PARENTING – Does your child REALLY deserve that scolding she/he got?

It’s 7.00 in the evening, it’s raining cats and dogs outside, your colleagues are leaving the office one by one to hit for home or anywhere else better than work and you are stuck juggling reports which dateline is next week but all of a sudden, your boss decides he wants it tomorrow early in the morning and you have a family waiting at home. Your patience level is thinning, you feel like there’s a volcano that will erupt from within you. “Mommy”, you start hearing your children’s little voices. Fast forward the whole scene, you arrive home at 9.30, greeted by your lovely angles. As soon as you reach the door they jump on you and pull you down together with your reports, everything is scattered. You get so mad that you yell at them saying they’re just making your life miserable. Sounds familiar?

In today’s challenging world, many parents have unintentionally use harsh languages or gestures with their little ones as a result of life’s stress. When we yell, shout, scream or reprimand our children, they immediately cease whatever they’re doing that would have caused their parents to be angry but in cases such as depicted above, how will a child understand the wrong of getting exciting at seeing their mommy coming back home? This is a classic situation of parents’ projecting their anger towards their child when actually they are angry with someone else or something else. In the case above, the mother yelled at the children with hurtful words out of her anger towards her employer, unfortunately she could not say it out directly to her employer, thus it’s bottled up causing her emotions to be extremely fragile. The first powerless person who happens to touch that fragility will experience its effects, thus the children getting yelled at.

In all the situations where we have been angry and act harshly towards our children, have those acts been valid? Did our children do something wrong or bad to deserve being reprimanded? It is so much easier getting angry at children because they are not equal to adults in terms of power. They are not our match; hence we use that and make them scape goats. Things can get out of hands sometimes when parents don’t stop at what happened that instant but instead continues to nag about past events and hurting a child’s personality, saying things like “you are useless”, “always giving me problems”, “making my life difficult”. These statements can live scar on child’s emotions and they drag it with them like a baggage with a broken wheel. Just imagine what does a bag with a broken wheel can do your floorings? Taking this analogy into child’s life, think what that broken wheel will do to him/her? It will scratch and leave scars on their self esteem and confidence, and this in turn will results in a hose on other emotional related problems later on. Is this what we want for our children? The next time you feel a volcano erupting within you, take a walk or even better, shower! and analyze what is the actual cause of the anger. This can help you avoid hurting your little angels.

Turning the Environment into Your Child's Classroom

I truly believe in engaging the environment in teaching children. Learning becomes fun, informal and meaningful when you turn your surrounding into your child's classroom. It also provides opportunities for learning at any given times, even unexpectedly. Here's my experience of how I have used the environment to teach my son. My son loves cars and I took that interest and turned it into an exciting learning experience. I taught him the concept of colours by pointing out the colour of cars around us. I started with blue and pointed at every blue car and said "that's a blue car", and I did that every time I saw a blue car. The next day, I asked him to point at any blue car if he sees one. Then, i went to red cars and every time he mastered, i taught him a new colour. It was simply amazing. He could tell all the colours up to silver when he was 2 years old. I have also used the same technique to teach shapes and many other things.

I make it a point to talk to him just about anything around us. The environment is a wonderful classroom that provides you with abundance of opportunities to teach your child something new every time. With this, you do not need to allocate a specific time for learning. Learning becomes natural and takes place almost all the time. Just describing what you are doing already provides a lot of room for learning.

Here are some suggestions you can try:

1. Take your children to the supermarket, tell them the names of vegetables and other food items. This will surely be more interesting than just hanging a poster of fruits and vegetables in their room.

2. Make them read car registration numbers to you to help reinforce mastery of numbers and alphabet.

3. Teach the concept of numbers by making them count items whenever you encounter a situation that permits, such as counting slices of cake on a plate while having tea. Or during morning walks collect dried leaves and count them as you and your child pick them up.

There are many more things you can do with your children that without you realising it, they're actually learning new stuff. It is crucial that we make learning enjoyable and fun for children and when learning becomes natural where it takes place anywhere, anytime, children will develop curiosity to almost everything around them and it is this thirst for knowledge that you want to develop in children.

6 Ways Parents Can Help Kids Cope With Social Cruelty - On Parenting (usnews.com)

6 Ways Parents Can Help Kids Cope With Social Cruelty - On Parenting (usnews.com)

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Two Simple Ways to Be a Happier Parent - On Parenting (usnews.com)

Two Simple Ways to Be a Happier Parent - On Parenting (usnews.com)

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BULLYING AMONG CHILDREN - How shall we train our kids to cope with bullying?

This topic has been in my mind for quite some time. We read in the daily newspapers about bullying in schools and how horrific it can get. It recently popped up again after my son spoke about what he wished to do to the person who bullied him. Here’s what happened:

My son attended a nursery when he was 2 years old. Observing that it was nice with a relatively pleasing play area, fish pond and lots and lots of toys and sound educational books and materials, I decided to send my son to this nursery. Moreover, it was being managed by a person whom I thought had the right qualities. For one, she’s a graduate in early childhood development and I was so so pleased to know this fact because I thought “okay, this lady sure understand kids very well and I bet there’ll be lots of fun stuff to do and my kid will be in good hands.” She also seems to have a nice personality and looks friendly with the kids (at least that’s what she portrayed in front of us, the parents). My son was doing fine in the beginning but later on, he was disturbed with the idea of having to go to the nursery. He was overcome with anxiety. Imagine a 2 year old waking up at 6 in the morning crying, asking whether he has to go to the nursery on that day, and this happened every day. I felt sad to see my baby crying and worried every day but at first I thought it was just separation anxiety so I kept sending him there. Whenever we arrived at the nursery, he would cry and this got worse as he started wailing and one day he just screamed and ran to our car. “That’s it!” I said. Something must be so wrong with this place. I tried asking my son but he won’t tell anything. He kept everything to himself until he is 4 now, as he is slowly sharing with us what happened. He was practically bullied by the son of the lady who runs the nursery. He was beaten and picked on. Nothing was done about this at that time. The lady never reprimanded her child for bullying small kids.

Now my son says that he wants to do the same thing to the boy as a way of revenge. I told him that it is not the right thing to do. Hitting the person who hit you doesn’t solve the problem. It just makes you like them. The question I asked myself is how do we teach our kids to cope with such situations? How can we tell them to walk away. Can we teach our kids diplomacy?