Be An Active Parent

Being an active parent in your children's lives is extremely important because it helps teach them and shape them into the adults that they will sometimes be. Being an active parent doesn't have to feel like parenting. You can actually make parenting fun and follow this ways to do just that. 

1. Outdoor Activities

Doing outdoor activities with your children such as playing basketball, cricket, kickball, tennis, or football is being active with your children. If you and your children are not into sports, you could always go hiking, fishing, canoeing, bike riding or swimming. If you are looking for simple outdoor activities to do as a family try going for a picnic and playing at the park a few times a week.

2. Board Games

Get children away from those video games and play some fun board games with them at the dinning room table. Heck, even add some munching snacks along with game time. It is sure fine way of being active in your children's lives and having a bit of fun with them too.

3. Baking

Baking cookies, breads, pies, or pizzas can be fun for you and your children to do together. In addition, it helps them learn how to measure out things with measuring cups and how to bake. Eventually, all children do need some real life skills for when they are all grown up.

4. Chores

Now I know you think chores don't sound like a fun way of being an active parent, but taking the time out of the day as a family to clean up the house is one way of being an active family. It also helps teach your children responsibility and home to take care of their belongings.

5. Family Date Night

You and the family should pick one night out of the month or week to go out for a night on the town to grab some food and do some fun activities such as bowling, roller skating, or going to see a movie at a theater, It a great way to spend time with the family out of the house.

          Good Parenting Skills Can Be Learned

1. Availability

Be available for your child. Yes, these are hectic and busy times, but you should never be too busy for your child, especially when they need you. Do not only be available when they say they need you, because chances are high that they will not come right and say that. Offer yourself to them and let them know that you are available to them. Let them know that they are important to you, as they should be. Dedicate a reasonable amount of your time each day to spending it with them. That might even be just watching their favorite TV program with them or reading them a book or going for a short walk with them.

2. Appreciation

The most powerful drive towards good behavior in children is in being appreciated. When a child does well at something, express your appreciation for them. When they do something nice for you, show your appreciation for that. Everyone likes to be appreciated, and children are especially sensitive to this. Appreciation also helps them make that maturing determination of what is right and what is wrong, based on how appreciated they feel. The more you appreciate their good deeds, the more their behavior will be in line with what you want and expect.

3. Affection

All of us wants to be loved, especially children. They are constantly searching for ways in which they can be loved by you. You are their focal point and they want to please you by their very nature. You need to be aware that love is the basis and foundation of a lasting relationship.

4. Acceptance

Everyone wants to be accepted and children are no different. You should go out of your way to show they unconditional acceptance. This provides them with a level of self-worth and helps to keep their self-esteem level high. It also gives them a sense of security in the act of acceptance. If you as their parent cannot accept them, then nobody else will either, and they realize this.

Increase Your Child's Memory

 

                                    

All of us Parents wants our child to be intelligent and have amazing amount of memory but what do we do to make this possible? A tremendous insight will happen regarding memory if we were to understand exactly why and how does memory increase. 

Whatever you learn, at first it goes into your sensory memory, where it stays for about a few seconds to a few hours. Depending upon how you relate to the information, it travels into your short-term memory, where it stays from about a few hours to a few days and then into your long-term memory where it remains for life. Presently we shall talk only about the long-term memory.

A given piece of information will pass from our short-term memory into our long-term memory if we are able to either associate it with something more obvious or if the piece of information by itself is very outstanding or if the information is repeated on us again and again. 

Thus, the three main steps to convert anything into long-term memory are:

1. Association

It happens when we link information with certain things that we find easier to remember. For e.g. we often link the names of the nine planets, in their particular order, to a statement which goes 'My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets', where the first alphabet of each word denotes the names of the planets which are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto respectively. Similarly, the colors of the rainbow are abbreviated as 'VIBGYOR' to help us remember their exact order of sequence.

2. Outstanding

Outstanding is something which is strikingly different or beyond the normal. Such a piece of information automatically creates a niche in your brain thus allowing you to remember it for life. For e.g. those of us who experienced it, will never forget the rainfall in Mumbai on 26th July 2005. Personally I will never forget an almost fatal fall I had from a cliff or a similar fall I had from a boat into the water. Such outstanding things remain engraved in our life forever and go deep down into the long-term memory like when - Earthquakes, Bomb Explosions are always remembered along with exciting cricket matches which have a photo - finish - India winning the 1983 world cup or 2011 world cup.

3. Repetition 

Repetition is the revision of a particular topic at regular intervals. This is the base of academic learning and involves a very systematic approach for 100 % effectiveness. Whatever your child learns should be reaffirmed after the first 10 minutes, then after 24 hours or 1 day, then after a week, subsequent to that, after 1 month and finally after about 3 months to 6 months. This will ensure that the particular information gets embedded into his long-term memory guaranteeing excellent results.

- By Manoj Lekhi