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Makes Living Fun

How To Make Holidays Productive For Your Children

By:

26th-blog (1)

Holidays -the most awaited time of the year! Children run out their schools on the last day of exam with inexplicable excitement. The parents, meanwhile, wonder how they will contain that excitement for the following two months!

While some take to travelling other parents enlist their children to summer workshops where various skills are picked up. To continue your daily chores & office work, without interruptions, your children need to  be occupied. They need to learn how to spend time by themselves when their parents are busy. Once you make them independent they enjoy their holidays better and you enjoy a peaceful time!

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Benefits Of Growing Up With A Sibling

By:

5th (1)

There was a time when having more than one baby was the norm and having one baby was more of a concern. But today, with rising inflation, exorbitant costs attached to baby care & education, parents are thinking twice about having more than one child. It may sound like a fair enough reason for rearing a single child, but there many reasons why your child needs to grow up with siblings-here are some:

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Teaching Your Child To Share

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Blog - 15th Jan

Is your child possessive about his/her toy or bedsheet? Does he/she throw a tantrum when a friend or sibling plays with his/her toy? Research says that children learn to share at the age of 3, but may take time to adopt the concept. There are ways in which you can encourage the concept of sharing in your little one.

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Let’s Play, Learn & Teach Without Gadgets!

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Blog Engage without gadgets - 9th Oct

Gadgets have made life easier than we could ever imagine. They help us reach people, across the world,  through calls/email, serve as great navigators when we are in someplace new, house apps which have transformed the way eat, dress and socialise!  But most of all, gadgets have given us new forms of entertainment. Entertainment which is great, as long as we don’t get too carried away and forget the outside world – This is exactly what is happening with our children.

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Don’t Let The Blue Whale Bite Your Children!

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Blue Whale Blog - 11 Sept

Dangerous gaming apps like the Blue Whale Challenge have taken the world by shock. The game designed by a Russian has resulted in 130 children suicides in Russia and 3 casualties in  India. The game gives children (generally teens are the victims) tasks to do, tasks as risky as, cutting a body part. The 50th and last challenge is the winning challenge, which is death by suicide. Experts warn parents of this contagious and addictive  game and share steps for prevention

  1. With both parents working, children are often alone for most parts of the day. Make sure you spend time with them once you get home. Ask them what they have been watching or reading on the internet. Sometimes, loneliness is not the reason, it is curiosity or the desire to do something ‘thrilling’ which gets children to play the game.The media has been sharing the consequences of games like Blue Whale Challenge, so your children probably know about it; but even so, do take time out to tell them about the game.
  2. Don’t gift them latest gadgets; it sends them the wrong signal. Children are young and have studies and other activities to focus on. They don’t need smartphones. A basic phone, primarily for communication purposes, is more than enough. In such cases, there is a lower risk of them succumbing to games like these.
  3. Monitor your child’s behaviour closely. Keep a lookout for mood swings, dull behaviour or even when they spend too much time locked in their rooms with phones or laptops. Keep a check on their usage of these gadgets and be stern about when they can use it. For eg, discourage the use of phones during dinner or an outing. However, parents must find a fine balance between monitoring and curtailing the child.
  4. Apart from monitoring your child in the real world, monitor his/her virtual world too. Use parental controls on all devices used by your children. Monitor their digital footprints and give them limited access to social media. For e.g., if the quantity of data is being consumed during odd hours, like between 1 am and 2 am, it is a sign of abnormal virtual activity.
  5. Attend workshops which are conducted by psychiatrists or cyber experts. These workshops will guide parents on how they can prevent their children from falling prey to such apps and even understanding signs of psychological changes or behavioural changes.
  6. Parents and schools must look out for these signs and treat them as they would any other illness; instead of attaching the stigma associated with mental illness.

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Importance of spending quality time with your children

By:

3rdapril

Time and tide wait for no one, they say. Time flies and often makes us wonder whether an hour these days is really made up of as many minutes as it was when we were young. In those days life was a more leisurely affair, and everybody seemed to have time for everyone else.

Alas, that is no longer the case. Our lifestyles and habits have changed beyond recognition, trying to keep pace with life in the fast lane in the modern times.

Five to six days of work a week, and spending Sunday trying to recover from the bruises sustained during the week leaves us with very little time or inclination for social interaction.

We still have exactly the same number of hours made up of exactly the same number of minutes as you had when we were, well, young. But strangely, everyone is pressed for time.

However, when it is time for our children to move out, many of us wonder why we never noticed it. Empty nest syndrome is a fact of life, but dreaded by every parent. Parents are suddenly filled with remorse for not spending enough time with their children.

Why it is important to spend quality time with your children?

● Bonding between child and the parents: It is absolutely necessary to provide enough time and attention to this vital aspect of parenting. The bonds that are formed during the formative years remain strong even without physical presence.
● Family as support system: Children learn through observation and the importance given by parents to family life will play a major role when it is time for your children to start a family of their own. A healthy society is just an extension of healthy family life.
● Reading vital signs in time: Spending quality time with your child will help you notice abrupt behavioral changes that may be early warning signs of some serious condition.
● Taking stock: Spending regular time with your kids will help you take stock of your child’s activities, and may be, make a course correction at the right time.
● Leaning on each other: A great way to solve a problem is to depend and lean on each other. Knowing that someone is always there for them will make your children take on life boldly and with supreme confidence.

Finally, family life is all about being there for each other, and caring for each other. Spending quality time is a term popular with child psychologists, and social anthropologists, that emphasises the importance of quality over quantity.

The trick therefore is to, not spend a lot of time but enough time that can really make a difference – to the child and to us, the parents.

As they say, it’s not the hours of work that you put in that matter, but it’s really all about the work that you put in those hours.