Welcome to ParentingJoyfully.com
Welcome to ParentingJoyfully.com! We are dedicated to helping parents develop a more fulfilling and joyful relationship with their children and create a happier, more relaxed home environment. We offer group and individual parent coaching services.
Being a parent is the most rewarding job you’ll ever have. That’s not to say it isn’t some of the hardest work you’ll ever do though. But between sleepless nights and messy days, you’ll find the beautiful moments of parenthood more than make up for the challenge.
Parenting Joyfully is dedicated to providing resources and information to help make parenting more rewarding, effective and fun!
TV and Children
Top 10 tips to limit your child’s screen time without scream time!
Eight year old Kyle received no less then 9 new computer and video games for the holidays and his parents are wondering how to keep him under the health professionals’ recommended screen time limit of one and a half hours a day without Kyle throwing a fit.
It can be difficult to impose rules on time spent in front of the TV, video machine, DVD and handheld players, but it’s not impossible. Here are the top ten ways to help your child manage screen time and not destroy your valuable parenting relationship.
1. Redirect to other stimulation. Have board games set up, sports equipment ready to go, or recipe ingredients laid out ready for a baking session.
2. Be involved and knowledgeable of where they travel on the Internet and whom they play games with. Spend time building the parent-child relationship by taking an interest in their on-line gaming and chatting pursuits. It’s easier to direct them to your activities after you connect for a while in their playground.
3. Don’t punish – problem solve! It’s not a battle of you against them. It’s you and your child against the problem. You are both on the same team! Work the problem out together to everyone’s satisfaction and enjoy the new rules and increased connection.
4. Model a balanced life that includes seven keys to health and happiness. Invite your child to participate with you in your pursuit of the seven keys of a balanced life. Many children will get active if the parents or the whole family is involved:
7 Keys to a Balanced Life:
- Social time – time spent with friends
- Physical activity time – exercise, sports, active play
- Mental exercise time – educational activities, games, puzzles, homework, reading
- Spiritual time – volunteering, meditating, solitude, unstructured play, church
- Family time – doing projects
- Financial time – job
- Hobby Time – leisure pursuits and projects
Teenage Development
We need to better understand adolescent developmental stages to help us not take teenage behavior as a personal attack on us. By becoming familiar with these stages, we will increase our competence in encouraging teens to establish their sense of identity.
- Teens are preparing to separate or individuate from the family. They are in the process of developing their values.
- Teenagers must initiate this separation and often rebellion gives them the energy to do this. A teenager challenges rules and values as a way of establishing his or her individuality. Adolescents cannot do this in a vacuum, but rather through conflict and confrontation.
- Adolescents may be rude or make fun of parents and other authority figures and not want to be with them. In a teenager’s mind, defiance expresses autonomy and says that he or she doesn’t need parents in and often serves as a test of parental caring.
- Due to body changes, there can be confusion about whether teenagers really do want to grow up.
- Hormonal changes cause mood swings marked by tearfulness, heightened sensitivity, sudden flare-ups, an increased need for physical activity and inappropriate laughter and giggling.
- Teens begin to work out their relationships with their peers to find out how they fit in.
- Teens start relating to the opposite sex in a different way than they did when they were younger (where there were once friendships, romantic relationships and/or deeply felt negative emotions may surface).
- Teenagers have a heightened need for privacy. Experiencing privacy gives them a new sense of control and autonomy. They need privacy to test things out for themselves without parent input.
- Teenagers may feel all-powerful and all-knowing at the same time that they experience fears of inadequacy and failure.
- Teens still need an adult to relate to, but in a different way than they did when they were younger.
Ten Keys to Successful Parenting
It is important that we discipline in a way that teaches responsibility by motivating our children internally, to build their self-esteem and make them feel loved. If our children are disciplined in this respect, they will not have a need to turn to gangs, drugs, or sex to feel powerful or belong.
The following ten keys will help parents use methods that have been proven to provide children with a sense of well-being and security.
1 – Use Genuine Encounter Moments (GEMS)
Your child’s self-esteem is greatly influenced by the quality of time you spend with him-not the amount of time that you spend. With our busy lives, we are often thinking about the next thing that we have to do, instead of putting 100% focused attention on what our child is saying to us. We often pretend to listen or ignore our child’s attempts to communicate with us. If we don’t give our child GEMS throughout the day, he will often start to misbehave. Negative attention in a child’s mind is better than being ignored.
It is also important to recognize that feelings are neither right nor wrong. They just are. So when your child says to you, “Mommy, you never spend time with me” (even though you just played with her) she is expressing what she feels. It is best at these times just to validate her feelings by saying, “Yeah, I bet it does feel like a long time since we spent time together.”
2 – Use Action, Not Words
Statistics say that we give our children over 2000 compliance requests a day! No wonder our children become “parent deaf!” Instead of nagging or yelling, ask yourself, “What action could I take?” For example, if you have nagged your child about unrolling his socks when he takes them off, then only wash socks that are unrolled. Action speaks louder than words.