I'm a full-time mummy

I came across this article which I must definitely share with you guys as I'm very interested to know your thoughts on this. Do note that sharing this does not mean I agree or disagree with it. For your convenience, I have copied the excerpts from the article here:

If she has to tell them once she has to tell them a thousand times – pick up your toys, stop playing your video games, go brush your teeth, put on your shoes. Cate starts out calm, but by the 3rd time, she yelling. And fed up.

 This is the lament of millions of parents who get frustrated because their kids don’t listen the first time. The problem here is that kids have learned that you don’t need to really take Cate seriously until she reaches that ultra decibel level. This buys them a few more minutes of TV or game time. Essentially the kids and Cate have both trained each other and fallen into a negative pattern. The way out is breaking the pattern.

The key here is training the kids to take you seriously the first time. Here are the steps:

Make your request calmly directly to them. This means not yelling across the house where it’s easy for the kids to tune it out. Walk up to them, look them in the eye, tell them what you want them to do.

If you’re asking the kids to make a transition, set a timer to let them know when they need to act. You wouldn’t like it if your boss suddenly interrupted you when you’re engrossed in something and asked you to immediately do something else. Kids are even more sensitive to that switch. So you go to them, tell them they need to shut off the computer in 5 minutes and go take a bath, and literally set a timer (big kitchen ones are great). When the timer goes off, they need to stop.

If they need to do something right away, stand over / next to them until they do it. If Cate wants her 4 year-old to put on her shoes now, she needs to say it once and stand there until her daughter does it. Don’t repeat the request, just stay there.

Have consequences if they don’t respond. The timer goes off and your kid ignores it. Have consequences: less game time, go to bed a few minutes earlier. Again, key is to state this calmly, one sentence, no ranting, no explaining. Actually the first time or two you implement these changes, expect the kids to test it. So have your consequences worked out ahead of time and at the ready.

Work up routines. Kids love routines and they can save you from turning into what sounds like a nag. For example Cate can establish a bedtime routine with the kids – brush teeth, bath, etc – so she doesn’t have tell them to do teeth, then bath, etc.

Praise good results. The rule of discipline is to be matter-of-fact but clear about negative comments (like consequences) but make a big deal about positive. So when you child does respond first time, jump up and down (no, not really) and praise him.

Map this out with your kids. Before you put this all into effect, have a heart-to-heart conversation about this – your frustration, your realizing that they don’t like you yelling all the time, give them so forced choices about routines (want to brush your teeth before or after a bath). Again, expect a bit of push-back initially, but with your following through with consequences, they’ll get the message.

What do you think?

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I'm always looking for printables to print out for our kiddos to learn and practice on. A few weeks back I stumbled upon these couple of printable games which I improvised a wee bit so that I can use them to entertain our kiddos during any road trip we will have (one coming up in December in fact)

The original printable is meant to be a mini book, for you to print, fold and cut out so that it is a small handy sized book that kiddos can use but I'm all for long-term usage of any useful, fun and educational stuff, so I decided to improvise on this by laminating the printables and turning it into flipcards instead.

The materials I used were:

The steps:

This is how my printables look like once completed. All ready to be used by our kiddos during a road trip!

Resources:

** Note: I have disabled the commenting feature on my blog engine thanks to all the spammers who happily spam my blog every day. If you wish to ask me any questions, you can find me at my Facebook page (I'm there almost everyday) or just drop me an email if you wish to maintain some anonymity.

I came across this article which I must definitely share with you guys as I'm very interested to know your thoughts on this. Do note that sharing this does not mean I agree or disagree with it. For your convenience, I have copied the excerpts from the article here:

Children have a sense of self-esteem comparable in strength to that of adults by the time they are five, researchers say. They found that the sense of self began earlier than previously thought. Because self-esteem tends to remain relatively stable across one's lifespan, the study suggests that this important personality trait is already in place before children begin kindergarten.

'Our work provides the earliest glimpse to date of how preschoolers sense their selves,' said lead author Dario Cvencek of the University of Washington. 'We found that as young as 5 years of age self-esteem is established strongly enough to be measured,' said Cvencek, 'and we can measure it using sensitive techniques.'

The new findings, published in the January 2016 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, used a newly developed test to assess implicit self-esteem in more than 200 5-year-old children - the youngest age yet to be measured. 'Some scientists consider preschoolers too young to have developed a positive or negative sense about themselves.

'Our findings suggest that self-esteem, feeling good or bad about yourself, is fundamental,' said co-author, Andrew Meltzoff, co-director of I-LABS. 'It is a social mindset children bring to school with them, not something they develop in school.' Meltzoff continued: 'What aspects of parent-child interaction promote and nurture preschool self-esteem? That's the essential question.'We hope we can find out by studying even younger children.'

Until now no measurement tool has been able to detect self-esteem in preschool-aged children. This is because existing self-esteem tests require the cognitive or verbal sophistication to talk about a concept like 'self' when asked probing questions by adult experimenters.

'Preschoolers can give verbal reports of what they're good at as long as it is about a narrow, concrete skill, such as 'I'm good at running' or 'I'm good with letters,' but they have difficulties providing reliable verbal answers to questions about whether they are a good or bad person,' Cvencek said. To try a different approach, Cvencek, Meltzoff and co-author Anthony Greenwald created a self-esteem task for preschoolers. Called the Preschool Implicit Association Test (PSIAT), it measures how strongly children feel positively about themselves.

The task for adults works by measuring how quickly people respond to words in different categories.  Taken together, the findings show that self-esteem is not only unexpectedly strong in children this young, but is also systematically related to other fundamental parts of children's personality, such as in-group preferences and gender identity.

'Self-esteem appears to play a critical role in how children form various social identities. Our findings underscore the importance of the first five years as a foundation for life,' Cvencek said.

The researchers are following up with the children in the study to examine whether self-esteem measured in preschool can predict outcomes later in childhood, such as health and success in school. They are also interested in the malleability of children's self-esteem and how it changes with experience.

What do you think?

** Note: I have disabled the commenting feature on my blog engine thanks to all the spammers who happily spam my blog every day. If you wish to ask me any questions, you can find me at my Facebook page (I'm there almost everyday) or just drop me an email if you wish to maintain some anonymity.