Our children are inundated with demands from the adults in their lives. At times all those words may sound like a never-ending torrent. I’m reminded of a YouTube video that made the rounds a couple years ago of The Mom Song, three minutes of commands sung to the William Tell Overture. What an exhausting way […]
Category Archive:
Leadership
Think Before You Talk
“You throw that ball and you’re grounded for a month.” “You talk back one more time and I’ll give your bicycle away.” “You don’t eat your peas, you won’t be able to have dessert.” The traps we can fall into as we work with children. In our efforts to have our children change their behavior, […]
An Iron Hand In A Velvet Glove
Oh, what challenges we have as parents trying to find the right fit for our parenting style. If we come down too strong on an issue, we think perhaps our need for control is bubbling over. If we ignore a problem or allow bad behavior to get its way, maybe we’ve given our power away. […]
Learning To Be Friendly With Error
If failure is not an option, neither is success. An interesting idea. But isn’t it true that we learn most effectively when we’ve had to figure out a problem through trial and error? On my typewriter (remember those things?) during my early 20’s I had a saying taped to it that read: Babe Ruth struck […]
Learning to Engage
Knowing and not doing, is really not to know at all. To truly know and experience something, we must engage. We can watch all the football games in the world, but until we learn to throw an accurate pass, run past a halfback, or have been tackled, we really don’t know football, we only know […]
Learning To Set Goals
Goal setting seems to be an adult-oriented skill set. How do we help our children learn to set goals? Having given adult workshops on goal setting, I realize that many adults lack basic understanding on how to formulate goals along with the strategic and tactical steps to achieve a goal. In my elementary classroom my […]
Learning How to Care
Many things in life seem to be a closed system, as if certain concepts flow through an electric circuit. To get respect, give respect. To have a friend, be a friend. Care for others and they’ll care for you. The key to success in learning to care is in understanding what actions constitute caring, just […]
Learning To Be Good At Doing Things
Recently I read an article by a father of a three-year-old boy discussing his son’s prowess in the kitchen, and what a surprising amount of tasks his son could accomplish—washing vegetables, stemming mushrooms, cracking eggs and kneading dough. The dad observed, “I’m not pushing him. He’s pushing himself.” Our under seven’s are in a developmental […]
Learning to Make Choices
Our children’s world is changing at a pace that is difficult to comprehend. The jobs that are here today probably won’t exist in ten, much less twenty years. We need to teach and help our children learn a skill set that will enable them to navigate the fast-moving changes they will inevitably encounter during their […]
Learning to Question
Information is an avalanche. Technology experts tell us that every two days we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. To be able to dig ourselves out of this morass of words and images, in order to find our way and to live our lives, learning […]