Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Calm Parenting Tips

A few good resources about Calm Parenting:

  • Peaceful Parents, Peaceful Kids: Practical Ways to Create a Calm and Happy Home by Drew

  • Screamfree Parenting: The Revolutionary Approach to Raising Your Kids by Keeping Your Cool by Runkel

  • 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families by Covey

  • The DVD serives Celebrate Calm by Martin

  • Getting to Calm: Cool Headed Strategies for Parenting Tweens and Teensby Kastner and Wyatt

In the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, Covey presents the benefits of thinking about the individual relationships you have with family members as an Emotional Bank Account. In my home, I would have three accounts, one for each child and one with my husband. In this account deposits include things like speaking nicely to each other, speaking nicely about each other, spending time together or helping with a task. Withdraws include things like arguing, snide remarks, talking negatively aobut each other or being late for something important to them. The idea is to keep the balance overwhelmingly positive. It needs to be far more positive becaues the relationship will face challenges and upsets and the positives need to be able to absorb the negatives. Think about each account in the last 24 hours. Ask yourself if there was a positive balance. Keep a running tally moving forward.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Planning Summer Travel Tips

Summer travel is coming up and if your trips are big, it may be time to start planning. As early as three years old, there can be benefits in including children in the planning process. Here are some ideas to get you started:

  • Find child friendly outings near your destination spots. Whether you are headed to the beach or the theme park, look for area museums, zoos and aquariums. You may need a break from the planned activity or find yourself with a rainy day. Last summer we had a rainy day and found a two hour scenic trainride through the countryside.

  • If traveling by car, find child friendly outings along the way. Especially for long trips, it can be helpful to plan real breaks. Stop and take in a picnic at a playground or walk through a museum. Bring physical activities like balls and jump ropes for shorter stops.

  • Set aside a bag to collect brochures, menus, tickets, receipts and other memorabilia from the trip. Some of this can add to the scrap book with photos, the rest is just fun to collect.

  • For the destination itself, visit websites in the months before and encourage your children to explore and plan their time. Before our trip to Disney, our children each picked a restaurant and a show they wanted during our time in the park.

  • If possible, check out books about the destination. Learn about the history, culture and food of the area with your children.

  • If you've made this trip before, talk with your children often about the last trip. Talk about their favorite times and what they hope to do again. If available, review the photos

  • If traveling by car, start collecting a bag of travel toys. This can be small new things or things they haven't seen in a while. In our bag we carry woodkins, magnet board games, colorwonder markers and paper, a few polly pockets and matchbox cars, travel bingo and lacing cards.