Namrataa is a certified Life Coach and Founder of Life Beyond Motherhood. She specialises in coaching mothers on finding their life balance. She can be reached at namrataa@lifebeyondmotherhood.com.

She also blogs at http://worldofmoms.wordpress.com.

Gone are the days when one would say, ‘there is no school which teaches parenting’ because there are such schools that are functional and in demand now. However, not all of us might be inclined to learn about parenting and we might want to discover things along the way. Well, to each their own. Parenting is a unique journey which each of us must traverse for ourselves. Then, of course, there is the child – a result of the parenting that is doled out. If the child is a result of the parenting received, I often wonder how a child processes information that he / she receives which might sometimes be contradictory. For instance, one parent likes to binge on junk food while the other is on a health trip or one parent believes academics are the way to success in life while the other might think academics are really quite irrelevant in the long run. So what does the child believe? Research has proven that when presented with two scenarios, human beings are more likely to pick the one which presents an easier path. The easier path that gets chosen, may not necessarily be the best path for the child. Does one parent work on undoing the path that he / she does not want the child to follow? It can all become quite a mesh and at the end of it all, can leave the child unsure about his / her choices in life and have a lasting impact on his / her self-confidence.

So what does one do? The answer is similar to what organizations resort to when they want to cascade a certain culture – ‘Alignment’. Well, it might sound unrealistic, but think of it this way. Culture Alignment, in an organization, is meant to get employees to align their own objectives with the organization’s objectives. Similarly, parenting needs alignment too. Communication is key to any kind of alignment. If parents end up arguing about how they do things differently, the child is at a loss. If, on the other hand, parents are able to discuss about how to handle a particular situation and how to provide the child with consistent messaging, the child would be clear about what is acceptable and what is not.

There are certainly divergent views that exist. More often than not, I would say. In such cases, agreeing on dividing up roles and responsibilities helps, with the agreement that messaging would remain consistent. It is like being a leader in an organization. At any point in time, one needs to uphold the organization’s interest. One cannot promote one’s own beliefs over an organization’s culture. The organization in this case, is the child.

Making time to reconnect as a couple is important, especially after having a child. Making time to discuss parenting is equally important too. There is, after all, a human being each of us parents are responsible for; someone who will soon grow up and mirror everything that he / she believes the parents stand for. Are we aligned on what we stand for, together?

Re-published with permission from the blog of ParentEdge, a bi-monthly parenting magazine that aims to expose parents to global trends in learning and partner with them in the intellectual enrichment of their children.

Weekend is here and here is your chance to spend some quality time with your children. Get your official work and your childrens’ homework out of the way get set for a weekend worth remembering!

Outdoor activities can be a great way to bond with your children. Keep lethargy away from them with these great outdoor activity ideas:

Go on a picnic

Picnics have become rare nowadays. Earlier, it was one of the best things to do with your family and friends. People get together, eat good food, play some sports, have a gala time and go back home tired yet extremely happy.

Pack a picnic basket with yummy goodies like cakes, chocolates (let your kids indulge once in a while) etc. But don’t forget the carrot and apples! Go some place where there is a huge open field, trees and maybe even a lake. Play games like frisbee, cricket, football or catch with your family. Invite your friends and your children’s friends as well. The more the merrier!

Host a sports tournament

Gather all your neighbourhood kids and organise a sports tournament in your campus or  nearby park. It can be cricket, football, basketball or any other sport. Encourage the adults to join in as well. It is a great way for adults to teach their children about healthy competition and sportsmanship.

You can even invite other neighbourhoods to join in the competition. This way you and your children will make new friends. Have snacks and beverages organised (the whole locality can pool in) – you can buy food or have a potluck arrangement. Channeling your children’s energy into the right direction will help them stay out of trouble!

Have a treasure hunt

Another fun outdoor activity you can organise for your children is treasure hunt. Plant clues all over your house and neighbourhood (make sure you supervise them). You can even place goodies after they discover each place – it could be something small like chocolate or a small toy.

Let the final prize be worth their effort. It could be a coupon to their favourite toy store, or a promise of a new bike, tickets to the new animated movie etc. If you planning to take your family on a trip, then treasure hunt could be a great way for them to find out this news!

Plant some trees

Get some saplings and start planting trees with your child. It is a great way to get your child closer to mother nature. This is one time when you won’t mind your child getting all muddy and dirty – and they will love it as well!

And watching the tree grow will give them a sense of accomplishment and pride. At the same time you are doing something for the environment!

Go to a resort

Plan a day of fun with your entire family and take off to a great resort. Most resorts have arrangements for indoor and outdoor games including pool, badminton, table tennis, cricket etc. Pools are always the highlight of every resort – and kids love playing in water! Play water polo or have swimming competitions.

Campfires are also a great way to spend some quality time with your children. Tell stories to each other and make them animated!

Nothing is as rejuvenating as fun weekends with your children!

 I am still not sure if I would be lucky enough to drop in at ParentEdge premises soon and have a chance to gauge what the perception is on how technology leaves its mark on children – an issue which has been in my mind for long. So I thought – Why not pen down my thoughts on this topic and hope for readers to put forth their thoughts and opinions too? It’s easy to think of the good and bad effects of anything and see if the good outweighs the bad or not and accordingly decide to accept or shun it. Here it’s not so easy because no matter how much we discuss the impact of technology on kids today, we all know its presence in our lives is only getting stronger each day and we better know how to deal with it, handle it and use it, else we’ll be strongly controlled by it even before we come to know about it.

As a mother of two – a kindergartener and a junior school student, and somebody who has the fortune of sharing friendship with many mothers whose children are in the age range of 1-16, I can say technology has become a permanent and integral part of our life and is thus welcomed by our children too. When a parent is in continuous association with some form of technology or the other throughout the day, is it a surprise that the child too considers it an essential part of life, that there is nothing wrong with it? I had a sudden urge to focus on the different modes through which most of the children around, including mine, are exposed to technology. These are cell-phones, computer games and Internet mostly that come to my mind, besides PS3s and a few other things that, of course, aren’t within the reach of every child I see around.

How is cell-phone affecting a kindergartener?

I have seen how my almost-ten-year-old son gets glued to it and spends fiddling with it in the car during some week-end drives down to an eatery or a shop because playing games on it is far more thrilling than looking out of the window to catch different kinds of sights or even a chit-chat with us sitting inches away from him. A great opportunity of the rare father-son communication lost right away, but who is bothered anyway? That is enough to inspire my kindergartener who waits for an opportunity to grab it and keep tapping it for a continuously changing screen. She knows she has an equal right to it since it’s her father’s and sees it as a great time-pass tool – as if we have frequent or boring family talks over the weekdays!

What would she know about the behavioural issues cell-phones cause amongst very young children?! Did you know that cell-phone is fast becoming a “coming of age”-symbol for the preteens in my neighbourhood? A mother narrated to me the other day how her naïve eleven-year-old daughter is not allowed to be part of the group of girls her age because she doesn’t sport around a cell-phone during her evening walks! It doesn’t occur to the girls that evenings are for playing around and making the most of the free time and investing in their health through outdoor games and not strolling around with cell-phones! I’ve even caught my son poring over his friend’s PS3 during the time I thought he was playing around!

The same boy, years ago, had once wisely told him his mom had said he should spend time on such things than have an afternoon nap (that was supposed to be a way of preparing the boy for adjusting to long hours in school when he was about to move up from short hours at kindergarten to junior school!) What I feel is children don’t really need cell-phones. Computer games is again another mode of entertainment that snatches away the evenings from the growing children. They definitely do make them more tech-savvy and smart and alert, but surreptitiously adds issues like child obesity and disturbed sleep patterns and often hyperactivity too to a teen’s and a preteen’s life.

My next-door-neighbour’s ex-tenant took quite some time to track down her four-year-old son’s short attention span in school to his long hours with computer games. And now I come to my favourite – the Internet. I see how Mindspark, an online Mathematics program my son works with on Internet that he has been introduced to in school, excites him and goads him to complete problems at his fastest pace to help him win stickers he could brag about in school. I also see how he can do research on school topics when he sits down on Internet, but I also wonder how long I’ll have to keep my watchful eyes on him lest something inappropriate pops up on the screen and draws an unsuspecting but curious boy into a world for which he is still not prepared. I also see how he is negotiating with me on doing fewer written problems (needed for a strong base) for more Mindspark time that involves just a click and pressing buttons. But I also think of how I had copied verbatim his hand-written notes on some Creative Writing topics on my laptop and then to thrill him had uploaded them on a blog area I had created for him and which I operate and he only gets to see once in a blue moon. His eyes glazed when his mentor at Magic Puddles, seeing it, had praised him, saying how well he had written about his summer camp experience there, but emphasizing that he kept writing in his notebook which I could keep copying. It gave my son a confidence and a much-needed push to be in the habit of writing on such topics.

Without Internet, would an eight-year-old’s writings ever catch anybody’s attention? (He had begun writing on such topics when he was eight which I later typed and uploaded). Thanks to computers again, my almost-four-year-old daughter, is picking up phonetics, though slowly, much before her brother had begun with it all in school, all because of educational programs shown on the computer in school now and then. So I come to accept that everything is not bad about technology just as everything is not good about it, either. But I do have a vague fear that technology is intoxicating us all.

Children are too powerless before it to realize its huge effect on them, too young to know how much of it is just right for them and that it can begin to control their life, excite them, and even distract them from their highest priority – studies – with new things happening in the field all the time. Being bitten by the technology bug is like catching a contagious disease. One boy in the neighbourhood gets addicted to it and it spreads like wildfire.

With many parents today working for long hours and returning home stressed out and tired, how much of policing can they do on their children?Let us keep a check on how much we are exposing the young, tender, impressionable minds to technology, at what frequency, how long, when and in whose presence (under a guardian’s watchful eyes) and most importantly, checking and controlling what exactly they get to see and experience through technology. Leaving them to research on a project topic on Internet while one goes for shopping may not be a good idea, as my neighbour feels. Let us explain to them they’ll be given more freedom in this matter as they grow and gain more maturity.

My son came home recently after a bout of cricket with his friends, a few of them older than him, asking if I could open a few Facebook accounts for him (he doesn’t have one till now), mentioning one of them has fifteen! Surprised, I asked him, “Why?” He replied, “To make friends!” When I said he is lucky to be in an apartment complex teeming with boys, many of whom are already his friends, he said, “But Facebook friends I want!” What he couldn’t or didn’t articulate was that he just wanted to be like one of those senior boys, moving around with an air of importance, and bragging about the number of Facebook accounts he has. He thought he could “grow up” in a jiffy the easy way! Technology, if used wisely (rationing of “tech” hours for right contents in the presence of a watchful guardian), will make the children smarter and well-informed. It’s like medicine – an overdose or the wrong prescription will do harm instead of good. It is also very addictive – even I feel so as an adult, as I try to discipline myself with limited number of “tech” hours with my computer.

Let us be wary to keep alive and strong our age-old Indian culture of working hard as students to be able to have a decent, stable future (that Obama is exhorting American students to do for a firm base in Science and Mathematics), not letting our children succumb to excess of technology and automatically pay less attention to academics and core subjects, while encouraging them to maximize the gains from it with the help of teachers and parents and knowledgeable adults. Technology will definitely leave its mark on our children – let’s hope it’s a positive one, on the whole.

Re-published with permission from the blog of ParentEdge, a bi-monthly parenting magazine that aims to expose parents to global trends in learning and partner with them in the intellectual enrichment of their children.

If you are the kind of parent that plans ahead, then the first day of kindergarten will not take you by surprise.  When the big day arrives, the clothes are all bought, the list the school gave you is complete, teachers conferences are done and you may have even used the last few months before school to help your little one bone up on the alphabet, on her numbers, shapes and colors so that step into a formal educational setting will not be such a shock.

It’s like an invasion in a way.  You are the General and you are preparing your troops to invade a foreign land to achieve an objective.  The difference is the foreign land is not necessarily hostile, it’s a kindergarten room.  And the teacher, administration and even other students there on that first day not only don’t want you to fail, they want to be your team to help your little one do great. The other difference is your invasion force is not a seasoned team of soldiers, it is that sweet little five year old boy or girl with a slightly terrified look in his or her eye.

But like any good General, you do have to be prepared for the unthinkable.  You may make a lot of good speeches about how” failure is not an option”.  But any parent who does not think about what can go wrong and how you will prepare for it and respond is setting themselves up for a catastrophe in the event something doesn’t go perfectly.  But if you are ready for the worst, then your child can still have a great first day at school and get around the problem that otherwise might have ended badly.

The first thing that springs to mind when it comes to accidents or something that might go wrong is with the wardrobe.  In all the excitement and nervousness, if your child spills either on the way to school or during school and soils her garment to where it is not suitable for using the rest of the day, you might get that phone call to come and get your child.

You don’t want to have to take your child out of the classroom until it is absolutely necessary.  You put so much time and effort into building up this big day that to your little boy or girl, if they have to leave the school during the day, it will seem like a tragedy even if it’s only for the day.  The solution for the wardrobe problem is one you may have already thought of which is to send a change of clothes.  By keeping emergency clothing at the school in your child’s locker at all time, it is always there for her to change into and not see a major disruption to her school day.

Another crisis that can come up at the last minute is the sudden emotional meltdown of your child.  If she becomes hysterical with worry or overwhelmed by the newness of it all, it can be a serious issue if you in the drop off line and you need her to go on in to school.  This is not at all unlikely even if you feel your child is not the kind of kid who melts down that easy. The build up to the day and all the new cloths and the excitement can suddenly change course and create an emotional train wreck as your child looks out of the car door at the school door she must go through to start her new life.

But by having a plan, you can even deal with this.  Often such melt downs are temporary.  You can pull out of the drop off line and park the car and comfort the child.  Above all don’t make her feel badly.  Then if she knows its ok, she might recover and go on in.  Worst case – you walk her in.  That is not a catastrophe at all.

Your child must learn to cope with crisis.  It is as much part of learning as books and assignments.  And if she takes her cues from you that there is no crisis that cannot be adjusted to and no issue that cannot be solved, that will be a source of comfort and strength on that first day of school and for every day thereafter.