Entries Tagged 'children' ↓

Valentine’s Day. The red hearts make us feel like love and happiness is all around. We see images of couples hugging and gazing into each other’s eyes and we want that. We go shopping at beautifully decorated stores and envision making our loved one feel special and cherished. And, secretly, we hope our partners are thinking and doing the same for us. The spirit behind Valentine’s Day is beautiful. Don’t we all want more of it though?

What do you think matters most to your children? You driving them to lessons and practices, or is it the smile and hug you greet them with after school?

Stores are busy right now. Maybe people aren't buying as much as in past years but they're buying nonetheless. Everyone is in the spirit of giving, but deep down also looking forward to receiving. The common denominator here is "things" and "stuff". Now, I'm all for making people happy and seeing the smile on their face when they open an exciting gift - that really brings me joy. And, of course, I love receiving a gift from someone special, but life experience has taught me that this "stuff" cannot really bring what most of us want for Christmas .

Our children love certain toys or brands and they make their lists for sure, however, I suggest that we parents do something a little extra special at Christmas.

Christmas is such an exciting time. Family and friends gather together to laugh, eat great food and share gifts with each other. What could be better? There is one way parents can make Christmas even better and that is by giving their children a present that is a tradition.

My parents always gave us presents that we had asked for however my mother always bought us a new pair of pajamas. We were just as excited to see what type or color we would be getting that year. It gave warmth to our Christmas celebration and deepened the connection we had with our mother. My father saw how happy we became, even as teenagers when we opened the special gift from “MOM”, so he decided to start his own tradition. He bought five different types of Scratch n’ Win Lotto tickets for each of us and after all the other presents were opened we sat at the dinner table and used pennies to scratch away. We have continued this tradition throughout boyfriends and now husbands.

It is really wonderful to watch our faces after we have opened the gifts because we all know what is coming next! One year, during the last recession, we lost the two restaurants that my family owned. There were no presents under the tree that year, dinner was tapered down, and there were no Scratch n’ Wins to scratch. Going without the presents was easy, and eating a little less was fine. The one thing we all felt melancholy about was the fact that we could no longer do our special tradition after dinner. It’s silly, really. We never win much, maybe ten dollars, but it was the consistency we missed and the hollers of, “Whoo hoo, I won a dollar!” that we missed. Of course we had other traditions that we continued like playing board games until the wee hours of the night, but it just goes to show how special and cherished traditions are for people and children especially.

So, here are some gift ideas that you can use to begin a family tradition and add more warmth to your family’s Christmas experience.

1. Books, novels
2. Calendars
3. Funny or colorful socks
4. Crafty toys
5. Scientific toys
6. Bookmarks
7. Slippers
8. Christmas ornaments
9. Wallets
10. Something with the 1st letter of your child’s name (pens, pads of paper, notebooks, pencils, books, socks, picture frames, calendar, key chain, wallet) The ideas are endless and will always keep your child guessing!

Christmas is a magical time where family is the focus. Deepen the bonds you share with your children by adding a special tradition. I promise you that when your child remembers holidays past, in ten years time, it won’t be the toy they asked for that they will remember, it will be the one that their mom or dad always gave them.

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Erin Kurt, B.Ed, spent 16 years as a teacher and nanny around the world. Now, she applies her expertise as a parenting expert and author of Juggling Family Life. You can learn more about Erin and her simple, loving parenting method, and subscribe to her weekly parenting tips e-zine at ErinParenting.com.

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Feeling snowed under in the run up to the Christmas?As kids we look forward to this time of year. There's the advent calendar, lights, tree, decorations, school vacations, stocking, a visit from Father Christmas and, of course, the long anticipated presents.But sadly, once you've grown up, with all the responsibilities and obligations being an adult entails, your Christmas spirit can get snuffed out. Even thinking about the planning, preparation and costs involved can fill you with dread.

I love a line I read in a book once. It went something like this: “If it isn’t life threatening, if the house is not ablaze, if it is not an emergency, or if the child you are yelling to is not half a mile away, then yelling is the wrong choice in parenting.”

Yelling negatively and directly affects the way children see themselves and how they feel about their life and their place in this world. Yelling is also bad for the parents’ self-esteem since it is usually a behaviour that one regrets or is ashamed of.

It is important to realize that when a parent yells they are not editing what they say the same way they would if they were speaking in a calmer moment of discussion or conversation.

The first step one must take to stop yelling is to understand what triggers the yelling. Yes, one’s child is probably doing something naughty, however, it is important to think about what makes one choose to yell instead of speaking matter-of-factly.

Ninety percent of the time, the reason people yell is that they were yelled at as children. Even though they may have hated being yelled at it is all they know and simply fall into that same pattern during times of stress with their own children.

The second step is to realize what response is most likely to occur after one finishes yelling. Because yelling makes a child feel badly about themselves they will often lash back in order to protect themselves, and then become revengeful. They may, out of fear and sadness, stop the behaviour for a short period of time, however the anger and humiliation they felt will build up and soon enough they will lash out. A good example here is when parents think yelling works when their children are small, but are shocked when they experience severe disobedience when their children get a little older.

So, if one knows that they are yelling simply because it is what they have learned and they understand that the result of yelling never achieves the desired result, what is the alternative? What is the solution?

Instead of yelling one must train oneself to take a deep breath and then state the behaviour they want from their child in a matter-of-fact, assertive tone of voice.

If one’s child is begging them to watch TV when it is homework time, one should simply say, “You need to stop whining and go do your homework.” If the begging continues say, “You can stop begging right now or you can go to time out. What is your choice?” If the child is used to yelling, they will probably continue, so the parent should take the child by the hand and walk him/her to a predetermined time out spot. The amount of time the child should spend there is one minute per year of age. After the time is up one should go back and state what they expect from their child again – to begin their homework.

With this these new tools, one should feel more confident that they have the knowledge now to change from what they have learned from their own parents to what they now know is the better, more effective way to handle discipline.

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Erin Kurt, B.Ed, spent 16 years as a teacher and nanny around the world. Now, she applies her expertise as a parenting expert and author of Juggling Family Life. You can learn more about Erin and her simple, loving parenting method, and subscribe to her weekly parenting tips e-zine at ErinParenting.com.

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I recently took possession of a pair of older PCs – the natural consequence of nagging one’s older relatives to get something a little more “post-Columbian” – and of course my first instinct is to refurbish one as a Linux PC for my nephew and niece, ages 7 and 5. My nephew, especially, is computer-obsessed, and I figure that giving him a complete child-friendly, education-focused PC might encourage some more productive “play” than he gets using mom and dad’s PC.

Kid-Friendly Linux Distributions

Believe it or not, there are several distributions of Linux intended for use by children as young as 3 years old. Child-oriented Linux distros tend to have a simplified interface with large, “chunky”, colorful icons and a specialized set of programs designed with kids in mind. Some of the better-known distributions aimed at children include:

• Sugar, the operating system designed for the One Laptop Per Child project. Sugar is a radical departure from traditional desktops, with a strong emphasis on teaching programming skills, but is very strongly geared towards classroom use. Although I’m pretty comfortable using Linux, I’m afraid Sugar might be too different for me to help my nephew and niece make use of it.
• Edubuntu is based on the popular Ubuntu distribution. Designed to be easy to install and very Windows-like in its operation, Edubuntu would be my first choice if I were using newer hardware. With its rich graphical interface, though, I worry that these years-old PCs, neither of which have graphic cards, will lag running Edubuntu. And given kids’ attention spans, I’m afraid that would be a major barrier to getting them to use it.
• LinuxKidX uses a KDE-based desktop highly customized for children, and is based on the Slackware distro. The only drawback for me is that most of the support material is in Portuguese (although the distro I linked to is in English), making it hard for me to be confident about my ability to help if there are any problems.
• Foresight for Kids is based on Foresight Linux, a distro distinguished by the use of the Conary package manager. Conary is intended to make updates and dependencies much easier to manage than other package managers – in English, it should be easier to install and update software.  On the other hand, finding software packaged for the Conary installer might be a challenge, though I expect the most popular programs are being adapted by the Foresight team.
• Qimo is another system based on Ubuntu, but designed to be used by a single home user instead of in classroom instruction. The system requirements are fairly low, since it’s designed to be run on donated equipment which Qimo’s parent organization, QuinnCo, distributes to needy kids.

Given the low specs of the equipment I”m working with, Qimo seems idea for me, but since most of these will run from either a Live CD or a USB memory key, there’s no reason not to download them all and give each a try to see what you – and, more importantly, your kids – like best.

Linux Software for Kids

In addition to the kid-friendly interface, all of the distributions above come with an assortment of software that’s either designed especially for kids or has special appeal for kids. This includes specifically educational software intended to teach math, typing, art, or even computer programming; typical productivity applications like word processors and graphics programs; and, of course, games. Of course, Linux doesn’t have nearly the range of games that are available for Windows PCs, but my thinking is, the games are good enough for younger kids, and older kids will gravitate towards consoles (my brother and sister-in-law have a Wii).

Some of the software available for kids includes:

• GCompris, a set of over 100 educational games intended to teach everything from basic computer use to reading, art history, telling time, and vector drawing.
• Childsplay is another collection of games, with an emphasis on memory skills.
• TuxPaint, an amazing drawing program filled with fun sound effects and neat effects.
• EToys is a scripting environment, more or less. The idea is that kids solve problems by breaking them down into pieces, scripting them, and running their scripts – the same way programmers do. But the goal doesn’t seem to be to teach programming but rather to provide an immersive learning environment in which kids learn foundational thinking skills.
• SuperTux and Secret Maryo are Super Mario clones, because kids love Super Mario. You already know that.
• TomBoy, a wiki-like note-taking program.
• TuxTyping, a typing game intended to help develop basic typing skills.
• Kalzium is a guide to the periodic table and a database of information about chemistry and the elements. Great for older students.
• Atomix, a cool little game where kids build molecules out of atoms.
• Tux of Math Command is an arcade game that helps develop math skills.

Not all distros come with all of these games, but they are easy enough to install from the online repositories if your chosen distro doesn’t come with one or more of them. Of course, most distros also come with standard Linux programs like OpenOffice.org (an Office-like suite of productivity apps), AbiWord (a Word-like word processor), GIMP (a powerful image editor), Pidgin (a multi-account IM client), and Firefox.

Linux is a complex operating system, but it’s also a highly customizable one – for kids, that means a system that can grow as they do and a powerful learning environment. Of course, children’s computer use should not be totally unsupervised – any kid can stumble across Web content that might be pretty uncomfortable for mom and dad to have to explain – but kids should have a chance to explore the possibilities of today’s technology and get their hands dirty, like kids do. And worst-case scenario – your 6-year old borks the operating system and you re-install. Wouldn’t you rather it was on the Edubuntu system, rather than on your mission-critical work PC? (Make sure you back up the /home directory regularly so you don’t lose all your kids’ drawings, poems, stories, or whatever.)

Do you know of other kid=friendly Linux distributions? Have you set up a Linux PC for your kids? Are their other games or programs you’d recommend? Let us know your experiences in the comments.

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Dustin M. Wax is the project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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