Tag Archive for: Child Development

Steps to Demonstrate a Positive Fatherhood Model

We can all demonstrate a healthy and responsible fatherhood model for our community. Pass this information along to friends, family, co-workers and neighbors.

With friends and in your own family…

  • Participate in marriage and family enrichment programs and encourage friends to do it, too.
  • Honor the covenant of marriage and be an accountability partner for fellow married friends.
  • Help mothers to be supportive of fathers’ involvement with their children, and ask your wife how you can be more involved with your own children.

If you’re an employer…

  • Create personnel policies and work environments that respect and encourage the commitment of fathers, and that enable parents to be more involved with their children.
  • Research the effects of relocating families and find ways to make the transition as smooth as possible for employees who must move.

If you’re a civic leader, elected official or community organizer…

  • Promote community organizations that model fatherhood and male responsibility.
  • Strive to develop neighborhoods that are stable and supportive of family life.

If you’re a religious leader or organizer…

  • Challenge fathers to assume moral and spiritual responsibilities.
  • Offer a broad program of teaching, supporting, counseling and training fathers in their vital role.
  • Encourage and recognize involved fathers, and provide opportunities for men to learn from each other.

If you’re a mental healthcare worker, healthcare or a family life educator…

  • Begin with a view in favor of fatherhood within the context of a marriage relationship.
  • Guide fathers to both accept and appreciate their unique roles within the family.
  • Provide continuing education on fatherhood and its responsibilities.

If you’re a family law attorney or judge…

  • Promote accountability of all fathers for each of their children.
  • Reassess current trends in family law and be an advocate for responsible fathering.

If you’re an educator or childcare provider…

  • Encourage fathers’ involvement in the classroom and invite fathers or father figures to participate in school activities.
  • Educate boys and young men concerning their potential influence as fathers.
  • Train staff about the father’s crucial role in a child’s developmental growth.

If you work in media or journalism…

  • Promote articles, research and organizations that address and offer solutions to fathering issues.
  • Discourage advertisements or programming that reflects irresponsible fathering practices.

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My Kid Lies and I Don’t Know What to Do About It

Does your kid lie and you don’t know what to do about it? Here’s a classic example. “You tell your parents that you’re spending the night at my house and I’ll tell my parents that I am spending the night at yours and then we both can go to the party.” Except the parents ran into each other at the store. You are so busted!

How do you handle lying in your family?

It drives me crazy when my kids lie to me. Then one day I really tried to look at things from their perspective and ask myself, “Why would they lie to me?”

Even little kids are smart enough to want to avoid consequences or even just letting their parents down. Put yourself in your kids’ shoes- they know that they are going to get in trouble for getting into the cookies, leaving a mess in the kitchen, or breaking whatever. So they choose what they perceive to be the easier path. So, my wife and I tried to make telling the truth the easier path.

When our kids were little, they knew that telling the truth, especially a hard truth, would directly impact their punishment. Sometimes the truth nullified the punishment altogether. “Thank you for telling me the truth about breaking the lamp. Remember, you were told not to horse around in the living room.” And that was it. “Thanks for telling me the truth about eating those cookies. You’re done with sweets for the night.” And we’re moving on. Reward the behavior that you want to get more of. Cultivating honesty in our kids was way more important than finding out who got into the cookies or made the mess in the kitchen or broke whatever. Pick your battles. Honesty is worth parenting toward.

So what about when they still choose to lie?

There was a definite flip-side to our approach to honesty. If we caught you lying, that was going to increase your punishment big time. You will be nuked from orbit. Now, it isn’t even about the cookies or the lamp anymore – it’s about the dishonesty.

We wanted to send a message that we know it can be hard to tell the truth and we will reward that difficult choice. We also wanted to send the message that lying was a relationship-destroyer and would have serious consequences. This definitely impacted our kids’ choices. It was not uncommon for our kids to take a minute (or an hour) and come back to us and say, “Okay, look, I lied about ______. This is what really happened…” Thank you! This didn’t mean that there were no consequences for whatever they did, but telling us the truth was always rewarded. Incentivize honesty!

We need to make sure that we are modeling honesty, too. More is caught than taught. Our kids are always watching and listening. Create a culture of honesty when your kids are younger and the stakes are smaller so that as they get older, they are in the habit of telling the truth.

With my older kids, I try not to ask questions that I don’t already know the answer to. They know this. So when I ask, “Hey, where were you last night?” What they hear is, “Ugh. Dad already knows probably.”

We have made telling the truth a family imperative. Lying shreds the fabric of trust in relationships. I tell my kids, “If I can’t trust you, your life is gonna be very dull.”

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The Scars of Youth and Fortnite

They say that our scars are our stories. If this is true, then Jude, my 12-year-old son, now has this story to tell: “I was playing Fortnite, and I tried this new exploit I saw in a YouTube video, and it worked! I was so excited, I jumped off my bed and busted my lip on the corner of a shelf and had to go to the emergency room and get stitches.” That’s right, we had a video game injury in my house today.

Something about my son getting hurt playing video games made me stop and think. It wasn’t just what he was doing when he got hurt, but I was bothered by what he wasn’t doing. He didn’t get hurt jumping his bike off a homemade ramp, or falling out of a treehouse he was building, or even the ridiculous rock fights that characterized my youth. He got hurt in his bedroom all by himself, playing Fortnite…

Boyhood has changed.

It’s the confluence of two things I’ve observed increasingly in the past few years. First, there seems to be real societal pressure to tame boys – to keep them from playing rough, to rein in their impulse to explore, their need to test themselves against the heights of a tall tree, or even to rise to the challenge of a mouthy friend. We don’t let them wrestle or climb or ride off on their bikes, but we neuter any hint of wildness. We tell them to get down, to settle down, sit down and sit still.

Secondly, because of technology like video games, tablets, and smartphones, our kids are perfectly fine with sitting down and sitting still inside where it is safe and secure. Boys fire up a game console, put on their headset, turn on their flatscreen and tune out the whole wild world. They don’t even know what they’re missing.

Now the only world that boys explore is digital.

Imagination is no longer required – just good Wi-Fi. The challenges of boyhood today mainly involve leveling up. Boys engage their rivals in hand to controller combat. And because the risks aren’t real, neither are the rewards. There may be fewer trips to the emergency room but there are less adventures and far fewer stories to tell.

Scars represent life lived. My son will have a Fortnite scar going forward. I suppose there are worse ways to get a scar, but there are also so many better ways.

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Preparing Kids for Responsibility

Preparing your kids for responsibility can be a daunting task. Kay Wyma, mother of five, had a revelation one day while taking her kids to school that prompted some dramatic changes at home and ultimately led her to write Cleaning House: A Mom’s 12-Month Experiment to Rid Her Home of Youth Entitlement.

“My teenage son asked me what kind of car I thought he would look best in, a Porsche, Lexus or Maserati,” says Wyma. “Deciding on the Porsche, he said he planned to get one when he turned 16. Fighting back nausea, I’m thinking, ‘What planet are you on and how do you plan to pay for it?’ All the talks about ‘materialism and how things don’t make you happy’ clearly hadn’t penetrated his brain.”

On the way home, Wyma called her friend to vent and get reassurance that the self-centered teenage stage doesn’t last forever. Wyma realized mid-discussion that maybe she was contributing to her kids’ self-centeredness.

“My kids are great. But I wondered if what we were doing was helping prepare them for the real world,” Wyma says.

“I made their beds, picked up their rooms, taxied them here and there, fixed their meals, and showered them with accolades but rarely gave them the chance to confirm the substance of that praise. My words said one thing, but my actions said, ‘I’ll do it for you because I can do it better or faster than you can.’ I realized this was a major disservice to our children. Instead of preparing them to launch, we are creating a sense of dependence on us as parents.”

After seeking wisdom from women with adult children, Wyma came up with 12 skills for her children to learn before they fly the coop. Here is a sample of what’s on the list:

  • Make a bed and maintain an orderly room;
  • Cook and clean a kitchen;
  • Do yard work;
  • Clean a bathroom;
  • Do laundry;
  • Run errands; and
  • Act mannerly.

“After deciding on the 12 skills, we called a family meeting and we told the kids that things were going to be different,” Wyma says. “We started with their rooms. They had to make their beds before they went to school and pick stuff up from the floor. We got the usual whining and complaining, but I was actually surprised at how quickly they started doing what we asked.”

To get the ball rolling, Wyma added an incentive. She put 31 dollar bills in a jar for each child.

They could get an additional dollar each day they did what they were supposed to or have one taken away. Most of the kids chose to have one taken away if they didn’t follow through on their tasks. Interestingly, she rarely had to take bills out of the jar. But the child who chose to have money put in the jar could have cared less.

“I think people forget how exciting it is to equip your kids to tap into the opportunities that come to them,” Wyma says. “If I am always doing everything, they don’t own anything nor do they have the opportunity to be challenged and build confidence. Our children are in a very different place than they were two years ago when we started this experiment. I think we would all agree things have changed for the better.”

Looking for more resources? Watch this episode of JulieB TV for an in-depth look on this topic!

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Parenting Through Fortnite

I can always tell when my kids are in a Fortnite Battle Royale match by the cheering or jeering I hear blaring from their rooms. I might be hearing the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat, but it is loud and enthusiastic. If you have a child who plays video games, they are probably playing Fortnite, too, (or soon will be) as the Fortnite craze shows no signs of slowing down.

When it comes to video games I typically have two concerns.

Is this particular game and its content something I want my child playing, and then more generally, how much time (and money) should my child spend playing video games? It’s worth noting that good, caring, involved parents can come to different conclusions – and that’s okay.

As far as content goes, Fortnite, put out by Epic Games, has been rated for 11 year olds and up. The most popular game mode is Battle Royale, which involves up to 100 online players fighting to the death to be the last player standing on an island with various structures and topography. Eliminating the other 99 players involves weapons and violence, but I would describe it as cartoon violence as opposed to bloody, realistic violence.

One thing I really like about Fortnite is that it requires creativity to be successful, not just a trigger finger. Quickly building and manipulating the environment to gain an advantage is an essential part of gameplay. Fortnite is a combination of Minecraft and shooter games with several clever twists thrown in that are genuinely fun.

(If you are concerned about the content of any video game, head to YouTube and watch a few gameplay videos that players have uploaded.)

This brings us back to the general question of how much time we want our kids spending with video games – especially since games like Fortnite can quickly become obsessions.

Parents approach this in a variety of ways. During the school year, some parents allow a set amount of time each week and/or only allow gaming on weekends. Hopefully your family has some tech-free times set aside for reading and playing outside, not to mention structured time set aside for homework and chores. Gaming time might vary during holiday and summer breaks.

Make whatever the latest video game craze is work for you! Parents can leverage video games in many creative ways. For example, I try to get a ton of extra work done around my house so the kids can earn money for in-game purchases. My child’s behavior and attitude may earn them more or less playing time. And here’s one of my personal favorites as a former English teacher: “I’ll match your reading time with Fortnite time minute for minute!”

Perhaps the absolute best leveraging of your child’s Fortnite obsession is to use it to spend time together, either joining in or watching them play. Game on!

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Parenting 101

Time for parenting 101! When David and Victoria Beckham were criticized by parenting experts for allowing their 4-year-old daughter to have a pacifier, David fought back. He took to social media to set the record straight.

“Why do people feel they have the right to criticize a parent about their own children without having any facts?? Everybody who has children knows that when they aren’t feeling well or have a fever you do what comforts them best and most of the time it’s a pacifier so those who criticize think twice about what you say about other people’s children because actually you have no right to criticize me as a parent,” said Beckham.

His response garnered over 600,000 likes on Instagram and more than 23,000 comments. Most of the comments encouraged him in his efforts to be a great dad.

Isn’t it interesting how people can take a snapshot in time and make assumptions that may or may not be correct?

The Irreducible Needs of Children: What Every Child Must Have to Grow, Learn, and Flourish,a parenting book by pediatrician Dr. T. Berry Brazelton and child psychiatrist Dr. Stanley I. Greenspan, lists seven basic needs of children. They are:

  • Nurturing relationships;
  • Physical safety and security;
  • Opportunities based on individual personality;
  • Developmentally appropriate experiences;
  • Rules and expectations;
  • A supportive community and cultural continuity; and
  • Future protection.

Anyone with siblings or children knows that, even when children have the same biological parents, their personalities can be as different as night and day, and their needs are not the same. A parent may not be able to turn their back on one child for a split-second without something happening, where another child entertains himself for lengthy periods of time. One child may be more outgoing than the others. Some struggle with what seems like non-stop ear infections while the others are the picture of health.

Engaged parents know things about their children that other people usually do not.

Have you ever been “that parent” in the mall, watching your child have a meltdown while feeling helpless and beating yourself up inside because you know people are watching and probably judging your parenting skills?

Parenting is complicated. It is easy to sit on the sidelines and judge, but when you are in the throes of it, it just isn’t that simple. There is no one cookie-cutter approach for every single child. Most parents are doing the best they know how to do. Being critical without being privy to the big picture is not helpful unless there is legitimate concern of abuse.

Every human being needs to know they are loved, capable, valued and safe. Children look to their parents and want to know if they love them and believe in them and if they measure up.

How parents express answers to these questions probably will look different depending on the child’s needs. Some may need a pacifier when they don’t feel good, even when they are 4 years old. Others may cross a clear boundary and receive a very loving, firm and needed consequence. From an outsider’s vantage point, it may even seem harsh.

Some parents really do need help with their parenting skills. However, it doesn’t seem like judging them publicly without knowing more details is the answer. Remembering that healthy parenting choices vary depending on the situation, the child and the environment can help foster empathy while avoiding a rush to unfair judgment.

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20 Reasons Your Child Needs You

A father's presence is vital.

A dad’s presence is important. Here are 20 reasons your child needs you:

1.  Lets your child know that you love him/her.

2.  Provides your child with greater financial resources.

3.  Gives your child a positive role model.

4.  Provides your child with emotional support.

5.  Enhances your child’s self-esteem.

6.  Provides your child with guidance and discipline.

7.  Enhances your child’s intellectual development.

8.  Gives your child someone to rough and tumble play with.

9.  Provides your child with someone to talk to when he/she has questions.

10. Increases your child’s chances for academic success.

11. Provides your child with an alternative perspective on life.

12. Lowers your child’s chances for early sexual activity.

13. Lowers your child’s chances for school failure.

14. Lowers your child’s chances for youth suicide*.

15. Lowers your child’s chances for juvenile delinquency.

16. Lowers your child’s chances for adult criminality.

17. Provides your child with a sense of physical and emotional security.

18. Facilitates your child’s moral development.

19. Promotes a healthy gender identity in your child.

20. Helps your child learn important skills.

From Reasons Why Your Child Needs You to be an Active Father by Stephen D. Green, Ph.D., Child Development Specialist, Texas A&M AgriLife

If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, there are a number of websites and organizations with excellent resources for you. HelpGuide is a great place to start, along with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention or 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline – just dial 988.

Looking for more? Check out this episode of JulieB TV on this topic.

*If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, there are a number of websites and organizations with excellent resources for you. HelpGuide is a great place to start, along with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

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Outdoor Family Adventures

When temperatures are extremely hot, it’s hard to think about going outside and doing anything except jumping in a pool—and even that feels like jumping into a big bathtub! It’s a shame—because there are so many fun things to take advantage of, wherever you live. When the temperatures cool off a bit and there are only a few weeks before school starts, it’s the perfect time to plan some end-of-summer outdoor adventures with your family.

According to the National Wildlife Federation, childhood has moved “indoors” over the past two decades. The average American boy or girl spends just four to seven minutes in unstructured outdoor play each day, and more than seven hours each day in front of an electronic screen.

Children are out of shape, tuned out and stressed out because they’re missing something essential to their health and development: connection to the natural world.

An ongoing research project called Child of Our Time follows the growth of 25 children from the time they are born until they become adults. They have documented some interesting findings about children who play outside.

  • One of the benefits of playing outside is that children laugh more. This is good because laughter is a stress reliever and it helps stimulate the immune system.
  • Another benefit of outside play is better health. Researchers found that children who engage in outside play have the potential to have stronger bones and muscles from activities like running and jumping. They also get vitamin D just from being in the sun. When children are active, they are less likely to battle obesity and more likely to do well in school.
  • Additional studies show that children who play outside are more likely to be adventurous and open to new experiences. They tend to be better at making friends and have longer attention spans. Outdoor play fuels the imagination and teaches children how to be resourceful by creating their own entertainment.

What are you waiting for? Put the iPhone down, pull your kids away from their gaming devices and head outdoors for some family adventures.  Experience the benefits an active lifestyle can bring while making some great memories!

If you’re short on ideas, here are a few to get you started:

  • Ride bikes through the park.

  • Visit the zoo.

  • Look up hiking trails near you and set out!

  • If you are brave and your children are old enough, check out a zipline adventure.

  • Grab some cardboard boxes and go sledding down a big, grassy hill.

  • Teach your children how to play kick the can, hopscotch and freeze tag.

  • Get out (or rent) the kayaks or paddleboards and travel down a local river or creek.

  • Create your own Summer Olympics and get all the neighborhood kids and parents involved. Sack races, egg toss, three-legged race and the wheelbarrow race are excellent backyard Olympic events.
  • Take your teens whitewater rafting.
  • Find a bridge, country road or local park and take a leisurely stroll.

Playing outside with your children is not only great exercise, it’s also a fantastic opportunity to bond as a family. If having outdoor family adventures is new for you, your kids may balk at first but once they experience the fun, they won’t want to stop. Are you up for the challenge?

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