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Category Archives: school
Carpenter or Gardener – What Kind of A Parent Are You?
Parenting is nothing less than a roller coaster ride and many a times, you’d find parents asking experts about some formula for parenting their kids perfectly. Well, as per experts there is no such formula. While today parents aren’t really able to spend a lot of time with kids due to both of them working. So, in a bid to do our best for our children many a times we end up doing helicopter parenting. Well, Experts think that children need to be on their own and not instructed or hovered by parents all the time. As per one of the known Psychologist and author of the book The Gardener and the Carpenter, Gopnik, trying to shape your kids so that they turn out to be particular type of adults is a doomed project by far. Furthermore it could also be counterproductive. Having said that she does not mean that kids don’t need looking after. They certainly do but not like it’s been done in today’s times. Most of the middle class parents, fathers and mothers alike have taken up parenting like any occupation and their main focus is results more than the over-all development and well-being of their child.
According to the psychology professor Gopnik, “leaving children alone is not a bad idea” and children are the last thing we need to be controlling. Apparently children need to stop worrying around the tiny little minutes of parenting as it does not make any different on how children turn out of be. Over parenting apparently creates a generation of kids who aren’t really independent.
Gopnik says that there isn’t any formula around parenting its just that parents need to be the gardeners for their children. Let them grow up freely not like those gardeners though who hothouse their plants – vis manipulate or force plants to grow in a greenhouse. Its just to water them adequately and provide the necessary nutrients just like a plant grows in the meadow.
*Sourced from Internet
Vydehi School of Excellence is one of the Top CBSE School in Whitefield Bangalore
A Few Tips On Bonding with Your Child!
Every parent wants to develop a bond with their child that makes their child feel safe, secure and comfortable enough to share their emotions be that of happiness joy, fear or anxiety. On the other hand parents today go out of the way to ensure that they are able to meet the needs of their child not only physically but even when it comes to connections. Here are a few tips to help you around strengthening your bond with your child.
Load them with Hugs – As per scientific study we need at least 4 hugs daily to survive, 9 to maintain ourselves and 12 to grow. So make sure that you snuggle in with your kid at least 8 -10 times a day, to make him/her secure and loved. This will help the child not only grow by bloom with confidence.
Keep Technology at bay – Technology is a boon and a bane too. When it comes to spending time with your kids, you need to keep yourself and your kid away for any kind of distractions in order to engage with them and for them to have your presence felt. So, if you are commuting your way home and wanting to have a chat with your kids, ensure that they are not on your devices, music in the car is off and even kids are away from theirs.
One on One talk – Be it around bedtime or before take out 15 minutes of time where you have eye contact with your child and talk one on one with him/her. You do not have to have a time table for the same, just fit in some fun activity which makes your kid engage and have fun with you.
Listen to your child – To be a friend of your child or to even develop a close connection you need to listen to your child primarily. That’s the key. Even if you have to say something keep it till your child is done with telling you their thing. You need to understand the perspective of your child and respond in a way that’s win-win for both. Ensure that you respect your child as you respect others.
Family-time connections – Mealtime and bedtime are two very important opportunities for a parent, rather for a family to strengthen the bonding with their child. Have a sort of ritual where you sit with your child and talk to them during mealtime, tell stories and snuggle with your child during bedtime.
Well, even though parenting is one of the most daunting tasks in the world and is a roller coaster ride, having a connection with your child can apparently ease your journey to a considerable extent.
*Sourced from the Internet
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Parenting Trends – 2019
Parenting trends have kept on changing and evolving over time and one of the biggest influence in parenting has been the technology that has also become an integral part of living of humankind and its positive as well as negative effects on kids. Let’s run through some of the parenting trends of 2019 that parents need to be aware about.
Holistic Approach – Even though in India academics is a top priority for parents, there has been a lot of change and parents and even schools are taking the holistic approach of concentrating not only on academic excellence but areas of interest of the child and fostering the same.
Anxiety is normal – Present-day, people are able to understand that it is okay to be anxious, it is normal. Be it adults or kids, everyone is prone to anxiety. A survey in Australia proved that one in seven kids within the age group of 4-18 years having mental health conditions, obviously anxiety is there. People and Parents are accepting this, talking about it and ways to handle the same.
The Technology Effect – Technology has transformed life and has become an integral part of everyone’s lives today. With the pro, there comes the con, that includes its effects on children in terms of over usage or addiction, abuse and more. In 2019, people and parents alike are talking about dealing with the technology cons and balancing the family time and tech time with an objective of using technology for personal enrichment, not entertainment only.
Extra-Curricular Activities – From the beginning of time, to say, academics has always topped the priority list of parents. But, now times are changing and extra-curricular activities could just turn out to be a passion for your kid, a stress buster or rejuvenator for that matter and help in the overall wellbeing as well. Parents are paying attention to extra-curricular activities as much as they do to academics.
Meaningful Conversations – The only way to establish a connection with your child, a bond and friendship is to converse. Meaningful conversations with parents can help children outgrow their anxiety, fears and more. Be it at the meal – table or while indulging into extra-curricular activities inside or outside the house or just having fun, meaningful conversations can work like magic.
With time, the only constant is change, and we need to learn to change. It applies to parenting too and the trends are a harbinger of the same. Well, that’s good news.
*Sourced from Internet
The parent-teacher association of Vydehi School of Excellence is an active body of the School. Every parent and teacher is a member of the association, as VSE strongly believes that parents and teachers must work together with children to improve the quality of education.
Dealing With Special Needs Teens – 5 Few Tips
Children with special needs, require special attention and extra support as compared to their peers. Additionally, kids, as well as parents, need to deal with the surrounding, adjust and adapt to it. Even people and peers of kids with special needs don’t necessarily understand them and can be non-empathetic to them. At times many kids with special needs are disobedient and hard to manage. Here are a few tips that could help you manage your teen kids in a better way.
Believe – Believing is primary. If you believe in your kids, others automatically will. If you don’t, don’t expect others to. Your child could be angry or disobedient but you need to believe that your kid is doing his/her best.
Don’t assume – If you have any questions ask them, but do not assume. Assumptions around the special needs of your child. If your child has a physical disability do not assume that it means that the child has mental too.
Promote Independence – Don’t assume that kids with special needs are unable to make decisions without help. As far as possible let them be on their own wherever they can. Ask if they need help before helping them out with daily chores. Guide them in being independent. Like for example when you put clothes on them, ask them which shirt they would prefer to wear, by giving them small options. This way you help them make their own decisions.
Foster their Strengths – Every child is unique and even children with special needs have their own strengths. As a parent try to recognize their strengths and foster them as you would do for a normal child.
All Friendships – Encourage your child to have friendships with everyone irrespective of whether their friends are challenged or not. Just take care that other friends treat your child properly and not poorly.
Well, managing teens without disabilities can be a daunting task, then obviously, parenting teens with special needs can be even more taxing, but with a few tips and points in mind, you can make the work easier.
*Sourced from Internet
Ensure Your Kids Eat Healthy – Few Tips
Gone are the days when Indians had four to five kids or even more and they just grew up in a joint family with a long list of close relatives to look after. There have been stories of women not being able to give any time to kids because most of the time went around in the kitchen and other domestic chores for the family. Today, women are out and working and equal to men, at least to say. Today parents are much concerned of every aspect of their child’s developmental process be it health or fitness, academics or sports, hobbies or extra-curricular activities or even mental health. Parents today want the best for their children. What they only miss out on looking into the details of all this is the quality time, which is of utmost importance for the kids and home-made healthy food as well. As both parents are out and working, many kids after school live in daycares and even if they are home, with all the online order facility available at the click of the button, many times its home delivery of restaurant made foods.
This apparently hampers the health of the child and deprives them of the needed nutrients that a homemade balanced diet can provide against the processed foods, loaded with unhealthy calories available outside. Apparently, kids pick every little thing from others and primarily it’s the parents. So, if the parents prefer unhealthy food, the kids are obviously going to prefer the same. Well, the solution is to follow what you preach. Eat healthy and seeing you do so, even the child will in no time.
A healthy diet includes five potions of fruits as well as vegetables on a daily basis. The balanced diet should include carbohydrates besides dairy, fats, veggies, and proteins.
It’s simple to understand if you spread it across a pyramid. At the base include the carbohydrates like cereals, pasta, rice and bread as Carbs are responsible for providing energy all through the day. Next in the pyramid are the vegetables and the fruits, followed by protein rich foods like fish, eggs, nuts, pulses and dairy like milk, cheese and yogurt. The phoenix or top of the pyramid is made up of the smallest part that is the fat and sugars including ghee, butter, oil, sweets and cakes.
The base is the largest part and subsequently decreasing as it goes up. Your child’s diet also needs to be that way in order for him/her to get the balance of all the nutrients required to be in the best of health.
*Sourced from Internet
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Life Skills For Making Children Independent
Gone are the days when kids used be taken care of any of the family members of a joint family and parents particularly moms were busy cooking for the whole house and other chores. But in today’s times when families have gone nuclear and parents, mostly both of them working, are very much concerned about every need of their child. They do seem to be focused in getting them everything that is needed more so because of the lack of time they have to spend with their kids. But, one thing that has not completely wiped out of still from our society is that academics is still the most important part of a child’s life. If the child fails there then there is pressure of performance. This obsession is apparently a legacy that has been carried forwards since the beginning of time of education. The winds of change are blowing but still we have to see a complete change in the mindset.
Speak to many school heads and many of them will bring this issue to light. Rather than concentrating merely on academics, parents need to understand that every child is unique and is blessed with a unique capability. As the saying goes ‘never judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree’, parents need to understand and explore the hidden talent of the child and try to nurture and foster the same rather than pressuring the child over academic performance. Parenting is a roller coaster ride with its highs and lows and bonding with children, working together with the teachers at school and parent can certainly help.
What kid really need to sustain in this world where Newton’s law ‘Survival of the fittest’ still holds true is a support that someone is always with them in their journey and who else than a parent can fill this space. Here are few tips on how you can foster your child to become independent through life skills.
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Teach them to Respect people – To earn respect, you need to give respect and this needs to be instilled into the child early on. Etiquettes helps groom a child’s mentality and the way to do it is to do it yourself.
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Encourage Extra-curricular activities – A holistic approach and an open mind can work wonders for the child, so beyond academics join them with extra curricular activities like sports, music or anything else that interests them.
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Put them in Situations and observe then respond – Put them into situations without helping them. Try to observe how they respond to situations. This will help them make decisions, boost their self esteem
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Relax and Have fun – Don’t take everything seriously. Children do make mistakes and will keep making them as they are learning every moment. So, just try to ignore silly mistakes and give them freedom to do mistakes by assuring them that we all make mistakes when we try. It’s okay to make mistakes some times as long as you learn from them and avoid repeating them.
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Follow a hobby - Hobbies always help in unwinding yourself and rejuvenating and starting early always helps.
All this helps them through their journey of life when they grow up, making it easier too.
*Sourced from the Internet
Teaching Manners To Kids – A Few Tips
If you want your kids to be well mannered grown-ups and pass the same to their kids, then the time to teach them manners is well at grass root level only. It’s only when they are kids that you need to do the task. Be it simple manners like saying please, thank you, sorry and so on, to greeting people on meeting them, from table manners to manners around public behavior, it needs to be done so that your kids turn out to be civilized human beings when they grow up.
Off course, it’s not a cakewalk! Here’s run down a few tips to help you sail through the process with a bit of ease.
First things first, preaching your children will never ever work. It’s like putting your point across the ears, in from one and out from the other. So, try to put your point across in a way that it reaches them and stays with them.
As per the director of Emily Post Institute, Peggy post, who also is a writer of umpteen books on etiquette, storytelling method for teaching them manners is a very good idea that does work. Kids are fond of fairy tales, stories of kings, queens, and battles to name a few. You may use these people and weave stories around them to teach them how to greet others, wear clothes and behave, etc.
Patricia Tice, Ph.D. and a business etiquette expert uses the sing a song method to teach etiquettes to her little toddlers’ clients. The songs they sing help them learn manners. So, they sing and learn simultaneously.
Now, for example, you want your kids to learn some table manners like holding the spoon, saying please and thank you, a rehearsal session at home could work well. Off-course with a catch viz. if the kids pass the rehearsal, they would get a reward like dinner at one of their favorite restaurants at the end of the week. This small and smart ideas definitely work well with kids so do rewards if used well and in control.
*Sourced from the Internet
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Are You Game To Watch The Moon Landing Of Chandrayaan 2 With Prime Minister Of India?
As the Chandrayaan 2 is inching closer towards its landing date of September 6, 2019 on the moon, there is curiosity and excitement building up over the monumental day. ISRO has already released the first pictures of Earth sent by Chandrayaan 2 using its L4 camera. Apparently, as per ISRO the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi is going to watch the landing of Vikram lander on the Chandrayaan 2 live in Bengaluru with select students of Class 8th to 10th class. Well, to grab this opportunity you need to be a student studying in class 8, 9 or 10 and crack the quiz contest by ISRO.
Two students from each state will get this opportunity of watching the landing accompanied by none other than the Prime minister of India. The procedure to enter the contest is available on the website www.mygov.in. The quiz contest is to be held between August 10 and August 20, 2019. The objective primarily is to create awareness about space programs within the children of the country. Only Indian Citizens are eligible to participate in the contest where they will have to answer a maximum number of quiz questions to win this once in a blue moon chance. The quiz has around 20 questions that have to be answered within 5 minutes. The participant has to answer all questions in the shortest time duration.
Meanwhile, the fourth and fifth orbit-raising maneuver has been successfully completed and by the time you are reading this, the sixth maneuver scheduled for August 6, 2019 would also have been completed.
The Chandrayaan 2 – was launched with the help of a heavy-lift rocket geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle – Mark III (GSLV MK III).
So, if you are up and excited to grab this opportunity, login to the mygov.in website to know the details and register yourself for the contest dated August 10, 2019.
*Sourced from the Internet
Pets Relieve Exam Stress Of Students – A Report
Well, college and exams put together is the perfect recipe for stress amongst students. There have been cases of college dropouts due to stress and extreme ones include even suicidal thoughts or suicides due to the pressure of studies and clearing exams. There’s a bit of good news for students though. It’s about reducing exam stress by spending time with pet dogs or cats. Now, Who doesn’t like pets? But, did you know a study shows the psychological benefits of having pets at home? Yes, you read that right, a study has found that pets relieve exam stress and study-related pressures of students. The study was published in the AERA open journal that said, many universities have implemented programs like ‘pet your stress away’.
The study was based on a research involving 249 college students who were randomly divided into four groups. The first group got a chance to do hands-on interaction with pet cats and dogs for a duration of 10 minutes. In order to compare the results, the second group was just allowed to observe the first group petting animals. The third group, in turn, was shown a slide show of the animals that were petted and the last or fourth group was simply waitlisted. The students who waitlisted did so without having any stimuli like phone, book or more. To check for the results, the salivary cortisol samples of every participant was collected in the morning after they woke up and the data was crunched.
The results did show that the students who interacted with pets showed a reduction in stress levels because there was a visible reduction in cortisol hormones causing stress. Even if the time they spent with kids was as less as 10 minutes, it worked in reducing stress as per researchers. The objective of the research was to find out whether this kind of exposure would help in stress reduction by reducing hormone secretion related to stress. This paves the way to utilizing the same for benefitting mental health over a period of time.
*Sourced from the Internet
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General Anxiety Disorders In Kids (GAD)
It’s not just the adults, but even children suffer from an anxiety disorder or Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). A child suffering from anxiety disorder will be worrying a lot about one thing or the other. Be it relationships with friends, family issues, marks in class, sports performance and more.
Anxiety up to a certain level is alright but if anxiety is consistent and keeps on increasing and spreading across areas of life, its time to consult a doctor for the same. Your child could be suffering from Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD).
It is known that between 5% and 10% of the people suffer from anxiety disorders and its more common with kids having ADHD.
Symptoms
Kids with generalized anxiety disorders experience too much of fear or worries often to an immense extent. As a result they are not able to concentrate, are restless, fatigued and suffer from frequent urination, stomach aches as well as sleep difficulties.
The stress and tension are of chronic nature and do interfere and affect various areas as well as the quality of their life.
At times even the child might be able to understand the excessive anxiety issues, but might not be able to control or manage it.
Diagnosis
One of the criteria around the diagnosis of GAD is, the experience needs to last for around six months at least. A trained mental health practitioner will assess the child and work with the child around his/ her anxiety disorders.
Well, apparently GAD is more likely to affect children who have undergone challenging situations in life or have been maltreated are at a higher risk of GAD. Challenges like humiliation, cruelty, and abandonment are a few triggers that already affect adults, then children would obviously be, isn’t it? Even puberty could bring in stressors besides consistent difficulties in relationships socially as well as frustrations and school performance issues as well. Treatment plans are based on diagnosis and differ from individual to individual.
*Sourced from the Internet