The Importance of a Regular Routine to your Child
Regular schedules provide the day with a structure that orders a young child’s world. Although predictability can be tiresome for adults, children thrive on repetition and routine. Schedules begin from the first days of life. Babies, especially, need regular sleep and meal programs and even routines leading up to those activities.
As they get older, when a child knows what is going to happen and who is going to be there, it allows them to think and feel more independently, and feel more safe and secure. A disrupted routine can set a child off and cause them to feel insecure and irritable.
How to Boost Your Emotional Intelligence
We often hear about boosting our IQ, but what about emotional intelligence? Is it important to our wellbeing? What will it do for you in your life?
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence speaks to the way that you handle… Continue reading
Forming a Stronger Parent Unit
It’s possibly the most over-used gag on family sit-coms spanning the TV airwaves from the days of Leave it to Beaver till our own 8 Simple Rules: a parent tries to lay down a message of authority to a errant child, and the other parent uses the opportunity to joke about the parent’s own childishness. The reason we laugh at this joke over and over is that it reflects the tension we often feel in our own family situations. But don’t laugh to hard, because the issue reflected by the joke can be one of the most serious threats to successful parenting.
“For a long time, I didn’t know how to put it into words,” Megan recounts of her co-parenting struggle, “My husband is so logical, all the time. When I’d make a decision about one of our kids, he’d always give me a ‘look’ and have some comment about not seeing the bigger picture. I realized after awhile that what he was causing my kids to see me as less intelligent and less capable of making good decisions. He still has a hard time admitting that it was having a bad effect on our family.”
Family research strongly supports Megan’s view that these kinds of communication messages have a negative impact on the entire family system. Jouriles and Murphy’s (1991) study of 87 families noted a connection between acting-out behavior in boys and parental disagreement. Other researchers have found similar results. The issue is not that parents have disagreements about child-rearing, it is how those disagreements are expressed in front of the children.
Why Sharing Meals Is So Important
You may think that the biggest benefit of eating together as a family is to ensure everyone has food in their stomachs. However, sharing meals does more than feed each person physically; it also feeds them emotionally and draws them together. Keep reading to find out why sharing meals is so important.
Family meals allow conversations to take place. Simply being together chatting about the day can be enough to help you stay connected. No matter which meals you eat together, you’ll appreciate having the opportunity to find out what’s going on in each member’s life. You’ll have a chance to encourage your children as they take tests or remind your partner of important events coming up.
Family Meetings – Great Ways for a Family to Stay Connected
Communication is the key to living together in harmony. It doesn’t matter if your family is small (two partners) or large (partners and various children) – family meetings are a great way for a family to stay connected. Read through… Continue reading
Is it Time for a Family Meeting?
Family meetings always seem like a good idea on the surface, but when it comes down to it, it can seem like the early stages of democracy in an emerging country. Think about it. Alliances are formed between usually warring… Continue reading
Autism, Asperger's and Family Life
In the Parenting section of our website, we try to talk about topics of interest to all parents rather than parents facing one particular issue. But this month, our article turns the scope on families dealing with Autistic Spectrum conditions. Specifically, our goal this month is to understand some things that happen to other members of the family when Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome become part of the picture.
