Here’s a great collection of outside / backyard games, if your kids are getting bored being pent up inside this summer.
👉 20 of the Best Backyard Games for Kids and How to Play Them
Red Light, Green Light sounds fun for one.
Tag: Parenting
Let’s Stop Saying No All the Time and Try a Yes Day Instead
Sometimes we parents think it’s our job to so “no” all the time. While there are certainly times when we must so “no” — hard rules, boundaries, safety — we often so “no” for the wrong reasons.
For example, we say no because the kids is just being loud or messy. Or when saying “yes” means extra work for us such as letting the kid help us with dinner.
Often “no” is our answer when we don’t have the time, energy, or patience to clean up messes or tend to bumps and scrapes.
According to this article, toddlers hear “no” an average of 400 times a day 😳, so “no” stops having real power or meaning to them.
👉 Let’s Stop Saying No All the Time and Try a Yes Day Instead
This article suggests a “yes” day and stop saying “no” out of reflex.
In doing so, our kids might be more responsive, obedient, and accommodating. We might even find out that saying yes can be fun—for the whole family.
Don’t Give Up—How to Get Your Kids to Do Chores
I have to admit, I’ve been slacking on giving my kids chores. It’s just basics – mostly cleaning up after themselves, emphasizing individual responsibility.
Without responsibilities, how will our kids grow up?
But this great article from Let Grow has me thinking about chores — reframed as “responsibilities” — as part of helping the family and growing your kid’s sense of community and self-confidence.
👉 Don’t Give Up—How to Get Your Kids to Do Chores
This article explains the benefits to your kids having chores responsibilities to do around the house. It also has practical tips for making these responsibilities work for everyone.
I’ve never been so inspired about chores! 😀
Let’s Stop Telling Our Kids to Be Careful All the Time
I love this post from Let Grow. It’s calling out how pointless and even damaging it is to just say “Be careful!” to your kids all the time. It’s a really interesting read.
👉 Let’s Stop Telling Our Kids to Be Careful All the Time
Of course we all want our kids to be safe. But the point here is that we should teach them specifically how to identify and deal with risk instead of a hand waving “Be careful!”, which only indices fear and is mainly meant to make the parents feel better.
As parents, we should be guiding our kids through risk. Our job is to make them strong, independent, smart people. That means helping our kids recognize, evaluate, and manage different kinds of risk. 💪🏻 How about empowering them by asking them, “What’s your exit strategy?” instead of vaguely scaring them with “Be careful!”.
Using phrases that empower our confident kids to manage risk on their own not only gives them important information about their environment, but it also teaches them that they’re capable of doing it.
They even have a poster of things to say instead of “Be careful!”.
Reasons Not to Monitor Your Kids’ Screen Time
Parents can be so obsessed with worrying about the dangers of screens that they fail to notice the massive, overwhelming, obvious benefits of the internet.
I’m not a fan of limiting my kids’ screen time for the following reasons:
- Screen time is not inherently “bad”. So much of screen time is deeply creative and engaging. Lumping all screen time together as all the same just doesn’t logically make sense. Winning Monument Valley or posting an original edit on Instagram help the brain practice solving problems and build social skills; they are not the same as passively watching South Park for the 40th time.
- Limiting screen time is impractical, and it undermines real rules. Do you really want to have a timer on hand and keep track of exactly how ling you kid has been on screens all day? Can you even really do that consistently? It’s pretty likely that your kid goes over time on their screen time regularly and is learning that rules aren’t enforced and aren’t important.
- It shows a lack of trust. Just like offline life, at the end of the day you need to show and develop trust with your kid. Spying on them and imposing arbitrary rules only undermines those ideas.
Instead of monitoring screen time, I prefer to just make sure my kids meet all their responsibilities (homework, eating dinner with the family, get outside at least a little) and then use as much screen time as they want.
So I was happy to come across this post to remind me that I’m not crazy.
👉 Here’s Why I Don’t Limit Screen Time or Monitor My Child’s Phone
There’s no surer way of telling your children you don’t trust them and don’t respect their personal boundaries than stalking them online.
LetGrow – “Always helping our kids isn’t always helping them”
As a parent, I love Let Grow. They are saying that we need to do less for our kids. Step back, trust your kids, and let them figure some stuff out on their own. They will gain skills, true confidence, and inner strength. 💪🏻
Doing a little less for our kids is not negligent or lazy. It is a vote of confidence in them
👉 Let Grow
The winners in business, love, and life are comfortable with a bit of risk, and able to deal with disappointment (even the lack of a trophy). They listen, argue, work things out. They are open to change. They pivot.
How to Raise Successful Kids
As a parent of two girls. this article from a mom who raised three very successful and (ostensibly) happy women immediately caught my eye. She lists five simple parenting principles. To my relief, they all fit nicely with my own ideas on raising my kids. ☺️
trust, respect, independence, collaboration, kindness
These all sound obvious. But many parents routinely (and with the best intentions) break the trust and undermine the respect and independence of their kids.
(It’s always fascinated me how baby talk, coddling, and strict discipline all go hand in hand. And none of these are on this list for making a strong, kind, happy adult.)
You may not care what I think as a parent, but I do suggest considering the ideas of this woman who raised two CEOs and a doctor. Her emphasis is big on kindness and independence and never about “getting ahead.”
What I wanted more than anything was to make them first into independent children and then into empowered, independent adults. I figured that if they could think on their own and make sound decisions, they could face any challenges that came their way.
…
What I’m offering… is an antidote to our parenting and teaching problems, a way to fight against the anxiety, discipline problems, power struggles, peer pressure and fear of technology that cloud our judgment and harm our children.
Esther Wojcicki
How Parents Are Robbing Their Children of Adulthood
Okay, this stuff drives me crazy. I’m glad to see an article about it.
Here’s the perfect quote to summarize the idea:
The point is to prepare the kid for the road, instead of preparing the road for the kid.
Via Apple News.
Why It’s Better to Find Success Later in Life
👉 Why It’s Better to Find Success Later in Life
Nothing super groundbreaking in this article, but it’s a good refresher. Basically, you earn a certain amount of success, happiness, and confidence by failing and bouncing back over time.
This is a lot of how I look at parenting (hopefully) resilient kids…
…the best way to gain strength is by falling and continually bouncing back, practicing, working around obstacles. But this flexibility is critical to long-term success.
Fortunately, it’s easy to struggle. 😉 This makes me think of George Washington, who failed a lot. Like, he was pretty bad for quite a while before he became amazing.
You don’t need to go out of your way to struggle and stumble, because it will happen naturally to most of us. And many a great has failed before they bloomed.
