Parenting resources

Do you ever wonder what is behind the occasional nasty attitudes expressed by your teenager? Teenagers can make their parents feel pretty badly at times; if they only knew how much their words and actions sometimes hurt us they’d probably stop. Perhaps.

It isn’t a developmental necessity that teenagers be mean to their parents, but enough of them demonstrate this behavior that it not only warrants examination here, it is the topic of frequent discussion among parents. And when young adults look back, they say things like “I’m still apologizing to my mom for how I treated her when I was in high school.”

Why do they act this way? What’s behind this behavior? Here are a couple of reasons.

During adolescence parents fall off the pedestal we once stood on when our kids were young. And that is a developmental necessity. Part of the process that teenagers are experiencing includes separating from parents, a process psychologists call “individuation.” They are coming into their own true – separate – selves. And this includes seeing parents realistically – and that means they see our flaws and short comings as well as our positive attributes.

Smaller children often make that pedestal parents stand on pretty high; think back and you’re sure to remember incidences that surprised you when you realized how you were perceived as infallible, nearly “perfect,” truly “adored.” When teenagers begin to gain a more realistic view of their parents it can actually be scary for them. They can feel vulnerable, angry even, to discover their parents are only human, imperfect like the rest of humanity. Obviously they will learn to cope with this realization, but at an unconscious level it can still be disturbing to them. This can be one cause of their “mean” behavior toward parents.

It will help parents to understand that along with the disappointment in learning adults are flawed, may also come relief as teenagers learn that “perfection” is not a prerequisite for adulthood. Parents can help their

teens through this shift in thinking and this important developmental step by being realistic about their flaws.

Another reason why kids sometimes present challenging attitudes to parents is that they’re testing out ideas. Hopefully, at a deep level, your teen knows that he/she can count on you and you’ll never abandon him/her, no matter what. That makes you, then, the safest person with whom she can express her feeling and thoughts – even ones that are not typically allowed in our culture.

Parents who provide walls and boundaries are not only keeping kids safe, they are providing walls to push against, and push they will! This may not be what the parent intends, but it is often the case, again, because of the inherent “safety” in the relationship. Parents can become, merely because of circumstances, the testing ground teens use to verbalize ideas, attitudes and behavior, sometimes with little regard for our feelings. Mother-daughter relationships, in particular, can exemplify this. One author referred to “mother” as the “standard to which she aspires and struggles against.” So, you see the challenge can be built right into the relationship.

There are many causes for the changing behavior of teenagers, and some of the attitudes they express can hurt parents’ feelings. The more parents understand the underlying causes for what is going on, the more we can properly manage our responses. We certainly don’t need to accept unacceptable behavior, but on the other hand we can help the situation if we are knowledgeable about what might be really behind it.

Sue Blaney

© 2004

Sue Blaney is the author of Please Stop the Rollercoaster! How Parents of Teenagers Can Smooth Out the Ride and Practical Tips for Parents of Young Teens; What You Can Do to Enhance Your Child’s Middle School Years. As a communications professional and the parent of two teenagers, she speaks frequently to parents and schools about parenting issues, improving communications and creating parent discussion groups. Visit our website at http://www.PleaseStoptheRollercoaster.com

As parents, we all want our children to do well at school but are often intimidated by the education system. Often parents can do a lot more then they realise. Always remember that the parent is the first and most powerful teacher of all.

Parental support is crucial to success. With a little extra effort we are able to enrich a child’s learning experience. There are countless fun activities that compliment what they learn at school. Remember the foundation of learning should be in the home.

You can make a difference. It could be as simple as asking your child to help with the weekly shopping, design a card for a friend or read a leaflet for you. Remember a trip out, be it to a museum or the local park, brings new experiences and ideas.

Try to understand how your child learns. How they intake, retain, recall and apply information. There are different techniques that are suited to different people.

An example is the re-capping method. When your child reads something, after three minutes they have forgotten 50%. However if they re-read it again the next day, after a week, one month and three months, then they will retain 90% of the information.

Have lots of books in your home, they will open your child’s mind to new ideas.

Music also harmonises the brain. Try to listen to different types together: pop, jazz, traditional, or classical. Maybe have an occasional sing-song and see if your child can remember the lyrics.

Our children live in a different world to the one we grew up in, and they must be able to succeed in their environment. Education is a tool of empowerment.

Nowadays it is important to monitor your child’s use of computers and other multi-media, but remember

it can also be a powerful learning tool. Again if you work together to find information on the internet or even play games, then the experience is enriched.

As your child grows encourage age-relevant skills and knowledge, and ensure they know that you are supporting them.

An important lesson for your children is financial literacy. Teach them how to budget and explain about targeted advertising and other temptations.

Your child needs to know about self-esteem, self-image and self-knowledge – how you feel about yourself, how you see yourself, what you know about yourself. These things shape us all. We need to enhance how our children feel about themselves, to erase any self-doubt.

If you keep telling a child they are foolish and stupid they will believe that.If you keep telling them that he or she is a genius they will believe that too.

The effects of high self-esteem are very important for a child. They are much healthier and are more motivated to learn. Children spend many hours outside of the home – in schools or out with friends.

Help them understand how their friends affect them. Peer relationship can be negative or extremely positive. Mixing with the right crowd can help a child succeed.

Teach your child to communicate effectively, both verbally and with body language. Simple techniques such as taking a deep breathe and waiting, instead of interrupting or arguing can diffuse many conflict situations.

As parents we must not undermine our children. We must not narrow their scope of opportunities. Young people need to be open to all possibilities.

Look at your child’s life through their eyes. We need to understand their world to understand who they are.”

Written by Jo WildmanA writer, photographer and mother of two based in London, UK.

http://www.keeping-kids-happy.blog.co.uk/

Sometime the most effective training tool in rapidly accelerating the rate of your child’s training is a potty doll. This is drink-and-wet a doll with the internal plumbing that simulates the potty process for your child. Generally, dolls with an internal bladder are the most effective. This enables the youngster to gently press on the dolls tummy to make it pee. In order to get started see below:

WHAT YOU NEED TO BEGIN:

-A potty training doll that wets Potty Dolls Can Be Purchased Here

-A potty chair

“Big kid” underwear (instead of diapers) Lots of liquids for your child and the doll to drink

THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE YOU BEGIN:

Development: The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests waiting until 2 years of age to potty train.

Modeling: You can demonstrate or have the doll demonstrate the process of “going potty.”

Motivation: Find out who your child’s superhero is. The hero will provide the motivation in this process.

POTTY TRAINING INSTRUCTIONS

STEP 1: POTTY TRAINING DOLL THAT WETS

Your child will learn by teaching the potty doll how to go potty. Have your child name the doll and give it something to drink. Then walk the doll to the potty chair with your child.

Pull the doll’s “big kid” underwear down and watch the potty doll go potty together.

STEP 2: CREATE A POTTY PARTY!

When the potty doll successfully goes potty, throw a potty party! Make it a big blowout with party hats, horns and celebrate. Give lots of attention to the doll so that your child understands that going potty is a good thing.

Let your child know that when he/she goes potty, they will have a potty party too. Not only

that, your child gets to call their favorite superhero to tell them what they just did!

STEP 3: NO DIAPERS, BIG KID UNDERWEAR

At the beginning of the process you placed “big kid” underwear on your child’s doll. Now it’s time to take away the diapers and put “big kid” underwear on your child.

STEP 4: DRINK LOTS OF FLUIDS

Give your child plenty of fluids to drink. The sooner he/she has to go potty, the sooner you can begin potty training.

STEP 5: NINE TRIPS TO POTTY WHEN ACCIDENT

Ask your child if he/she needs to go potty. Your child might say no and that’s OK. Because you’ve given your child plenty of fluids, he/she will soon need to go. If your child has an accident in their underwear, don’t scold him/her. You want this to be a positive experience.

Take your child to the potty, pull his/her underwear down, and have your child sit down. Do this nine times. This builds muscle memory and your child will eventually go.

STEP 6: CHILD CALLS SUPERHERO

When your child successfully goes potty, throw him/her a potty party. Most importantly, your child can now call his/her favorite superhero and tell the hero about what they just did! Enlist the help of a friend or relative to play the hero and take the phone call.

When your child has an accident, simply take him/her to the bathroom nine times in a row as you did before. This will continue to build his/her muscle memory. And don’t forget to keep up the positive reinforcement.

Avid Amiri is president and co-owner of Potty Training Solutions, the worlds largest seller of Potty Training Dolls

Most research into children’s friendships shows that those children who are able to form friendships when they start school are happier at school and also learn better.

More significantly, a positive beginning to friendships has long-term implications for social and indirectly academic success.

Developing and maintaining friendships is a dynamic process. Most children experience some type of rejection from their peers throughout childhood. One study found that even popular children were rejected about one quarter of the time when they approached children in school.

Most children recover from such rejection. They move on and form constructive, worthwhile relationships but some children need help.

The results of number of studies indicate that children can be taught friendships skills. The strategies are simple and revolve around teaching children a range of friendly behaviours such as: talking with others while playing, showing an interest in others, smiling, offering help and encouragement when needed, a willingness to share and learning how to enter a game or social situation. It is also useful to teach some children alternatives to fighting and arguing when there is disagreement and conflict within groups.

Gender impacts on the ability to make friends. Professor Miraca Gross from the University of NSW has found that girls are further advanced along the stages of friendship than boys. Her research also indicates that gifted children were further advanced along the continuum of friendship behaviours than their peers. They look for more intimate friendships at a far younger age than their peers. This challenges the perception that only gifted children have poor social skills – it seems that they have a different concept of friendships than those around them.

Children form friendships inside

and outside of school and their regular day settings. It has been noted by some researchers that children who appear to have no friends at school frequently have networks of friends outside school.

It seems that having friends outside school can be quite an insulating factor to teasing and bullying that can occur within the school gate.

Parents often become quite concerned about an apparent lack of friends that a child has compared to a sibling or a friend. One research project indicated that children on average have only two significant friendships at any one time. Anecdotal evidence suggests that seconds frequently have more friends than the elder siblings and only children prefer one-on-one friendships to group relationships.

Generally parents need to do little more than provide social situations for children to build and maintain friendships. Involvement in some activities (but not so many that a child’s life is full), opportunities for visits to friend’s homes and to have friends visit your home and some help making sense some of the less satisfactory social situations a child may encounter are the main fare for parents in this area.

However some coaching on how to make and keep friends may be desirable when children really do have difficulty making and keeping friends.

Michael Grose is Australia’s leading parenting educator. He is the author of six books and gives over 100 presentations a year and appears regularly on television, radio and in print.

For further ideas to help you raise happy children and resilient teenagers visit http://www.parentingideas.com.au . While you are there subscribe to Happy Kids newsletter and receive a free report Seven ways to beat sibling rivalry.

Time devoted the better part of an issue to it. Newsweek featured an article titled “Busy Around the Clock.” Articles with titles like “Whatever Happened to Play?” “Pushing Children Too Hard,” and “Are You Over-Scheduling Your kids?” show up in print media and on the Internet. Books with titles like Hyper-Parenting: Are Your Hurting Your Child by Trying Too Hard? are appearing on bookshelves.

Child development specialist David Elkind writes: “Parents are under more pressure than ever to overschedule their children and have them engage in organized sports and other activities that may be age-inappropriate.” Most agree the practice is today’s status symbol among families. In short, a superkid is a child pressured by parents and by society in general to do too much too soon. It’s a phenomenon in our society in an escalating trend — with no end in sight. It’s a frightening thought.

Writing in the magazine Child Care Information Exchange, Johann Christoph Arnold says: “The pressure to excel is undermining childhood as never before.” He also asks: “Why are we so keen to mold [children] into successful adults, instead of treasuring their genuineness and carefree innocence?”

We have the best intentions, of course. We want our children to be happy; we equate happiness with success. And we fervently believe that success won’t come unless we give our children a head start — a jump on the competition as it were.

But at what cost will all of this “success” come? If children don’t learn to play as children, they aren’t likely to discover its value as adults. And, oh, what a dreary, deadening existence daily life will become. Think about the following questions, really pondering each for a moment:

* If children begin living like adults in childhood, what will there be left to look forward to?

* What’s to ensure they won’t be burned out from all the pushing and pressure before they’ve even reached puberty?

* If we’ve caused them to miss the magic of childhood, how will they ever find the magic necessary to cope with the trials and tribulations of adulthood?

* What will become of the childlike nature adults call on when they need reminding of the delight found in simple things — when they need to bring out the playfulness that makes life worth living?

* What joy will our children find as adults if striving to “succeed” becomes life’s sole purpose?

Childhood is not a dress rehearsal for adulthood! It is a separate, unique, and very special phase of life. And we’re essentially wiping it out of existence in an effort to be sure our children get ahead. But when did we decide that life was one long race? When,

exactly, did life become a competition?

Young children are not internally motivated to succeed; their only motivation comes from the value we place on success. And they don’t want to let us down. As a result, stress is often a principal factor in the life of a superkid. Of course, into every life a little stress must fall. But when it becomes more than a person is capable of handling, it becomes unhealthy. Studies have shown that the brains of stressed preschoolers now look remarkably like the brains of stressed adults, which have excessive levels of adrenaline and cortisol, the chemicals responsible for the body’s fight-or-flight reaction. Young children, who don’t have the vocabulary or understanding to express what they’re feeling, will often act out as a way of coping.

But there’s more than stress involved in pushing children onto the fast track to success before they even understand the concept. For one thing, children aren’t allowed to discover motivation on their own — and motivation is often more important to success than talent. Pushed children never have the opportunity to discover who they are. And they never learn to be at ease with themselves when alone, with time on their hands. Having experienced life “by the clock” — and almost constantly surrounded by others — these kids have never learned the joy of solitude, of having only oneself for company. Not only does this mean they’re unable to practice self-reflection, but they’re also unable to simply be.

Not long ago, in an attempt to help adults realize the folly of all work and no play, a saying began appearing on bumper stickers and in e-mails. It read: “No one ever said on his deathbed, ‘I wish I’d spent more time at the office.’” Whether or not the saying had the desired effect remains to be seen, as adults appear as determined as ever to fill up their time with accomplishments. But someone had the right idea, and evidently quite a few people agreed with the sentiment. Isn’t it now time to consider the same sentiment as it relates to children? Is there anyone who would say, at the conclusion of childhood, “I wish I’d had less time to play”? Who, after all, wants to look back on life and regret passing up that one and only opportunity to just be a kid?

Rae Pica is a children’s physical activity specialist and the author of Your Active Child: How to Boost Physical, Emotional, and Cognitive Development through Age-Appropriate Activity (McGraw-Hill, 2003). Rae speaks to parent and education groups throughout North America. Visit her and read more articles at http://www.movingandlearning.com.

Your child’s teacher says that you need to find out if your child has ADHD or not. What do you do? Here are some tips from the ADHD Information Library.

First, find a clinician, a Psychologist, or Marriage, Family, and Child Therapist, or Psychiatrist, who has a good working knowledge of Attention Deficit Disorder – ADD or ADHD. Most mental health professionals do NOT know much about the disorder, even if they tell you that they do. During my formal training in psychology at both the Master’s level and the Doctorate level I received about 15 minutes of training on ADHD. Find an expert in your community.

Ask parents at your local CHADD meeting about who the best doctor and the best therapist in your area are. Then call your local psychiatric hospital and ask for either the Children’s Unit or the Adolescent Unit Charge Nurse. Ask the nurse who the best doctor and therapist for treating Attention Deficit Disorder are. Once you have a name or two, call the professional on the phone and give them a two minute interview.?

Keep the phone call brief. They are busy people too. Ask them questions such as, “What percentage of your practice is with Attention Deficit Disorder – ADD ADHD children or teens?” “How many years experience do you have in treating ADD ADHD individuals?” “How do you do a diagnostic work-up for Attention Deficit Disorder – ADD ADHD?” and “What treatment options are you familiar with in the treatment of ADD ADHD?” Based on their answers you will know whether or not you will want to work with them.

Read this entire ADD Information Library web site. Once you have read the 80 or so pages of information at that site for parents you will be ready to meet with the professional who will do the assessment, and perhaps the treatment. If the professional seems to know more than you do (after you’ve spent time preparing) then that is a good sign. If they seem to know less than

you now do, then that is a bad sign. Why pay money to someone who knows less than you do?

Find the Expert — do what he recommends — and pay him what he’s worth.

Ask to have a thorough assessment done, including a parent interview, a child interview, parent and teacher rating scales, and TOVA testing as appropriate. Emotional conditions that could also be causing ADHD-like symptoms must be ruled out.?

If the diagnosis is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder what should you do?

Never give up YOUR responsibility as your child’s parent to any professional (medical, psychological, or educational). If they are experts, get information and opinions based on their experience. Trust their judgment and learn from their wisdom. But YOU are the parent. Once your child or teen has had a good work up, and you have a “righteous” diagnosis you will have a lot of decisions to make regarding treatment. But always remember that YOU are the parent.

It is YOUR job to get all of the information that you can from the experts and make the decisions regarding your child’s treatment. No professional will ever love your child as much as you do. Educate yourself until you are an expert!?Read lots of books, vist each of the ADHD Information Library’s family of web sites, talk to lots of people who know what they are talking about. Subscribe to our newsletter. As Solomon said, “My son, get Wisdom and Knowledge.” You need to become an expert NOW!

Douglas Cowan, Psy.D., is a family therapist who has been working with ADHD children and their families since 1986. He is the clinical director of the ADHD Information Library’s family of seven web sites, including http://www.newideas.net, helping over 350,000 parents and teachers learn more about ADHD each year. Dr. Cowan also serves on the Medical Advisory Board of VAXA International of Tampa, FL., is President of the Board of Directors for KAXL 88.3 FM in central California, and is President of NewIdeas.net Incorporated.

Most of our Founding Fathers, including Ben Franklin, Sam Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, like most average colonial Americans, spent few years, if any, in formal grammar schools of the day, yet they knew how to read and write well.

Most voluntary local grammar schools expected parents to teach their children to read and write before they started school. Most colonial parents apparently had no trouble teaching their children these skills.

At least ten of our presidents were home-schooled. James Madison’s mother taught him to read and write. John Quincy Adams was educated at home until he was twelve years old. At age fourteen, he entered Harvard. Abraham Lincoln, except for fifty weeks in a grammar school, learned at home from books he borrowed. He learned law by reading law books, and became an apprentice to a practicing lawyer in Illinois.

Other great Americans were similarly educated. John Rutledge, a chief justice of the Supreme Court, was taught at home by his father until he was eleven years old. Patrick Henry, one our great Founding Fathers and the governor of colonial Virginia, learned English grammar, the Bible, history, French, Latin, Greek, and the classics from his father.

Abigail Adams, Martha Washington, and Florence Nightingale were all taught at home by their mothers or fathers. John Jay was one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, a chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and a governor of New York. His mother taught him reading, grammar, and Latin before he was eight years old. John Marshall, our first Supreme Court Chief Justice, was home-schooled by his

father until age fourteen. Robert E. Lee, Thomas Stonewall Jackson, George Patton, and Douglas MacArthur were also educated at home. Booker T. Washington, helped by his mother, taught himself to read by using Noah Webster’s Blue Back Speller.

Thomas Edison’s public school expelled him at age seven because his teacher thought he was feeble-minded. Edison, one of our greatest inventors, had only three months of formal schooling. After leaving school, his mother taught him the basics at home over the next three years. Under his mother’s care and instruction, young Edison thrived.

If Thomas Edison was alive today as that child of seven, school authorities would probably stick him in special- education classes. Poor Thomas would waste his precious mind and be bored to death until they released him from school at age sixteen.

So it turns out that many of the famous Americans our children now read about in their dumbed-down public-school textbooks were either homeschooled, never set foot in a government-controlled public school, or thankfully only went to a public school for a very short period of time.

Joel Turtel is an education policy analyst, and author of “Public Schools, Public Menace: How Public Schools Lie To Parents and Betray Our Children.”Contact Information:Website: http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com, Email: lbooksusa@aol.com, Phone: 718-447-7348. Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel. NOTE: You may post this Article on an Ezine, newsletter, or other website only if you include Joel Turtel’s complete contact information, and set up a hyperlink to Joel Turtel’s email address and website URL, http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com

We know that you want your little guy or gal to have the best start. The greatest thing you can do for your child is to provide a home filled with love and laughter. Spend as much time as you can with your child. Add lots of great children’s books and read and cuddle with him as much as possible. Enjoy exploring his world and showing him things. Cherish each day with him—don’t be in a hurry to see him grow, but enjoy what each stage brings. These young years are a gift from God for your benefit—to make “your” memories!

And some of the best memories for us, as parents, are those special, quiet times when our child curls up in our lap, listening attentively to a story he has heard at least 25 times already. This is an extraordinary experience for our children. It is their special time with mom or dad, when everything else is put aside. It’s a time to cuddle, speak together, and to discover new things about the world around them. And while we don’t say it, our actions show our children that they are worth our attention and that we enjoy their company. We hope that one day they will love reading as much as we do.

In my first article in this series, Teaching Your Child to Read, I wrote about the importance of reading aloud to our children. Reading to children increases their knowledge of the world, their vocabulary, and their interest in reading. From being read to repeatedly, children learn that reading is enjoyable, that pictures provide clues to the story, that stories have a beginning and an end. By listening, watching, and asking questions, they add to their vocabulary and increase their comprehension. Repeated reading aloud not only helps children learn to read but also has an impact on school success. Lifelong enjoyment of reading is directly related to daily reading.

In this article I’ve summarized some basic reading aloud “techniques.” The suggestions are broken down by age level. I hope they are helpful tools in passing on the wondrous gift of reading for enjoyment.

Birth-Age 2

· Reading aloud is an intimate moment that you and your child have together. Snuggle close and share books that can easily be held while your child is in your lap. Read aloud often.

· Find books with large, bright and colorful pictures, exciting sounds, and rhyming patterns in the text (i.e., Mother Goose rhymes). To reinforce the rhyme, sing or recite the stories during the day.

· When your child is a baby, choose books that help him learn the names of all the objects that surround him. Point to the objects in the pictures and call them by name.

· Choose sturdy board books and place them anywhere your child will be, like the highchair, the car seat, the stroller, and the toy room.

· As your child learns how to turn pages, don’t be concerned that this often seems like the only way he is interested in interacting with a book. Promote an early appreciation of books by modeling how to handle them with care.

Ages 2-4

· Keep books handy everywhere (in your bag, in the car, a little box in most rooms of the house) and integrate them in with toys so that children are just as likely to pick up a book as they are to pick up some blocks or a stuffed animal.

· Set a special routine time and comfortable location for reading. Bedtime, while dinner is in the oven, or while a younger sibling is sleeping are some suggestions.

· Demonstrate to your child that reading occurs anytime, any place. Read everything around you such as store signs, road signs, and magazine covers. Create grocery lists and lists of things to do and read them aloud.

· Read the same books over and over. Let your child participate in the story reading by lifting flaps, turning pages, pointing to pictures, and repeating words or phrases that he remembers.

· Always choose a few books to read aloud that are a few levels above their current vocabulary to introduce new words and concepts and build listening skills.

Ages 5-7

· Choose books with patterns, rhymes and repetitive phrases. Emphasize the rhythmic pattern as you read aloud and encourage your child to “fill in

the blank” by pausing before you reach the end of the rhyming line or repeated phrase.

· Try reading a familiar book by covering up the words and telling a story just from the pictures. This shows your child how to use the illustrations to tell a story.

· Sit in a way that your child can see the text while you read aloud. Help your child to recognize that the words you read follow the words on the page by underlining the words with your finger as you read. You can also ask your child to find individual words based on their beginning sounds. These types of “direct learning” activities fit in better when your child has heard the story often.

· Set aside time for assisted reading as your child begins to learn how to read. You read a page to him and then he reads the next page to you.

· Choose a variety of books that include fairy tales; folk tales from different countries; non-fictional books about animals; fictional stories that touch on early science concepts like the seasons, weather, and animal habits; characters that learn lessons about friendship and feelings and look at the world through a child’s eyes.

· Often, your child will want to revisit the book by himself after you’ve read it a few times. Encourage him to read it silently instead of asking him to read it back to you; in this way, you’re encouraging silent reading for enjoyment. Grab a silent reading book for yourself and curl up next to him to share a few moments of “shared silent reading.”

Ages 7-9

· Continue to read aloud to your child even though he has already learned to read on his own. Children learn a lot about the flow of language, their vocabulary grows, and they get many opportunities to hear what good reading sounds like.

· Good choices at this age are chapter books, sports stories, riddles and jokes, word-plays and poetry. Encourage your child’s interest by reading aloud books in the same series or by the same poet.

· Subscribe to a child’s magazine that focuses on particular subjects like Sports Illustrated for Kids, Ranger Rick, or Time for Kids. Visit the library to read aloud from reference books about things that your child may discover in the real world like insects, flowers, and snakes.

· Read aloud the description of various entries in a recipe book and choose a recipe to make together. Choose a particular craft from a craft book and read aloud as you follow the directions together.

· Chapter books (slightly longer children’s stories divided into chapters and having fewer illustrations) are a wonderful way to foster longer attention spans, increased vocabularies and a more vivid imagination. Share these books during read-aloud sessions now. When your child gets a little older he will likely revisit these same books to read by himself.

Ages 10-12

· At this age, children begin to develop an appreciation for mysteries, informational books, tall tales, adventures with real heroes, biographies, and interactive choose-your-own adventure stories. They are often involved in active sports, and developing best friends. Try to select books from these categories so that your child will be given access to a broad range of age-appropriate topics and various literary styles.

· Visit the library and make time for books in between the sports practices, homework assignments, and social activities that your child is involved in. Entice older children by reading the beginning of the book aloud. Just as the tension in the story builds, leave off, and often, children will want to finish the book by reading it themselves.

· If you plan on reading an entire book aloud to a child of this age, choose a book with a reading level a few years higher than your child’s current level. This will build his vocabulary and improve his listening skills.

· Find interesting bits of news to read aloud from the newspaper or news magazines. Introduce your child to current events, important social and political figures, new geographic regions and different cultural practices and beliefs.

Tom & Shelley Cooper

Tom is the director of a large humanitarian aid program, and Shelley left a successful career as a financial analyst in order to become an educator. They have a tremendous love for children and have two children of their own. Their children were the inspiration for their website at:

http://educational-toys-4u.com

In the first premise, some films and video tapes which are released into the world market are doing more harm to the society than good. These films are full of various modes and systems of corruptions. Imagine a film in which a small boy abused and insulted the age mate of his parents for almost one and half hours and was punished in the film for only five minutes,much emphasis is laid on the insult and abuse than the punishment inherent in the social malady. When other children watch such a movie, they think withing them that it is no harm to do such a thing to ones parent or other elders, then they imitate such act and started to abuse their elders in the public. These children do not know that real life situations are not two or three hours journey, but journey of many years before and ahead.

We no longer buy or encourage our youth to watch good, educative or christian films or movies in which they can learn good morals and learn more about Christ Jesus, but it is only those ones that will corrupt or even destroy them. A film Censor director once said that “A boy or girl who wakes up in the morning to watch violent movies and takes ritual films at Lunch , and blue (sex) film at night before bed, what manner of future leader will he or she become?

The mind of our children are polluted with the actions of the corrupt films. Our generation has little or no films which edifies or teach these young minds on the rewards inherent in respect for elders and punishment for disobidience. Film producers lay more

emphasis on bad characters, while they snap through or just “show off” in few seconds the punishment in disobedience.

I will advise the film producers to change this system. Much emphasis should rather be laid on the punishment or reward in a particular character for disobedience or obedience respectively than the act. By this, our children will avoid such behaviour which can make the entire world to frowm at them.

Video tapes and films come in various categories today. Only films in general categories that is, the ones meant for general viewing should the children be allowed to watch.

Students fail in both internal and external examinations the more because video tapes, Cds and cinema houses have taken over the precious time they would have spent with their studies. They no longer read effectively as before,they watch more of movies instead. In another way round, they seek cheap success by getting themselves involved in examination malpractices.

We have not seen anything yet,if something is not done as quickly as possible about bad films proliferation not only examinations malpractices will turn out to be the effect, but there will be more armed robbers, prostitutes and of course HIV/ AIDS infected people all over the world.The government must do something urgently to stop this act. All hands must be on desk to put a final solution to the malady.

For more causes and solutions to Moral decadence among youth, read my article on Cigarrette- A blessing or Curse?

2005 C Olu Adepetun is the Proprietor and Principal of Scholars Private College, 1 Aguda Close, Ondo Road, Opp. Portland Cement, Ondo Road,P.O.Box 3698, Akure, Nigeria, Gsm 2348033965428. Visit us at http://www.scholarscollege.i8.com or e-mail us at scholarolu7@yahoo.com