We all know that children are like sponges. They assimilate and imitate things that are from the immediate environment. This is both a good thing and a bad thing for children. For one, you have to make sure that what children see is beneficial for them. If you want to educate your child, you have to create the instances when and where your child can fully learn something new.
Therefore, you have to be an active parent. An active parent intervenes in the learning process not to limit it, but to make the horizon wider and more fruitful. An active parent in the learning process makes full use of available resources for learning and more.
Do rewards work with children? Some people in the old field of behavioral, psychological analysis point to a peculiar fact regarding disciplining. It appears that punishment is quicker to teach than rewards. However, how happy would a child be if punishment were always used? Remember, most of what is traditionally done to children is not natural.
A French thinker, Gilles Deleuze once said that adults repeatedly treat children with infantilism that is not theirs. That means that most of the restrictions we place on children’s actions are not really beneficial for the most part. So the next time you want to be critical of your children, why not try rewarding first?
Some parents clamp down hard when it comes to friends. They want to know who the kid is with, what the new friends’ parents do for a living, etc. While it’s fine to be safe with the child, such actions are actually detrimental for the social development of the child.
If you want your child to be wise about the friends that he or she chooses, then you have to inculcate the right values and skills. Don’t do the choosing for your child. Instead of choosing for your child, make sure that your child knows how to select the friends himself. Doing this would make your child more open to the world and to your family.
Do you ever wonder how parents of child geniuses do it? Aside from being supportive of their children all the way, parents of child geniuses often provide the best possible environment for their children. These parents invest books, spacious rooms and the right learning materials for their children.
Parents should also invest in their children by acquiring the best educational resources. This might mean musical instruments and small libraries. You do this because you’re attempting to cultivate a small seed of genius. If you’re sure that your child is not too bright, you can still make a genius out of him or her by buying the right kind of tools for learning.
Back in the day, boiling your H2O was the norm. You get a pot of water, boil it for ten minutes and let it cool down. The water can be used by the whole family, including small children on milk. Is this still true? A survey done in 2008 revealed that we are already consuming fifty billion liters of bottled water instead of plain tap water.
However, are these waters safe? Unfortunately, not all water-refilling centers are clean. There might be some pronouncements that the water is safe, but there’s no way to know whether the cleansing process is enough to produce the cleanest possible water. In poorer countries, small refilling stations handle the cleaning process of bottled water. How safe are these bottled waters, really?
Often, people suffer from the complications of a fatal disease: spend until there’s no more. That’s why most of corporate America is on credit, because cash is no longer around. Avoid the trap. You can teach your kids to save early on by giving them the means to do so.
If they’re too impulsive to save on their own, ask them whether you can drop a few dollars a week into a piggy bank for them. After a few years, ask them whether they feel mature enough to hold their own savings account (ATM card). Since kids like being treated like mature adults, they would be delighted. Trust us; it works! What did you last do to make your kids feel more mature than their actual age?
The concept of money would be alien to kids, unless you teach them just how difficult it is to earn it. Kids don’t have an in-born appreciation of what a $50 Dora the Explorer cup is really worth. All they know is that they want it, and they have to get it.
Kids 7 and older can be taught the basics of what money is. Before you explain prices, interest and other complicated concepts, start with the basics. Let your child accompany you to an automated teller machine and let him or her watch you withdraw or deposit money. You can then proceed to explain why you have money. Entertain questions afterward, no matter how simplistic or out of this world it is.