Articles Archive - Page 76 of 91

Let’s imagine that there’s a problem at school. You’ve been asked to come it to talk it over or you’ve called the teacher and asked her to let you come in. This is not your ordinary parent-teacher conference. There’s an issue to tackle and it makes you a bit nervous and upset.

Your child is counting on you to use this conversation to its full advantage. Whatever the problem, whether it’s about his behavior, a classmate’s behavior, or his progress in reading or math, this meeting makes a real difference in how the rest of the school year goes for him. How should you handle this?

Here are some tips.

Get a babysitter. Unless your older child is included in the meeting or your infant is a newborn who can be counted on to sleep through the entire thing, leave your children at home. You want to give the conversation your full attention and not be distracted by your kids. In addition, your child who is the subject of this conference isn’t helped by hearing you and his teacher talk about him. You won’t feel free to say what’s on your mind if your child is listening in and neither will his teacher. Get a babysitter or trade kid-minding with another parent you know. Leave your children at home.

Arrive five minutes early. It’s a sign of courtesy and of your seriousness about this meeting to show up on time. Don’t let the teacher wonder if you’ve forgotten the meeting by being late. Don’t let yourself get upset before you even get in the door by having to hurry. Get there five minutes ahead so you have time to get to your child’s classroom and gather your thoughts.

Bring pencil and paper. You have questions you want to ask or points you want the teacher to address, so write these down ahead of time and bring your list along. That way you can’t forget what you want to say. Bringing a notebook shows the teacher you’re taking this seriously. If you think you and the teacher might have a difference of opinion on the issue at hand, being ready to write down what is said shows the seriousness you feel.

Don’t argue. Your child’s teacher is giving you information. Listen and learn. It might be that what you learn most is how this teacher thinks and how he manages his students. This is important stuff. It might be that you’ll learn things about your child you didn’t know or a different angle on her behavior you’d never considered before. You can’t pick up information if you dominate the conversation, take up time telling the teacher how wrong he is, or act defensive.

Ask questions. The best questions are open-ended. Ask, “What have you found is the best way to handle Clara’s meltdowns?” instead of asking, “When Clara has a meltdown, do you punish her?” Questions that can be answered by a single word don’t give you much information. You want to get a good picture of what’s going on, and that means getting the teacher to talk enough to tell you.

Stay nice. Even if your child hates this teacher, even if everything you’ve heard about her is awful, even if you’ve argued with this teacher in the past, be sweet. Do not display unreasonable, demanding behavior that she can use as a reason to ignore your concerns. If you think you’re right, being calmly certain carries more weight than getting all worked up. Your pleasant behavior will give the teacher reason to be pleasant too. You want this conversation to go well.

Expect real information. It might be you find out that things are not so bad for your child as you’d feared and you have no real concerns after all. But don’t let the teacher paper over or minimize the problem that brought you to the school and don’t let her make vague, general statements about what she doesn’t like about your kid’s progress or actions. Be prepared to dig a little bit and insist – nicely – on specific instances of what she’s seeing or explanations of specific problems your child says she’s having at school. You don’t want to get home and think, “That was a waste of time! I didn’t get the answers I needed!” Now is the time to get answers. Ask for them.

Wrap up on time. When it’s time to go, say good-bye. Do not run over unless the teacher wishes it. If there is more to say, make another appointment. As you’re wrapping up, review your notes, saying out loud what you learned and what you’ll try to do at home to help your child. Say also what the teacher has agreed to do and tell when you and he will talk again, to see how things are going. Thank the teacher for his time and effort. Make eye contact. Leave on a happy note.

Any parent-teacher conference is an important event. It cements the relationship of the most important adults in a child’s life, his parents and his teacher. Managing a calm, reasonable conversation at a time when your child is in some sort of trouble is even more important.

You and the school are on the same side – you both want your child to do well. So make any conversation about your child a useful and positive experience. Good luck!

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Dr. Anderson will be in Atlanta, GA on December 10 and 11, speaking at the National Head Start Association’s Parent Conference. Email her at [email protected] for details or to set up a presentation to your group in the Atlanta area on one of those dates.

We’ve all heard that exercise is important for kids. The First Lady has made something of a crusade of this but hard evidence to back it up has been pretty thin. Exercise is good for adults, yes, but is it really essential for kids? Don’t they get enough exercise already?

Now, a long-term, large-scale study in England has the facts we’ve been looking for. Girls, especially, who were more active at age 11 did better in high school than other children, and the girls who were the most active did the best of everyone in science.

We’ve discussed this British study before, so it might seem familiar. Thousands of English children have been followed since 1991, creating data on all sorts of behaviors and outcomes. In one part of the study, 5,000 eleven-year-old kids wore an accelerometer for a week, which how much time was spent in active motion. The findings were surprising.

Despite the fact that the recommended amount of exercise for children is at least one hour per day, the average level of exercise was far less. Boys averaged just 29 minutes per day – not quite half the minimum recommended amount. For girls the average was only 18 minutes – less than one-third the recommended minimum.

Children’s level of exercise at age 11 was compared to standardized test scores in English, math and science. The more active a child was, the better he or she did on all of the tests. This advantage lasted. The most active children continued to outshine other kids academically at ages 13 and 16.

Most surprising of all was that girls who got the highest levels of exercise were better than all other kids – boys as well as girls – in science.

Although the study controlled for ordinary factors, like household income and other family factors, there might certainly be some link besides exercise that predicts children’s academic success. But until we know more, there’s no harm in getting your kids more active.

Continue to encourage active play and sports participation into adolescence, for your sons and also for your daughters.
Keep track of time spent in active play and don’t rely on guesses that your children are “active enough.”
Support physical education programs at your child’s middle school and make certain that class time really is spent in active play – not in lectures or sitting on the sidelines.
Accept no excuses from your child that lead to frequent skipping of P.E. class.

Health is not an add-on. Promoting children’s health is what parents are supposed to do. Now that you know that plenty of exercise makes your child smarter too, do everything you can to get him or her up and active.

In this age of standardized testing and STEM programs, it’s easy to imagine that the only subjects that matter are reading and math. Schools in recent years have dismantled music and art classes, relegating these at most to once-a-week “specials” intended mostly to provide reading and math teachers with some planning time. Many parents are quicker to sign their kids up for afterschool tutoring than for guitar lessons or a ceramics class. They want to get, naturally, the biggest bang for their buck.

A new study, however, indicates that the arts promote the same abilities prized by schools these days. Whether your child is truly interested in art and music or simply wants to do well in science, taking classes in the arts is an important part of kids’ education.

The study, conducted by researchers at Michigan State University and published in Economic Development Quarterly, investigated the childhoods and later careers of students who graduated from the MSU Honors College with majors in science, technology, engineering or math between 1990 and 1995. Those graduates who today own businesses or hold patents had much more arts training as children than other graduates.

In addition, the researchers found that more arts leads to more success in STEM fields. According to Rex LaMore of MSU, “If you started as a young child and continued in your adult years, you’re more likely to be an inventor as measured by the number of patents generated, businesses formed or articles published. And that was something we were surprised to discover.”

In addition to sheer volume of arts exposure the kind of art kids dabbled in mattered too. Those who had taken courses in metal work or electronics were 42% more likely than other kids to grow up to hold a patent, as were 30% of kids who has tried out photography. A whopping 87.5 percent of those who explored architecture as children were likely to form a company. The secret, apparently, is early training in creative thinking that supports later innovation.

“The skills you learn from taking things apart and putting them back together translate into how you look at a product and how it can be improved,” according to Eileen Roraback, also from MSU. “In our study, a biologist working in the cancer field, who created a business, said her writing skills helped her to write business plans and win competitions.”

For parents, the next steps are clear:

Encourage your children (boys as well as girls) to take classes in art, music, or other creative fields.
Support at-home dabbling in creative problem solving, by setting aside space and equipment for a workshop. Just a corner of the garage or basement might do and tools scrounged from yard sales and thrift stores.
Buy toys that encourage building and tinkering, such as Lego or blocks, and don’t inhibit how your kids play with these. It’s not so important that they follow the directions to duplicate the package front. It’s more important that they find innovative uses for the materials.
Rally around the arts at your child’s school. Art and music are not frills or just in-school babysitting while “real” teachers plan. The arts encourage exactly the sort of thinking that develops into life success.

Remember Sid, the sketchy kid next door in Toy Story? That’s the boy who mixed and matched toy parts to create scary-looking figures he then launched with model rockets. Research suggests that that child was headed, not for juvenile detention, but for success as an inventor. His parents had the right idea.

Supporting the arts in your child is a good idea too.

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Developmentally Appropriate Parenting, at your favorite bookstore.

Block play has been around for a very long time and wooden blocks are a staple of preschool equipment. These days, children at home enjoy wooden blocks, but also Lincoln Logs, Lego, and other building toys. Have you ever wondered why block play seems so interesting? What do kids get out of it?

A study published this month in the journal Child Development found that block play develops children’s spatial reasoning ability, even in children as young as three. As you might remember, spatial reasoning is a key element in intelligence tests. Those puzzles about rotating figures, deciding what pieces would fit into an irregular shape, and even finding the example that is the same as another from a set of very similar possibilities – these are all tests of spatial reasoning and they are all indicators of higher-level thinking skill.

In addition to just increasing brain power, playing with blocks of all sorts increases children’s math ability. They master concepts of shape and size, determine relationships between blocks (“which is under another?”) and solve spatial problems as part of building structures.

In one experiment, three-year-old children were asked to use Duplo sized Legos to recreate a model shape. Six of these tasks ranged in difficulty from “easy” to “tricky.” Just about all the children were able to duplicate a model that required only two pieces. But only children whose parents reported more block play at home and more conversation at home about block play were able to recreate the most difficult models.

The take-aways from this study are obvious:

Provide your child with blocks, Lego, puzzles, and other hands-on toys requiring development of spatial relations. Notice that, while video games are often touted as means of developing spatial relations skill, hands-on play with “real” blocks should come first.
Remember that blocks are not “boy toys.” Girls, who may have been discouraged in years past from playing with blocks, should build with blocks too. Last I checked, girls are as smart as boys and need the same opportunities to learn too.
Talk about spatial relations with your child. Use words like “between,” “under,” “beside,” and so forth when you play together with blocks and in other situations throughout the day.
Start now. The three-year-olds in the study were demonstrating what they had learned in their first few years of life. Find block toys that are safe for small children and get down on the floor and play.

Parents often think of math as a “school skill.” This study demonstrates once again that what is learned in school builds on what children have learned already at home. Parents are a child’s first teachers and, happily, part of that teaching includes playing with blocks.

It’s a sad thing that by the time a child finally figures out how to go trick-or-treating effectively – when he’s learned where the houses with the “best” candy are, what the most efficient route is around the neighborhood, and when he’s old enough to go out with just his friends, no adults, in the dark, for hours – by the time a child is really good at trick-or-treating, he’s really too old to do it.

Trick-or-treating is for little kids. It’s for miniature Batmans and Cinderellas. It’s not for full-sized ones.

But older kids are unlikely to notice this for themselves. The pull of a huge candy-haul and the fun of an evening out roaming around blinds them to the fact that they no longer fit the trick-or-treater model. It will be up to you to tell your child she’s too old to go door-to-door on Halloween night.

This moment probably comes at some point during middle school. By the time a child is eleven or twelve, they’ve outgrown “cute” and their version of “scary” is no longer cute either. A scary twelve-year-old may be big enough to be just plain scary… and unwelcome on the doorstep. A princess-y twelve-year-old may be not sweet anymore but instead more like Miss America or a Dallas cheerleader. Sometime in the preteen years, it will be time to redirect Halloween fun.

Here are some ideas:

Your older child can dress up and then answer the door at home, handing out the candy.
Your older child can take over decorating the outside of your home, then watch for the effect on trick-or-treaters (be careful that your child’s efforts don’t frighten preschoolers away!).
Your older child can be the escort for younger siblings. He won’t dress up for this role or take along a candy bag but he’ll find that many homeowners will give him candy even so.
Your older child can volunteer to decorate a local community center or to help out during a community Halloween celebration.
Your older child can even organize a new Halloween event, like a kids’ parade or pet costume contest.

The key is to not wait until the day before Halloween to tell your child she’s too old to go trick-or-treating. This year might be the year to tell your child it will be her last to dress up and go round begging for candy. Give her time to get used to the idea… if not a whole year, then at least a whole week.

The good news is that Halloween has become more celebratory, even among adults. Your child’s days of dressing up as someone else aren’t ending, they’re shifting. The rituals of childhood change for the preteen child to the rituals of grownups.

Help your child to make the switch.

When is bedtime at your house for your preschool children? If your answer something like “It depends” then you could be setting your family up for problems. A new study from University College London, published in the journal Pediatrics, found that children whose bedtimes are variable are more likely to be behavior problems for Mom and Dad.

Bedtimes reported by parents of 10,000 English 3-, 5- and 7-year-old children were compared to parents’ and teachers’ reports of children’s behavior. A clear link was found between irregular bedtimes and hyperactivity, conduct disorders, problems getting along with friends, and emotional outbursts. The longer irregular bedtimes persisted and the older children got, the more severe the behavior problems became.

Researchers speculate that variable bedtimes throw off the body’s circadian rhythm, leading to sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation disrupts essential brain functions that occur during sleep and interferes with neural development of brain areas needed for behavior regulation.

They found that irregular bedtimes are most common among three-year-olds, when 1 in 5 children go to sleep at different times each night – and when behavior struggles and tantrums are common! By age seven, most children go to bed between 7:30 and 8:30 pm but children still up at 9:00 pm or who continue to go to bed at odd times continue to struggle with behavior.

Every parent knows that children who are overtired or who didn’t get a good night’s sleep are more likely to be irritable and unfocused. Imagine that this is a child’s daily experience. As lead researcher Yvonne Kelly notes, “Not having fixed bedtimes, accompanied by a constant sense of flux, induces a state of body and mind akin to jet lag.”

It’s obvious that irregular bedtimes might have daytime consequences.

What can you do?

Set a bedtime and stick to it. Don’t let small children stay up to watch television, so finish a game, or participate in evening activities. Get things wrapped up in time for the same bedtime every night.
Maintain your child’s bedtime even on weekends and vacations. Goodness knows, you want your child to be sweet when she’s around you all day. And just as jetlag lingers for a day or two, a late-night on the weekend may have repercussions for your child’s learning later in the week.
Make certain the sleeping arrangements provided to your child work for him. If older or younger children disrupt your child’s sleep, take steps to adjust the sleeping situation.
Avoid letting your child watch television or play with computers or cellphones in bed. The light from these screens disrupts the release of the sleep hormone melatonin and can lead to sleep deprivation.
If you allow your child to read in bed, have a firm “lights out” limit. Yes, we want our children to enjoy reading. But they need their sleep too.

The good news, according to the study, is that behavior problems caused by irregular bedtimes are reversible. Once children start going to bed at a the same time each night, they became better behaved during the day.

Having trouble with your child’s behavior? Look at her bedtime. If it’s variable, just setting a more regular sleep schedule may make a difference.

Being bullied is no fun and being a bully isn’t a great way to build a social circle. In recent years, parents’ and teachers’ concern about bullying has led many school districts to implement anti-bullying programs. In fact, parents often demand that such programs be instituted.

Now, a new study calls into question the effectiveness of anti-bullying programs in schools. It seems that there is more bullying in schools with anti-bullying programs than in schools without.

The study by researchers at University of Texas Arlington and published in the Journal of Criminology, surveyed over 7,000 12-to-18 year-olds in nearly 200 U.S. school districts. They found that older students were less likely to be victims of bullying than younger students but that the most pervasive bullying occurred at the high school level. Race and ethnicity were not a factor linked to more or less bullying. Boys were more likely to party to physical bullying and girls more likely party to emotional bullying.

Most disconcertingly, the study found that the presence of bullying prevention programs was associated with more bullying, not less. The study notes, “Surprisingly, bullying prevention had a negative effect on peer victimization. Contrary to our hypothesis, students attending schools with bullying prevention programs were more likely to have experienced peer victimization, compared to those attending schools without bullying prevention programs.”

The authors speculate that bullies may learn better bullying techniques when schools focus so heavily on what bullies do and their effects. It may also be that schools that implement anti-bullying programs have more severe problems with bullying than schools that do not. The study reports that about 68% of American schools have anti-bullying programs.

If bullying is a problem at your child’s school, what should you do?

Remember that anti-bullying programs are not enough to make a change. One cannot simply expect that having a program solves the problem. Bullying is not so simple as that.
Do what you can to change the culture of the school and the neighborhood. Bullying thrives in a coercive environment, where people in power wield power over others. Highly controlling teaching methods, zero-tolerance administrative policies, and blatant favoritism of some groups over others are methods frequently employed by the adults in schools where bullying is a problem. It makes sense that bullies learn by adult examples.
Listen if your child complains of being a bully. Just because her school has an anti-bullying program doesn’t mean you can imagine the problem no longer exists, or exists only in her mind. Remember that boys can be victims of bullies too (and girls can be bullies, as well).
Get help if you suspect your child is a bully. While many bullies learn how to be controlling and coercive at home, some bullies are children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder and other mental health issues, raised in homes with responsive parenting. Don’t be embarrassed. Take action.

The take-home message from this study is that parents cannot assume an anti-bullying effort at school solves the problem. Things may actually get worse or at least get no better. As always, parents must still pay attention and take action to protect their children.

You know how this goes. You do something or offer something and your child frowns. He crosses his arms and ducks his head. He glares at you. He pouts. Maybe he lets a tear slide down his cheek.

“Oh! We don’t have any macaroni and cheese. We’re all out!” you say. Your child looks at you with angry eyes.

You’re surprised. You had no idea he would act this way. You want to understand, to make things better. But you can’t make things better. Your child has decided to make you pay.

It’s amazing, when you think about it, the young age at which children learn to sulk. Most are masters by age four or even younger. Many continue to send you on a guilt trip throughout their childhoods and into their teens. There seems to be nothing you can do about it.

You can apologize. “I’m sorry. I thought we had some mac-n-cheese but we must’ve eaten it.” Usually this falls on deaf ears. An apology only confirms your child in the belief that you have failed miserably as a parent. Making you feel badly is exactly what your child had in mind. An apology sometimes works but most likely won’t.

You can offer alternatives. “How about some spaghetti? You like spaghetti.” A child may accept an alternative but not instead of what she originally wanted. She still wants what you didn’t have and she is still holding you accountable for that. Offering a substitute only means you’ll pay twice, for the substitution and for whatever was wanted in the first place.

You can try to cheer your child up. “Oh, come on! Mac-n-cheese has holes in it!!!” But this never works. Your child doesn’t want to be made happier; he’s happy enough putting you through your paces. Your child sees your efforts at being cheerful as a denial of the seriousness of your crime. He will sulk harder, since you obviously don’t understand!

You can growl, telling your child to snap out of it, or “straighten up and fly right,” as my father used to say. This doesn’t work very well. From the child’s perspective she’s being punished now for exposing the truth. You have failed but she’s being yelled at for it. Unfair!

The only technique that works is refusing to play your part. Be pleasant but ignore the sulk. “Oh. We don’t have any macaroni and cheese. We’re all out. Is there anything you’d like instead? No? Okay. Well, tell me if you change your mind.” And then go about your business.

Sulking is a performance. It has to have an audience. No audience, no show.

When your child does come around, saying maybe, “If I can’t have macaroni and cheese, can I have a peanut butter sandwich?” answer as if no sulking has happened. Pick up where you left off, not where the sulking began. This means you shouldn’t say anything about the sulking. Don’t say, “That’s better!” or “I’m glad you’ve decided to be nice now” or anything like that. Let the sulking be something that evaporated.

But if your child says instead, “If I can’t have macaroni and cheese, can I have some candy?” just smile and shake your head. Suggesting an alternative your child knows you won’t agree to is the start of another sulk-session.

Don’t play along!

Every person has ups and downs. But kids don’t know that. Sometimes children think they’re the only ones to ever have failed at something, the only ones to have ever wished for something that seems out of reach, the only ones to have ever been afraid. Knowing that ups and downs are normal – and that the downs are always followed by ups – is important. How can we send that message to our children so they have this truth to fall back on in hard times?

Researcher Marshall Duke has the answer and it’s a simple one you can start working on today. The answer is “by sharing family stories.” Children who have heard tales of their parents’, grandparents’ and other relatives’ lives are more resilient and better able to cope with adversity.

According to Duke, family stories follow one of three general patterns. There’s first the rising narrative: “When we started out, we had nothing. Then we worked hard and became successful.” This narrative is the classic American boot-strapping story, of course, and it’s the basis for lots of books and movies.

Then there’s the falling narrative: “We used to be important and happy. Now we’re nothing.” This narrative captures a previous state of grace that could be recaptured. It might even motivate a child to work hard and restore the family’s rightful place in the world.

But the most motivating narrative of all is the narrative of ups and downs: “We’ve had hard times and we’ve had good times. But through it all, we’ve cared about each other and made it through.” The key thing is, these narratives – all three of them – are not delivered just like that, as two-sentence stories. They are built up over time, through anecdotes, remembrances, and object lessons that gradually fill in the picture of a family with a rich past… and a rich future.

Duke’s researchers asked families of 9-to-12 year-old children and then families of 14- to 16 year-olds a set of 20 questions, designed to assess how much members knew about their own family history. The researchers also listened to the sharing of family narratives by taping dinner table conversations. All this data was counted, and then compared to the results of tests of what is known as “self-agency” and emotional stability taken by children in the participating families. These were simple questions and the bits of family history that were inserted into conversations were ordinary sorts of things. The families didn’t know that researchers were counting family lore.

But the results were astonishing. Children and teens in families in which family stories were routinely shared and who knew many of the answers to the 20 questions – because these questions had been part of shared lore in the past – were overwhelmingly more self-confident, more resilient in the face of problems, and happier than kids who heard less and knew less about their families.

We could ask why?

Duke and his team believe the answer lies in a sense of an “intergenerational self.” It helps to know we are each part of something bigger than ourselves. It helps to know that others have had a bumpy road too and have managed, one way or another. Even if a child never met his grandparents or great-grandparents, knowing they bravely crossed oceans or borders to get here or defended their families and country in time of war or raised children with little help, all these stories send the message: “you are a member of a family of strong people.”

So, don’t hold back. Tell tales about your family and about the ancestral family. Dig out old photographs or talk with the family elders. And see if you – and your kids – can answer “yes” to Duke’s 20 questions:

1. Do you know how your parents met?
2. Do you know where your mother grew up?
3. Do you know where your father grew up?
4. Do you know where some of your grandparents grew up?
5. Do you know where some of your grandparents met?
6. Do you know where your parents were married?
7. Do you know what went on when you were being born?
8. Do you know the source of your name?
9. Do you know some things about what happened when your brothers or sisters were being born?
10. Do you know which person in your family you look most like?
11. Do you know which person in the family you act most like?
12. Do you know some of the illnesses and injuries that your parents experienced when they were younger?
13. Do you know some of the lessons that your parents learned from good or bad experiences?
14. Do you know some things that happened to your mom or dad when they were in school?
15. Do you know the national background of your family (such as English, German, Russian, etc)?
16. Do you know some of the jobs that your parents had when they were young?
17. Do you know some awards that your parents received when they were young?
18. Do you know the names of the schools that your mom went to?
19. Do you know the names of the schools that your dad went to?
20. Do you know about a relative whose face “froze” in a grumpy position because he or she did not smile enough?*

* If you’ve ever told your child that making a face will cause it to stay that way, Duke’s research team understands. They realize that not every family story will be strictly true or agreed-upon by everyone in the family. Accuracy isn’t so important as telling the tales the way you remember them. And, by the way, 15% of Duke’s participants answered “yes” to question 20!

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