Four Life Skills Parents can Teach Their Children During the Pandemic

Four Life Skills Parents can Teach Their Children During the Pandemic 

Huffpost  Article

1. 
   
   How to live with uncertainty
1. Their routines have changed
2. No one can give them answers about when this will end
3. Tell them you don’t know when it will change
4. Explain that doctors are trying to find medicines that will help
2. How to be resilient
1. Allow for discomfort (stress and fear are normal)
2. Model coping strategies (walking, talking to friends, etc..)
3. Reinforce problem-solving skills
4. Give them time to think about solutions and strategies that might help them.
3. That kids are so much more than school and extracurriculars
1. Help kids recognize that there is more to them
2. Help them connect them to what they truly enjoy
3. Talk to them about what they would like to be doing more of
4. How important their role is in your family. 
1. A family is a team
2. Have children help with chores. Give me responsibilities they otherwise may not have had.
3. Reinforce the importance they have to the family.

Keeping Your Child Motivated to Complete Assignments

Parents of teens, tweens, and pre-teens, we applaud you! You have a difficult job during Remote Learning - helping your child stay on track with completing class assignments. How do you know if your child is really done with all their online work? The tangible pieces of evidence of work being completed are now rare, and parents often have to rely on their child’s word that their homework is finished.   

Parents are left trying to figure out if your child is really “all done for the day” as your child gleefully announces, “I’m done” at 10:30 while flipping over to Super Smash Brothers or Instagram for the day.  And truly, do you have the time every hour to grill them on their assignments, to have them “pull them up on the screen” to be sure they wrote a full paragraph or did out the math work for each problem? 

Then, wham!, you get an email from their teachers that work is incomplete or missing!  

What do you do?  You can ground them---oh, wait, isn’t that what social distancing is?  You can take away their phones?  But that is the only way they can talk to their friends right now!  Sounds inhuman, right?  

How about if you were to REWARD them?  Give them something that they value---but make them earn it.  Like us---we don’t get a paycheck unless we produce, right?  Way of the world. 

This does not have to be a big treat--and it can be something that they already receive from you, like a trip to Dunkin’s for a coolatta with a friend.    And  this is a temporary measure, during this more challenging time of remote learning, to help your children develop effective self-management habits.