Kid – Less Meat More Veg

Is Your Kid Struggling In The Back-To-School Adjustment? What The Experts Say

CX3 — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 09:48:30 +0000

Listen, social re-entry anxiety is real, for adults and kids alike. Not to mention, starting a new school year—coming out of a pandemic or not—is cause enough of some kids to get jitters about making friends, fitting in, and finding their community. “Some kids struggled to join in before the pandemic and may have sunk further into their own bubbles. The wall of opposition—shrugs, eye-rolling, or tantrums—is usually a sign that your child is struggling to surface in this brave new world.” says parenting expert Caroline Maguire, M.Ed.

Social isolation has probably meant that some kids may have missed developing key social learnings, too. This may result in them feeling as though they don’t know how to navigate a conversation, reach out to others, and therefore, retreat.

So the first thing to do is to identify where the pain points are.

“We can all remember a time when we had to cross a room to speak to people we didn’t know or felt a nuanced and subtle slight. Due to social distancing, children have missed some of the natural progressions—the small and big social milestones that help us learn to connect. Your child may have struggled before COVID with fitting in, but now is the opportunity to identify which key social-emotional skills to work on such as chatting, approaching others, keeping a game going, reading the room,” says Maguire.

Work with your child to find where they feel they are struggling—be an empathetic listener while doing so—and then help them build confidence in those areas. “Pair the social-emotional skills you are working on with low-key, fun opportunities to build confidence,” she says. “There are valuable social skills that come from interacting in a less-structured environment. Make this practice a game by including supportive opportunities with close friends, family, cousins, younger or older children, or a group.” The key is to practice these skills in low-stakes situations—there’s a lot of social pressure at school, so you’ll want to work on these skills in places where they know they won’t be judged—and even better, be encouraged!

This article was originally published by mindbodygreen.com. Read the original article here.

Should You Send Your Kid To School? What We Know About The Delta Variant Today

CX3 — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 00:17:26 +0000

This is the future of education, especially with our new challenge of the Delta strain.
This article was originally published by mindbodygreen.com. Read the original article here.

How to Potty Train Your Kid | Goop

CX3 — Sun, 23 May 2021 14:12:14 +0000

You don’t start with “Let’s sit on the potty and poop.” You’re going to end there, but that’s not where you start. A good place to start is with a potty chair, not the adult potty. The reason for that is twofold: Number one, sometimes kids get intimidated by being up there on the adult toilet. It’s like you sitting on a ten-foot platform. And two, it’s very hard to poop when your feet are dangling. If you do use a little thing you put on the toilet seat, you need to have a little platform or step stool that they can put their feet on.

The first thing you do with a potty chair is you get them sitting there comfortably like it’s no big deal. You do that by making it more a party chair than a potty chair. The child will sit there, fully clothed, just to read a book or to sing a fun song. Then, “Come on, honey, let’s sit on your magic chair and look at a book. Which book do you want to look at?” When they’re sitting, set a timer for a minute or two. When the timer goes off, you say, “Yay, that was fun! Bye-bye, special chair. We’ll see you later.” The child is going to go, “Wait, I’m not finished. We were reading a book.” And you go, “Okay. Yeah. We’ll finish this page, but then we’ll come back and read some more later.” Get them wanting it more than you want it.

Once a child will do that, the next step is to do the same thing but without pants on. The next thing is to do the same thing but without a diaper on. Then, oftentimes, whether by coincidence or through their figuring it out, they pee or they poop.

I’ll note that it’s a good thing for boys to learn to pee sitting down. Because once they can pee standing up, they don’t want to sit. Standing is more fun. So getting them to learn to sit down is helpful, because that will help them figure out how to poop sitting down faster.

This article was originally published by goop.com. Read the original article here.

How to Intervene When Your Kid Is the Bully | Goop

CX3 — Sat, 24 Apr 2021 21:17:18 +0000

The first thing to do is ask questions and listen to the answers. And don’t just listen but go along with your child and validate their experiences. If you don’t listen to them, they’ll likely stop telling you the truth.

1. “The school’s been in touch” or “So-and-so’s parents have been in touch.”
It’s good to be transparent about where this conversation’s coming from.

2. “Can you help me understand what’s going wrong?”
This is a key question. Try to stick closely to these words. They’re very simple, but they’re setting the ground that you, as a parent, don’t know more about the situation than your child does.

3. “What things do people at school do that annoy you?”
Most of the time, kids engage in socially controlling behavior because they feel annoyed or frustrated with other children. Start by asking them how they see the situation and—this is important—go along with what they say. If they say something is annoying, you can validate that. Note that it’s best to do this without singling out the targeted child. Instead, frame it generally as “people.”

4. “When people do that annoying thing, you probably handle it pretty well most of the time. What do you usually do when you feel frustrated with people?”
You want to acknowledge that your child probably often gets it right. It’s important to let them know that you’re separating their actions from their identity. If it sounds like you’re saying they never get it right, they’ll be less likely to tell you what they really think.

5. “What are some examples of things you do that get you into trouble or hurt someone’s feelings?”
Once you’ve established what it means to handle a frustrating situation well, you can talk about what ways don’t go so well. This is where seven or eight out of ten kids will say something like, “We were just joking around.” They’ll try to normalize and minimize the incident. They might say they talk to their friends like that all the time and their friends don’t get upset about it. Again, go along with them. You might say, “Yes, that’s true—they’re your friends and they trust you.” That’s where I would talk to them about crossing the line.

6. “Where does joking around cross the line and become teasing?”
I tend not to use the word “bullying” with kids. Because, boy, that makes them clam up. So I ask about crossing the line and teasing instead. This is a neat question because you’re not talking about something they’ve done wrong. You’re just asking them to recognize when a situation isn’t fun anymore. Acknowledge that yes, it can be hard to know when you cross the line. It can help to ask when somebody else crossed the line and hurt their feelings, or you might tell them a story about a time you were naughty as a child. Remind them that we’ve all done things that have made another person unhappy—we’ll do it, we don’t always mean it, but it happens. Acknowledge that it’s not about blame and shame.

This article was originally published by goop.com. Read the original article here.