Category: Parenting

As a parent, you know how important it is to meet the basic needs of your children. Most parents understand the benefits of proper nutrition and exercise for their kids. But, when it comes to making sure kids get enough sleep, there can be struggles.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, school-age children should get anywhere from 9-11 hours of sleep each night. Unfortunately, studies have shown that many children only get around 7-8 hours each night, and sometimes even less.

There are a variety of factors that can play into your child’s sleep health, but technology is a big one.

We live in a digital device society, and kids are getting smartphones and tablets in their hands very early on. While that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s important to set boundaries when it comes to technology – especially when it comes to getting better sleep.

So, what’s the real issue with tech and sleep? If your child is having trouble getting to bed each night, what can you do to establish healthy boundaries between them and their devices? Let’s look at why your child needs to get more sleep, how technology could be hindering it, and how you can help.

Why Sleep is Important for Kids

You’ve probably heard that sleep is important for healthy growth. If your kids have had trouble sleeping for a while, you may have even said that as an incentive for them to get some shut-eye. But, making sure your children get enough sleep is crucial for so many different reasons beyond basic growth and development.

Not getting enough sleep, even as a child, can lead to problems like:

• High blood pressure
• Obesity
• Diabetes
• Increased risk of depression

Additionally, a lack of sleep can impact your child’s quality of life and how they get through each day. They might start to struggle in school, perform poorly in extracurricular activities, and even develop issues in their relationships. Their behaviors and attitude can change at home, especially if their mental health becomes impacted.

So, while sleep is vital for physical development and healthy functioning, it’s just as important for their mental and cognitive states.

How Technology Can Create Poor Sleep Hygiene

What does technology really have to do with kids not getting enough sleep? First, it’s been proven that most digital devices emit something called blue light. Blue light causes the body to produce less melatonin – a useful hormone that helps you feel drowsy. Exposure to blue light at night can distort the body’s natural circadian rhythms – the signals in the brain that tell your body when it’s time to be asleep and awake.

When your child’s circadian rhythms get out of sync, they’ll have a harder time falling asleep at night. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make them any less tired. Their body still needs sleep. So, they might start napping during the day or even falling asleep when they shouldn’t. That can create a vicious cycle. If they take a nap during the day, they’re less likely to sleep at night, throwing off those rhythms even more.

Digital devices can also stimulate your child’s brain, especially if they’re playing games or watching videos. That makes it even harder for them to get into a relaxed state and fall asleep. So, while many kids might have their phones or tablets by their bedside, it’s likely time to set boundaries to preserve their sleep hygiene.

What You Can Do

Not sure how to set those boundaries? It may not be easy, especially if your child is used to having their device(s) before bed. One of the best ways to make a change is to develop a routine with your child. That should start with them going to bed around the same time each night.

Part of the routine should include something you can do to replace technology. One idea is to try mindfulness with your child. When done correctly, it can reduce stress levels and bring them into a calmer state of mind. Especially if your child already practices it at school, you can practice mindfulness at home in a variety of ways, including:

• Guided meditation
• Breathing exercises
• Listening
• Journaling
• Gratitude practicing

Your main goal should be to establish an environment of relaxation and let your child know that their bed is for sleeping, not for scrolling through Instagram. As part of their routine, cut off electronic devices two hours before bedtime. This will give your child’s mind and body a chance to adjust and for the blue light to “wear off,” so their natural circadian rhythms won’t be disrupted.

Because we live in a world saturated with technology, these boundaries are difficult but necessary. Now that you know the importance of healthy sleep for your child, and what technology can do, try to implement a better routine and get them back in sync with healthy sleep habits. Talk to your kids about why these particular boundaries are important. When they have a better understanding and know the benefits of healthy sleep, they’re less likely to argue against the limits you’re putting in place.

We all want our kids to be successful in life. Teaching them to have a rewarding career that keeps them financially secure is a great goal. But to succeed, children need to learn career-building skills.

As parents, we can help our kids learn what they need for the future. Before your child is a graduate seeking a university options, that teaching can begin as early as pre-school.

First, though, we need to understand what skills can help them thrive.

Two Kinds Of Skills Your Kids Need

When we think of job skills, we often think of job-related skill sets, or hard skills. Doctors, for example, need to be well-versed in human anatomy and medicine.

It’s equally important today to have soft skills that appeal to employers. These are the intangible skills necessary to succeed in any job, such as a good bedside manner. They are more akin to positive character traits.

There are several soft skills that employers seek in a candidate. These include curiosity, creativity, a strong work ethic, and problem-solving abilities.

The groundwork for both hard and soft skills begins before they even get to school.

Preschoolers: Laying the Foundation

Little kids have an innate curiosity about the world. You can nurture this trait by helping them to explore jobs that make the world go round. Expose your children to a wide variety of experiences at this age:

• Let them dress up for different careers: firefighter, doctor or nurse, scientist.
• Visit educational or immersive places like museums, nature hikes, or kid-centered science centers.
• Let them watch or read age-appropriate programming and books that focus on different careers to discover their interests and gifts.

You can also teach soft skills:

• Adaptability: Ensure your children can handle a break in their daily routines. Disrupt the schedule from time to time to teach them this skill.
• Creativity: This can be as simple as arts and crafts! Try to find kid workshops outside the home as well as at-home activities.
• Teamwork: Teach your children to work together for chores or while playing games.

Preschoolers may not yet get a good handle on soft skills. Their early school years will help build those skills.

Elementary School: Where Soft Skills Grow

As children interact more with their peers, desired soft skill traits can flourish. Schools that foster the best of these skills help students mature. For example, if a school awards students for kindness, children are encouraged to help others and develop leadership talents.

Hopefully, your child’s school fosters relationships and teamwork in addition to providing academics. If you are worried about this, get your child involved in extracurricular activities. These can help him build team skills, dedication, leadership, respect for others, and more.

At this age, children can learn more about the hard skills needed for a particular career path. Ask them frequently about their desired future career. Help them to discover in-depth what is involved in pursuing that field.

Middle School: Career Planning Begins

By now, you may be able to see areas where your child shines academically. This is the best time to help your child discover his career path. Take a good look at grades, teacher comments, extracurricular activities, and anything that gets your child excited.

For example, if your child gets steady high grades in math or science, she may want to prepare for a job in science, tech, engineering, or math. These STEM careers are some of the fastest-growing fields for college graduates today. Many of these jobs pay well too.

While kids under 14 are often too young to work, some can do volunteer work. Even if this is not in their field, it will give them a good background in hands-on work. All of these things looks good on a resume!

Middle schoolers can also look at specialized high schools that focus on their desired field. Students can study resume examples that suit the industry they are interested in.  They can also begin their college search to prepare for high school goals that get future applications noticed.

High School: Skills That Land The Job

Some teachers will tell you that the entire goal of high school is to prepare you to work in the real world. No doubt the most intense preparation begins at this level.

Your teen should be ready for their first job search, and you can assist them. Help them write their first resume for a job that requires little to no experience (stock clerk, YMCA lifeguard). What do you include in a resume? Important items include:

• Key skills, especially soft skills which might be the bulk of their resume.
• Action verbs that highlight what they have achieved so far.
• The goal of a resume is to stand out in the hiring manager’s mind. Teach your teens to share their personality and their unique talents in a serious, professional manner.

Help your teenager to create relationships outside of school so they can build a network full of opportunities. Networking can also provide them opportunities such as job shadowing, giving them a good idea of what a job entails beyond the required hard skills.

For example, if your teen wants to become a nurse, there is a clear educational path but several key soft attributes they need as well. Teens can study a cover letter for nursing to learn what these skills are while learning how to write such a letter.

A Final Note for Kids

Setting Realistic Goals for a Your Future

For many people, a brand new year means a fresh start. For others, there is anticipation about upcoming events, such as another birthday or a special holiday trip. As one year rolls into the next, you may be looking for clues as to what the future holds. Here are 100% genuine true predictions you can count on.

1. You will hear or read something that will hurt your feelings.

Unfortunately, this is a fact of life. Remember that everyone sees the world differently and everyone has a different opinion. And just because you hear or read something that stings you, the commenter might not have meant anything mean.

The key is to not take things too personally.  Expect that people will disappoint you from time to time. Humans make mistakes and often do not intend to hurt others.

2. You will try to reach a goal and fail.

Winning at anything means taking steps along the way and stumbling. Every time you fail at reaching a goal, you get close to actually getting there.

Many famous and successful people have said that there is no success without failure. It is an essential stepping stone to greater things as long as you keep on trying.

3. You will try to reach a goal and succeed.

It might be a small goal, like getting a great mark on a pop quiz or finally being able to make a super-serious friend laugh at one of your jokes.

Every time you try to do something, it makes you stronger and more confident. Most people make lists of huge, towering resolutions and ultimately break them before the year has even started. Make lists of small goals and soon you will find bigger goals easier to tackle.

4. Something you do will have a major effect on your life.

It could be a friend that you make. It could be some nice act you perform for another person that changes how you feel about yourself. It could be a new skill you learn or an achievement in school or online eLearning.

You might not even know that this “thing” is important until years later. Still, this year will make a difference for years to come. Think about that when you get up each morning.

5. One of your idols will do or say something idiotic.

Yup. That’s a guarantee. As a matter of fact, all of us will do or say something idiotic in the future.

It could be in person or online, but every single living human being will say or do or post something that will look silly to others. That’s why everyone of us should expect to say, “I’m sorry,” or “I’ve made a mistake” at least once.

6. You will make at least one decision between right and wrong.

Doing the right thing in the face of adversity is never easy. You may be approached to cheat on a test or be tempted to ignore a good friend because of peer pressure.

You may see someone being bullied and want to help them but be faced with fear of what will happen if you do.  Accept that you will make mistakes like every other human on the planet.   The important thing is to decide now the kind of person you want to be and surround yourself with the type of people that will help you “be that person”.

7. You will work and you will play – and you can have fun doing both.

A good life is about balance.  All play and no work brings discontentment.  We all need goads to strive for.  All work and no play will stress you out and is not healthy.  Plan now to make sure there is balance in your life… between sports and school, between family and friends and even your own “alone time”.

The next year is going to be an interesting one. The person you are when it begins is not the person you will be when you celebrate the next new year.

Life for a child is about making small changes with the help of your parents.  All those changes add up to exciting growth to ensure you are read to choose a lifelong career when the time comes.  In the meantime, enjoy the changes in your life and around the world.

Alphabet, or letter recognition, is a foundational skill that is essential for learning to read and write. Children with a solid grasp of letter recognition can identify both upper and lowercase letters, in different contexts, in any order.  Letter recognition goes beyond singing the “ABCs,” which only teaches children to recite the alphabet from memory.

To be proficient with letter recognition, children also need to be able to distinguish the physical characteristics of each letter.  Letter recognition can begin at a very young age, with reading babies and toddlers alphabet books.

There are tremendous benefits to reading aloud to children, and books about the alphabet are no exception. Alphabet books provide children with exposure to letter names and their appearance. There are board books, storybooks, and books written in rhyme to choose from.

After your new baby arrives at home, education on letters and words is the last thing on your mind, even though their learning journey as already begun.  As children get older, they may begin recognizing some letters of personal significance, beginning with the letters in their name.

It is not uncommon for children to recognize the first letter in their name and later, to begin identifying others. This is a great starting point for teaching letter recognition. Take advantage of teachable moments to point out letters in the environment. For example, show your child how the letter on the sign is the same as the letter in her name.

Young children can benefit from tactile ways to interact with letters. One way to provide these opportunities is through the use of alphabet puzzles. In addition to the letters, alphabet puzzles often use pictures to represent the sound each letter makes. This is a great way for children to start associating letters with a picture, which can act as a cue to its sound.

Another tactile way for children to use letters is through the use of playdough. They can create the letters, either on their own, or with the help of a playdough mat that shows the outline of each letter.

Alphabet printables provide many different ways for children to work with letters. Choose from activities like mazes, spinners, tracing sheets, letter hunts, and flip books. These activities help children learn the letter names, distinguish their physical characteristics, and begin learning the sound each letter makes.

It can be helpful to have the alphabet displayed for children to refer to. This can be a premade alphabet chart or cards that you purchase from a store. Typically, they show the correct formation of each letter along with a picture that represents the letter sound. Alternatively, you can involve children in the creation of alphabet cards and have them choose pictures or items that represent each letter sound.

Having them choose the pictures can make the activity more meaningful and help them remember the sounds more easily. For example, children may choose to associate the letter “f” with a frog. The hope is that when they see the letter “f” in another context, they will think of the frog and be cued to the correct sound an”f” makes.

When focusing on letter recognition, it is important for children to learn both the upper- and lowercase letters of the alphabet. In addition to the activities outlined above, matching provides another way for children to see the physical differences between upper- and lowercase letters. Provide them with opportunities to use materials like magnetic letters, letter tiles, stamps, or stickers to match the upper- and lowercase letters. It can be overwhelming to work with the entire alphabet, so begin with a few known letters and add in one or two new ones.

There are lots of ways to teach children the letters of the alphabet. Choose different activities to keep them engaged and provide lots of encouragement as they begin the exciting journey of becoming a reader!

Do Babies Always Respond to Their Name?

The road to being a stepparent is not an easy one. You will face many challenges. These include but are not limited to family dynamic changes, scheduling conflicts, child support payments, and compromising with the exs’. Connecting with your stepchildren is the hardest. Even more, when you are being a stepparent to school-aged children.

Challenges of Being A Stepparent to School-Aged Children:

 Divorce does not affect adults alone. Children too, bear the brunt of dissolving and forming new families. They have to come to terms with the absence of a parent, changes in routines, living arrangements, and many more. And these changes are perceived differently by children at different ages.

Research states that children between the ages of 9-15 years have more trouble adjusting to their new step parenting situation. They were more likely to feel sad, rejected, and betrayed by their parents for divorcing. They might also worry about their:

• Living environment: In event of changes to living arrangements, or the sale of the family home, children would have to adjust to being in a new environment. They would be away from the comfort of their home and will find it difficult to accept a place shared with you, their stepparent, as their own.
• Responsibilities and routines: Every family has designated roles and responsibilities for each family member, as well as a routine they follow. This structure is disrupted when you blend or form new families.
• Addressing stepparents: They will have difficulty deciding on how to address you. Unlike toddlers or preschoolers, school-aged children and older teens may be uncomfortable addressing you as ‘mom/dad.’ This hesitancy can stem from their anger or resentment towards you, or to avoid being disloyal to their bio-parent.

In fact, they would be less accepting of their step-parents, blaming them for their parents’ breakup or for being an obstacle to their reunion.

As a stepparent to school-aged children, you will find yourself constantly battling:

• Anger and resentment of your place in the new family. The child may never consider you a figure of authority and may try to undermine your authority over them.
• Their rejection of your attempts to build a family or connect with them.

As stepparents to school-aged children, be prepared to hear, ‘You’re not my parent!” a lot.

Stepparents to School-Aged Children: Red Flags:

 The first step to being awesome stepparents to school-aged children is to be aware of your challenges and to understand the child. It can help you take measures to build a nurturing and positive relationship with them.

We’ve understood the challenges, now let’s learn about some potential red flags that can be your stepchild’s cry for help in adjusting to the new situation. These include:

• A sudden decline in academic performance.
• Disinterest and passive participation in social and extracurricular activities.
• Sudden mood fluctuations, between sadness, and anger.
• Being hostile and defensive with both you and their bio-parents.

How to be a stepparent to school-aged children?

Here are some suggestions to help you build a positive relationship with your step kids:

Be realistic: You can wish for things to be perfect, but chances are it won’t be. Be realistic and accept that things might proceed slowly. Understand and accept your challenges, and commit to connecting with each child. With time and effort, they will learn to accept, and even if not love, will learn to like you.

Give space: It’s easier to smoothen things with the younger ones. School-aged children, not so much. This is why it’s important to give kids space to acclimatize to the new changes, including you. Instead of pushing the child to form a relationship with you, give them the reins, allowing them to set the pace of the connection. This is especially true when children are adjusting to the dynamics of co-parenting.

Communicate: Communication includes both talking and listening. Be transparent, open, and share your thoughts and feelings. This will give kids a chance to understand you and will help you build a rapport with them. Over time, they may feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and lives with you.

Include kids in all family discussions. It will allow them to share their thoughts and feedback, as all decisions impact them too. It can also help makes them feel included as a part of the new family.

Be original: Try not to take the place of their bio-parents. Talk to your step kids and help them understand that you are not looking to replace or compete with their parents. You can be their friend, or confidante, or play any role depending on the child’s needs.

Let Your Actions Talk: Help kids understand that you are committed to them and love them. Your actions can help them feel secure and confident in you. Follow through your promises, and ensure that you are there for the family as required, pickup-drop off, at school recitals and sports matches. It will always be the little actions that count.

Set Boundaries: Every family has its set of do’s and don’ts with regards to chores, routines, and behavior. You should set yours too. Collaborate with the children to decide on rules acceptable to all. Remind kids that as a family, you’re all bound to follow the rules formed and that some behaviors will not be accepted.

Find Interests: Find a common ground and share your love for it with your step kids. Be it sports, arts, cooking, or even crafts, share your love for the same to help them maintain a positive attitude. While building your relationship, remember to be genuine in your attempts as kids are more perceptive than we give them credit.

Connect with the bio-parent: Set aside your differences and compromise with the parent for your stepchild’s greater good. You all want what is best for the children, so why not work on it together? Be it for schedules, routines, or disciplinary methods, try to communicate and set consistent rules and boundaries to give each child more stability and to help them grow confidently.

Building a blended family is never too difficult. Being a stepparent to school-aged children is no different from being a parent. It both takes your time, effort, and unconditional love. And slowly, but surely, you will become friends with your step kids.

Author: Sarah Joseph:  An Occupational therapist, freelance content writer, and more importantly a stay-at-home mom, Sarah, like all other parents juggles her many roles. Her passion for writing combined with her professional expertise as an Occupational therapist (working with children with special needs) has helped her craft content specific to child health, wellness, and learning skills. At present, Sarah alternates her time between raising her two young children, and writing about what she knows best- children!

Additional Resources:

• Tips for establishing internet safety while co parenting.
• How you can boost your child’s academic success.