By Debbie Elder

What messages are you sending to your children? If you give them lots of attention when they misbehave you may want to rethink this strategy. The best way to raise a chronically unhappy and poorly behaved kid is to make a habit of giving lots of attention to them when they act out. Instead, take action, walk away, and have a plan.

Less talk more action is the key. When your child acts badly remove them or take away the offending object immediately. Save the lecture and stay calm. No yelling or frowning, remain stress free. When dealing with young children, remove them from the area and walk or carry them to their room. Tell them when they are ready to act nicely and behave, they are welcome to come out and join the family. If they return to the group and are not ready yet, simply return them to their room for more thinking time.

The goal here is to teach the child that misbehavior doesn’t pay. You need to be consistent and attentive to this strategy in the beginning. Generally when parents first use this technique children need considerable time in their room, but this time shortens quickly. One key to the effectiveness of this technique is to not interact with the child when they are in their room. The fastest way to blow this behavior management method is to use too many words.

When your child emerges from their room don’t lecture or remind them. Simply give them a big hug and move on with your day. If your child acts up again repeat the techniques. Some children require two or three trips to their room when they are first learning this practice. Don’t worry, this is normal.

Have lots of fun with your kids when they are behaving. Your actions speak louder than your words. Being with you and interacting is very important to your children. They want to spend time with you. You want them to miss you when they go to their room for misbehaving. Be silly have fun, enjoy them. When they act out the fun shuts down immediately and you remain calm but turn very boring when they misbehave. The message should be loud and clear, misbehavior is no fun!

By Debbie Elder 

Do you remember the red margins around the pages in your note books in elementary school? Do you remember who got to write in the margin? That’s right, your teacher, that space was saved for her. The margin gave her room to write her comments and instructions. The space was saved and it served as a buffer area. Do you have a buffer area in your life now?

Too many parents today are being pulled in too many directions. From working full time to family responsibilities, not to mention any personal time they might want to spend socializing. If you are reading this and trying to remember what ’socializing with your friends’ feels like, then you are very representative of most parents today. In order to meet the needs of your family you need to meet your needs. Spending time having fun being with your friends is very important. You need to schedule this time into your calendar. Call a babysitter and go on a date night, see a movie with a friend – your kids will love you for it!

If you will commit to taking care of you the entire family benefits. No more excuses. When you allow your personal time margins to collapse, so does your world. By intentionally adding this to your priority list you can expand your margins back to their intended size. Start small and build up. Having raised two daughters I understand the time constraints of parenting. I also remember that I was a much more patient mother when I had time to be me.

Even if it was just to grab a quick coffee with a friend, the adult time really made an impact. Get creative, join a babysitting co-op, trade off with your friends, watch their children and let them reciprocate. If your children are older, take advantage of the time they are at their soccer practice and take a walk, call a friend or make a new friend at the park. Protect your margins, keep your relationships current and make new friends.

By Camille Rodriquez

It happens all the time – we read something and promptly forget what we’ve just read. In an educational setting, this can be a particularly challenging issue. It is a factor of not connecting with the information because students are not attentive to it. The problem seems obvious, but the question remains, “How do I connect if I don’t really want to read this?” Wanting to read an assignment will more likely occur if the student knows how to captivate their attentions while reading.

The first strategy is to know what they hope to gain from the reading before they begin. They focus on the specific and unique knowledge to be gained. What a student hopes to gain from the reading is the starting point to caring about the information. Be sure you help students know the purpose for reading the assignment.

Secondly, good readers don’t jump to conclusions when reading. They allow the information to be read as content for evaluation until they have read all of the content. Good readers ask questions and insert their comments eventually, but allow themselves to read the content objectively. This lets them “listen” to arguments and points the author is making.

The corollary to this is that good readers ask tough questions at the end of the reading. For instance, they might want to consider other explanations, other factors that the author did not include, or possible answers or influences that were not mentioned. Good readers understand that every author is presenting an opinion or assessment of the situation. If a student tries to identify factors at the end of their reading, they have taken one step closer to understanding the material at hand.

Students need to see the value in what you are asking them to do. If they are fully present in the reading by engaging their brains, “listening” to the author, and asking rebuttal questions at the end while paying attention to the details, then they will remember and learn more efficiently. With a little practice, this can be easily incorporated into their daily work, whether for schoolwork now, or business reading later. Be sure you are training an effective reader!

By Debbie Elder

By modeling effective time management strategies you can teach your children habits that benefit them in all areas of their life. If you are not sure about your own personal time management skills, read on! By being purposeful with your time you can lead by example and prepare your children to manage their time efficiently.

You need to control your time or others will! Your clients, customers, staff, friends, and even your family will zap your time. I like to spend as much time with my family as possible. This has served as a great motivator to constantly evaluate where and how I spend my moments. Being clear on goals and targets has really proved beneficial in this process. So, if you need to stop here and address this area, I encourage you to do so. By determining what you want you can allocate the resources you need to accomplish it.

Once you have a clear understanding of your personal desires you can use benchmarks to help stay on track. Daily, weekly, monthly, and per project benchmarks are incredibly helpful and will keep you accountable. Remember, you cannot manage what you cannot measure. Integrity is incredibly important when we are on the topic of time management. Ask yourself, where are you out of integrity with your intentions and goals and what are you willing to do differently?

Time and worry leaks are another area that needs to be addressed. If you will commit to purposeful dedication to staying positive you will see remarkable changes. Daily affirmations are a great way to keep your ’self talk’ positive and on track to success. Unnecessary worrying is another tremendous burden on your time and energy. Take back your power, stay in the now, and make up your mind to control your internal environment.

When faced with procrastination keep in mind the following. Steal the moments, if you can make a dent in a project – do it. Break large jobs into bite sized pieces. Remain realistic. Don’t get overbooked; be mindful of what is reasonable and appropriate. Reward yourself and schedule breaks into your day, you deserve the opportunity to recharge. Live your life within these parameters and you will be an excellent role model for your children!

By Camille Rodriquez

Learning to read more efficiently without sacrificing comprehension is a time-saving essential skill to develop. One particular area to target is visual obstacles. These include visual regression, deceleration, and scattering to name a few. Simple tricks will take care of these issues and help your reading time to become more productive, profitable, and enjoyable.

Visual regression is reading the same words over and over again in the sentence or paragraph. In part, this is because you were not paying attention, and you were not aware of the purpose for your reading. Another reason is that you were not pointed and focused. You may vaguely remember the subject, but not the content. Your eyes were too busy backing up and redoing what you already did.

Visual deceleration is similar. It occurs when you slow down to read something again because it was interesting or entertaining, and you lose focus on where you were going with the assignment. Often with visual deceleration, our minds wander off into unrelated thoughts. Before we know it, we’ve lost time getting sidetracked and not reading.

The final eye pattern worth mentioning is visual scattering. This is when your eyes jump all over the page while reading. Clearly, this hinders comprehension because you read out of order and miss the author’s sequential presentation of the points. This quenches the passion for any reading assignment because you never really “get it” in the first place.

In order to combat visual regression, deceleration, and scattering, you must employ some strategies. The easiest trick is to use your hands while reading. You may have to get used to that feeling again, but using your hands to point the eye will keep your vision targeting the right text as you read.

Along those same lines, you must think of your hands as the metronome for your reading. Move your hands at a constant speed and train the eyes to follow. They set the pace and should be held to a consistent, forward direction.

If you use pointing and pacing consistently you will find your tendencies to be visually distracted while reading all but eliminated. This allows your brain to stay focused on the content of what you are reading, and your comprehension can increase as well as your speed! Simple but effective – and by the way, if you are reading on a computer, use your mouse as your hand!

By Debbie Elder

Coaching your child to success is one of the missions parents are given. Unfortunately not all parents received their copy of the ‘play book’. In a previous article the four reasons children misbehavior was addressed and one of the most common goals of misbehavior is the need for attention. Parents without the ‘play book’ tend to coax and remind their children of the appropriate behavior which temporarily stops the misbehavior only to have it return later. An effective method for dealing with a child’s need for attention is to hold them accountable.

By holding your child accountable you are giving them the one-on-one attention they crave and deserve. In our coaching role we need to be constantly making adjustments, you stay in the driver’s seat with this strategy. When you take your eye off the game, you lose control of the outcome. In parenting when you take your eye off the game you end up in situations that cause you to react instead of respond; crises develop, tempers flare, and feelings get hurt. It is easy to avoid all of this by keeping tabs on your children.

Engage in regular discussions about their day at school; ask how their project is coming along, what is the study schedule for the upcoming test. Be their accountability partner. We all do better when others help us to stay on track. This regular communication gives you the opportunity to readjust and rethink the direction you and your child are heading. It also allows for the opportunity for you to give helpful feedback about what your child is doing well. Positive comments from a parent on a regular basis will do wonders for the expression of positive behaviors from your child. By letting them know exactly what you want they can and will deliver.

Too often parents and children drift apart, not on purpose necessarily but because they haven’t been purposeful! Spending time daily with your children keeps you connected and allows you to lead and direct. Don’t wait for a catastrophe to erupt. Lead by design, mentor with a purpose, and hold your children accountable – they deserve it!

By Debbie Elder

It is the parent’s responsibility to teach money management skills to their children. This process should start when the child is five or six years old. By this age most children have an understanding of money and its value. Probably the best tool to teach money management is an allowance. Children who have to struggle with money not only become more fiscally responsible, but they also become more responsible in other areas of their lives.

Traditionally a child’s allowance has been tied to the chores they complete. I would encourage you to not combine these two entities. Paying our children to complete household chores undermines the ‘cooperative household’ philosophy. Everyone who lives in a home contributes to the up keep and care of the house. We want to teach our children to take ownership of their home and by contributing this will happen. An allowance is given to a child so he or she can learn to manage money. The only times I recommend that you pay a child for chores are if they are chores above and beyond the regular scope of a child’s involvement, or they are chores usually done by you, and you don’t want to do them.

Deliver the allowance at the same time each week. Provide the money in a pay envelop and insert an invoice indicating what the money is for, for example, if your child is six years old the invoice might read; $1 allowance, $6 lunch money. As you children grow allow them to manage more money and increase the items they are in charge of purchasing, personal care products, clothes, school supplies, etc. What you hope is they will run out of month before they run out of money. Sound harsh? Consider the alternative; this happens when you are not there to buffer the ‘fall’. Wouldn’t you rather they learn this financial lesson when the risk is low?

Please don’t insist your children save all of their allowance; you can’t expect them to learn how to manage their money if they don’t use their money. Saving a percentage of their money is a wise practice to teach your children as is the opportunity to tithe. Work with your children, share as much about the workings of the financial community with them as you can, information is power!

By Debbie Elder

Revenge is another of the four goals identified by Dreikurs. A child seeking revenge feels “I belong only by hurting others as I feel hurt. I cannot be loved”. When dealing with this behavior a parent will feel deeply hurt and the tendency is to retaliate and get even. Unfortunately this sparks the child to seek further revenge by intensifying the misbehavior. Parents need to realize that the child’s revengeful behavior stems from discouragement and is not caused by the parents. What a child seeking revenge needs from the parent is a trusting relationship and to be convinced that he or she is loved unconditionally.

Lastly, a child displaying feelings of inadequacy feels “I belong only by convincing others not to expect anything from me. I am unable; I am helpless”. Parents will know if a child is pursuing this goal if they too feel despair and want to give up. The typical reaction to this type of behavior is to agree with the child that nothing can be done. The child generally responds passively and does not improve. What parents need to do is stop all criticism. Instead encourage any positive attempts, no matter how small. Start to focus on the child’s assets and above all don’t get hooked into the pity and never give up on your child.

Parents, by paying close attention to how you feel when your child misbehaves, you will pick up clues as to what they need. Your job then is to teach an appropriate way to meet that need. By replacing inappropriate behaviors with appropriate ones you can help your child overcome his or her feelings of discouragement. Parents, changing how you respond to your children’s misbehavior will change their behavior.

By Camille Rodriquez

Developing a written plan for each year and the goals of your school is the first step to homeschool success. Families sometimes have to sort through the “needs versus wants, versus options” question to do that. Far too often homeschoolers allow the wants and the options to overpower the needs for their homeschool. Plan ahead, prepare for flexibility, and involve your student in the process whenever possible!

Be sure you know the state codes for graduation in your state. An excellent source for clarification is the Homeschool Legal Defense Association. Subjects of study vary from state to state, relationships with local school districts are handled differently, and homeschool parents need to understand the process in their state. There should be no fear in dealing with these codes, but it is the obligation of the parent to adhere to them.

Once you have determined all areas of mandatory core subjects are included in your plan, then you can consider a list of “wants” – courses you or your student would like to add. Be adaptable to different “wants” as that will help to motivate and encourage the unique styles and character of each of your students. Homeschooling may be the common vehicle, but not all students have a common passion!

A third item worth consideration would be a list of “what if” courses or areas of study. What if you had the opportunity for each child to travel their senior year? The “what ifs” can be included in your homeschool plan if you allow plenty of preparation, both for academic needs as well as personal needs.

You must keep focused on the big picture, while still allowing flexibility in your homeschool plan. The earlier you sit down with each child individually and create a master list of needs, wants, and “maybe” items, the earlier you will be able to incorporate these core studies into your program. Never sacrifice the required elements, but your child may want to add enrichment opportunities in specific areas. By involving your student in this planning process, you will have a much more motivated and engaged student learner. You will also be teaching the fundamental skill of ownership and pride in self-direction that comes from creating, implementing, and completing a successful plan.

By Debbie Elder

According to Rudolf Dreikurs, a prominent psychiatrist, children’s misbehavior can be classified into four broad categories or goals as he likes to refer to them. Dreikurs believes that the misbehavior is achieving something for the child. So if you are able to determine the function of the behavior you can replace an inappropriate behavior with an appropriate one. The four goals of misbehavior are; attention, power, revenge, and display of inadequacy. You determine which goal is being acted on by how you as the parent feel.

A child who is seeking attention believes that, “I only belong when I am being noticed and serviced”. When a parent is faced with this behavior they feel annoyed and their reaction is to remind and coax the child to change their behavior. This approach temporarily stops the misbehavior, however later it resumes as the same behavior or the child disturbs in another way. An alternative technique is to ignore the misbehavior and give attention to positive behavior instead.

Seeking power is the goal of misbehavior when the child feels “I belong only when I am in control, the boss, or when I am proving that no one can boss me”. Faced with this misbehavior the parent feels angry and provoked, as if their authority is being tested. Here is where we see power struggles or the opposite, the parent just gives in to keep the peace. Children typically response to this parental reaction with an increase in active or passive aggressive behavior or they ’submit’ with defiant compliance. Another approach that parents may want to try is to withdraw from the conflict. Help the child to see how to use power constructively by gaining the feeling of control through demonstrating their areas of mastery. The feeling of power is best expressed through competency. Identify, with your child, their strengths so they can start to make the shift towards a positive expression of their need for power.