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Listen: Why Do Your Kids Tune You Out?

http://kidzedge.com/ Posted on June 9, 2013 by Victoria Marin 

By: Julia Simens

Can you hear me now? . . . Can you hear me now? . . .

Not all children listen to their parents

 

 

Parents often claim that their children tune them out or don’t listen to them. This is easy to understand. People tend to belong in groups in two ways: they will either belong through contribution or they will belong through misbehavior. Your family is a “group”.

Do your kids belong or misbehave?

This ‘tune out’ of parents appears to be a global concern!  Young children are egocentric so often if they do not choose the activity, they could care less. Parents need their children to get ready in the morning, but children could care less. Parents want children to pick up their toys, but children could care less. Parents want to know where their teen is going, but the teen could care less.

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Summer Vacations and Families: What To Do With All That Togetherness

 

Lake Tahoe - Ahhhh... becautiful lake

Travel to places you love!

 

Summer vacations with the family can be the best of times or the worst of times.

Interminable plane trips, boring hotel rooms, exhausting hours together in the car, funky cabins on muddy lakes and six straight days of rain — family vacations can be difficult enough for adults, but for children they can be down right awful!

 

On the other hand, exploring new places together, sharing time and goofing-off for days at a stretch, meeting new people or reuniting with loving relatives — family vacations can be the best thing since summer was invented.

     How to have more of the best of times and less of the worst?

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Early Childhood Success: Don’t focus on academics

creative commons

What do I need to succeed?

 

 

 

Parents need to focus on three key things for early success with their child’s preschool  experience.

1) Kids need to have exposure to letters and sounds so parents need to read aloud to their children starting at an early age. It is great to share as many possible books with your young child but also have one old favorite story that you read again and again.  Repetition helps a child understand the whole reading and writing process.
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How can you instill “money basics” in your highly mobile family?

Picture-17

 

You can teach your child about money with games or with real life ‘teachable moments’!

 

 

I work with families around the world as they relocate to take a new jobs, and this is one of the most common questions I get asked. “How can I instill the basic concept of money in my global nomad?”

Any culture can instill money basic by taking advantage of “teachable moments” with their children.

Sometimes my families have real concerns when they are faced with changes in their lives due to money. A family relocating from Bangkok might spend a certain amount of money for a local Thai dinner and yet that same amount of money will just buy them a soft drink in Rome. Imagine the concerns this would cause for a Middle or High School kid new to that environment.

Here are three tips that I have used with children as young as six years old.

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Best and Worse Countries to be a Child

It’s hard to measure a child’s quality of life. Is he or she being Fed/ Educated? Valued? Loved? It all depends on a number of factors, both tangible and intangible.

A UNICEF study sets out to assess the well-being of children and adolescents among industrialized nations by measuring the way each country protects and nurtures its youth, according to six dimensions of well-being.

#1 Material Well Being

#2 Health and Safety

#3 Education

#4 Family and Peer Relationships

#5 Behavior and Risks

#6 Subjective Well Being

I hope these six dimensions of well-being are not listed in the order that UNICEF feels is the most important but a overall grouping of things kids need.

I would want the following for my children:

# 1 How they feel about themselves – their own well being

#2 Family and Peer Relationships

#3 Behavior and Risks

#4 Health and Safety

#5 Education

#6 Material Well Being

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Total Count for Top Countries

Would it surprise you to know that these countries were the top hit in each category?

#1 Material Well Being – Sweden
#2 Health and Safety – Sweden
#3 Education – Belgium
#4 Family and Peer Relationships – Italy
#5 Behavior and Risks -Sweden
#6 Subjective Well Being – Netherlands

Where was the USA?

12th in Education –  17th in Material Well-Being – 20th in Family and Peer Relationships –  20th in Behaviors and Risks – 21st in Health and Safety – 21st in Subjective Well-being

It would be interesting to see where most CCK’s or TCK’s find themselves in this list of things they need. Perhaps they take somethings for granted, like their material well being?  Or the fact that they will have a very good education at an international school?  Or that their embassy, company or etc. is always looking after their Health and safety issues.

To me the big question is where do these TCK’s (CCK’s) place their Family and Peer relationships!

Notes:

http://awesome.good.is.s3.amazonaws.com/transparency/web/1206/where-are-the-best-and-worst-countries-to-be-a-child/flash.html

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Our your predictions off?

 

thinking child

What can you do when you brain doesn’t match your hand?

With two kids in college, I thought I had most of this ‘child rearing’ figured out.  I do not.  I realize that half of what I have been telling my kids is possible wrong.  Or at least out dated. The world is constantly changing and nothing is for certain forever.

Are you OK with the notion that what your kids are learning in school may contradict what you learned in school. For some reason, that notion worries me!

Then I read this book – Yikes!

Samuel Arbesman’s “The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date” is very interesting and makes you think.  Most medical schools tell their students half of what they’ve been taught will be wrong within five years – the teachers just don’t know which half.

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Balikpapan Parents: What makes an Expat Child grow?

I was honored tonight to see the parents flow into the community center in Balkipapan, Indonesia.  They were all there to try and get a better understanding on how to support, nurture and help their expat child grow.

Here is the presentation we went through:

 

Unique Culture

By “A boy named Jack”

I am a third cultural kid. In my 8th grade humanities we needed to bring in an object that reflected our “culture”. This posed several concerns for me. First, we had just arrived in Thailand from a move from Africa so what sort of cultural things might I find in my backpack since our shipment had not yet arrived in our new home. This did not seem very promising. Second, what culture do I represent?

I decided to sit down and do a time line on my life to see if it might help direct me into finding just the right item to take into class. I decided to map my time line by months so it would reflect my summers in the USA.

The end results did not help narrow down my search for the idea culture object. I am 4% Australian, 25% African, 25% American and 45% Indonesian. Of course, I am 1% Thai since this is now my home country. I do carry an American passport but that is such a small part of my actual 13 years.

I finally had the perfect object for class. My object was a cardboard box. This box can hold your items when you are moving from place to place. I am a third culture kid, so I have moved a lot, this makes cardboard moving boxes a commonly used item for people like me. Most Third Culture kids have lived in other countries longer than their passport country. The packing box reflects the life of a moving family.

I hope my teacher will acknowledge this unique culture. If not, I have just blown my first grade in a new class in a new school. Being a third cultural kid makes you brave.

Notes:

Ruth Van Reken – Expert and founding father of Global Nomads

Rebecca Grappo – Education consultant

FIGT: Families in Global Transitions

Search Institute: Assets – Checklist of questions to build resilience

Panel discussion at the USA State Dept. 2012 – TCK’s

Exit Interview – Leaving one international school by Julia Simens

Prezi – additional presentation by Julia Simens go to Prezi.com and search for Julia Simens or Kjjgsimens

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Mothers day: Momma raised me right!

mother and grandmothers hands

A mother’s touch . . .

 

A hearty hello to all the mothers in the world.  This day is for you even if your country celebrates it on a different day than my passport country.

In 2011, I was honored to be part of the “Gratitude Book Project – Celebrating Moms and Motherhood, edition Donna Kozik.  I wrote a short article about my mother and the power of “ummmm” or allowing silence to be a very important part of a conversation.

Due to the nature of my job, I meet people from all over the world.  Many of them are Moms.

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Death: Overseas when the unthinkable happens

When a Family Member Dies Abroad

A  checklist for the most difficult of times.

The passing of a loved one irrevocably alters family life but it can impact an global family way more than you ever thought!

After a death, there is so much to deal with. Some things may be put on hold. But …This must be done, though, and it is better to do it sooner rather than later.

Status of Residency

Check with your embassy on the status of your residency in your host country. If the deceased is the ‘work permit’ holder things might move very quickly on your staus of being legally in that country.

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Do words matter?

Screen Shot 2013 05 02 at 7 47 08 AM
Word Choice is Important

I believe that they do.

“Mom, I am so ugly.”

How do you respond?  Please tell me you are not one of those parents that say, “No honey, you are not ugly.”

Kids love to announce that they are not good at something. They usually do it just after they try something new and challenging, and they say it with finality, as if issuing a verdict. I’m not good at math! I’m not good at volleyball. They also like to throw out “I’m ugly” or “I’m fat”  or “I’m not macho”.

At that moment, your parental instinct is to fix the situation.

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