learning. Teaching a child to take pleasure in study is the greatest guarantor of his intellectual success! A child who enjoys the bliss of learning will be self-motivated and will read and explore knowledge voraciously for the rest of his life. Therefore the most important question we need to ask and answer for our child when he engages in schoolwork is, “What is interesting, fascinating, amazing and beautiful about what I’m studying right now.”

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Kids and Competition, and Kindness

Kids and Competition, and Kindness

Kids who are polite and well behaved are very attractive. We see polite children every day here in downtown Manhattan, and we adults are rightfully proud of them and of our families. However, this may not be the most important thing for the children. It is much more important that they be emotionally healthy and happy even if they are a little impolite and sometimes misbehave.

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Moral Development in Children

Moral Development in Children

We all want to promote moral development in our children. This means, for example, that they should think, “I don't want to do ‘X’ because it will hurt my friend’s feelings, and that is wrong.” we shouldn’t want them to think that the only thing wrong with doing ‘X’ is that “My parents will disapprove get angry or punish me”, because that teaches them that if it weren’t for the punishment, doing wrong is just fine. Disapproval and punishment is an extrinsic effect of misbehavior, whereas hurting someone else's feelings is an intrinsic effect. We want to promote this intrinsic awareness of what's right and wrong as a guide for our child. We do this by description. When a child takes away another child's toy unfairly, don’t say, “Bad boy, no grabbing!” which expresses anger and disapproval and provides an external reason to refrain from the behavior.

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How To Communicate With Children - Using Golden Phrases

How To Communicate With Children - Using Golden Phrases

There are so many golden phrases parents can use in learning how to communicate with children! We all know that words are extremely powerful in interpersonal relations, and words expressed from parent to child are yet many times more powerful! Therefore we as parents need to take advantage of this by using golden phrases. Famed psychologist from the 60’s Haim Ginott inspired the following, and I’ve synthesized his work and my own ideas. 

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Is Homework Harmful or Helpful?

Is Homework Harmful or Helpful?

When considering “Is homework harmful or helpful?” we need to realize that the amount of homework that is assigned generally in schools has greatly increased in recent years. When I was in school we were assigned 20 to 30 minutes of homework per day and nothing on weekends or vacations. But now, kids get a couple of hours of homework per day and lots of weekend and vacation homework. The age at which homework begins to be assigned has gotten much younger as well. Some schools, unthinkably, even give homework in kindergarten and pre-K!

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How Not To Spoil Your Child

How Not To Spoil Your Child

The following advice about how not to spoil your child is inspired by the work of my dear mentor, Dr. Ben Sorotzkin, to whose work I have added some of my own ideas. No parent wants her child to be spoiled, selfish, and demanding. Can this be avoided or resolved by reducing the number of material things we give them? How does a child get this way? How do we prevent it?

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