The Kids Are All Right

Showing up for your child is easy to do. A child should be made to feel Safe, Seen, Soothed and Secure.

When we show up and give our children an opportunity to be seen, honestly and directly, then we act as a living mirror for them to see themselves.

While we reassure our kids telling them what they are feeling is not going to be a problem, and they shouldn't cry or worry, we are ignoring their feelings.

Acknowledging what they feel is as important as correcting their course.

A big part of treatment for children with anxiety is to teach parents stress tolerance.

A mental health professional can help you work through methods of stress management for your specific needs.

You might learn strategies in therapy that you can impart to your child when she is feeling anxious.

Try to maintain a calm, neutral demeanor in front of your child, even if you are still trying to manage your anxiety. Children are quick to read facial expressions.

Children learn to act kindly the same way they learn anything else - with practice.

Give them daily opportunities to practice kindness, such as helping another child.

Children need to learn to focus on individuals and truly listen to them.

They also need to learn to see the bigger picture by putting human experience in context.

Allowing parents to participate in their children's field trips can prove an inspired idea, as they often have great suggestions. 

Moreover, getting their feedback both before and after the trip might lead to the improvement of such activities.

This kind of program often results in successful cooperation between parents and teachers, therefore ensuring that no feedback is lost. 

Parent volunteers get in contact with other parents for topics related to their children and forward their opinions to teachers, enabling an efficient communication of everybody's thoughts and suggestions.

In Japan and Norway, parents are focused on cultivating independence.

• In Norway, most children enter state-sponsored daycare at 1 year old.
• In Japan, children run errands without parental supervision. The children take subways by themselves and walk on busy streets alone.

American parents focus on grooming their children's talents for success. Many Asian nations focus highly on academics, while the Dutch parents believe in not pushing their children too hard.

In Spain, families are focused on the social and interpersonal aspects of child development.

...is the belief that your abilities can be improved through effort. 

And this means you can get better and hard work pays off.

• Don’t praise ability or intelligence: That promotes a fixed mindset. Compliment effort, process and choices.
• Don’t ignore outcome, tie it to effort: You can be happy about success, but attribute it to effort.
• Respond positively to failure: Failure isn’t bad, it’s a tool for improving.
• Don’t just say “Try hard.” Set goals: Blind repetition doesn’t work. 
• Practice a Growth mindset in all areas of life: There’s no area where they cannot improve with hard work.
• Share your own Growth mindset efforts: Practice it yourself and share your results.

Make a list of people that you would like to get to know better.

Consider extending an invitation and see what happens.

Decide when you are going to ask someone to do something together.

Schedule these initial contacts to ensure that you won't keep putting it off.

It’s both natural and useful to take time to explore a task before committing to one path forward. 

While children tend to do this automatically, adults may need to plan ahead for their exploratory time. Explore: consider multiple solutions, ask questions that may seem tangential, and be open to discovering unexpected ways to tackle the project.

Adults generally do a great job of applying past knowledge to new situations. Children’s brains thrive instead in unfamiliar contexts, in part because more contexts are unfamiliar to them. 

So the next time you’re tasked with a completely new project, don’t force your prior knowledge onto it.

1. Get personal. Attack the issue, not the person. 
2. Get distracted by new and extraneous themes. 
3. Water down your strong arguments with weak ones.

1. Use punchy one-liners, like: That begs the question. That is beside the point. You’re being defensive. Don’t compare apples and oranges.
2. Ridicule and humiliate your opponent. This can be very effective in front of an audience.
3. Deliberately provoke your adversary until they lose their temper and so the argument.
4. Throw in diversions that deflect the other person from their main point.
5. Exaggerate your opponent’s position and then show how ridiculous and unreasonable the exaggerated position is.
6. Vigorously denounce each of your opponent’s arguments as fallacious but just select one or two that you can defeat to prove the point. Then assume that you have won.