As every birthday passes, the years seem to be streaking by at warp speed. Five-month-olds become 5-year-olds in the blink of an eye, and then 15-year-olds. This inexorable march of time that turns babies into big kids is the "other" biological clock facing young couples. Every day brings new growth, new milestones, and new wonderment, but the challenges of juggling our adult lives often prevent us from fully appreciating the delicate nuances of childhood.When you add up all the time your kids spend at day care, school, asleep, at friends' homes, with babysitters, at camp, and otherwise occupied with activities that don't include you, the remaining moments become especially precious. There are only 940 Saturdays between a child's birth and her leaving for college. That may sound like a lot, but how many have you already used up? If your child is 5 years old, 260 Saturdays are gone. Poof! And the older your kids get, the busier their Saturdays are with friends and activities. Ditto Sundays. And what about weekdays? Depending on your children's ages and whether you work outside the home, there may be as few as one or two hours a day during the week for you to spend with them.
Reference:How to Spend More Quality Time With Your Child, By Harley A. Rotbart, M.D. from Parents Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.parents.com/parenting/better-parenting/positive/quality-time/
Accept their feelings of disgust. There's evidence that moral disgust may develop from our early aversion to icky food. In that case, encouraging a kid to express his gross-outs could make it more likely he'll speak out against injustice as a grown-up.
Tips for Teaching Children About Fairness
It's probably a mix of nature and nurture that develops our sense of fairness. Try these tips to help your kids understand fair play.
Empower them. Despite our brains having an innate capacity to evaluate what's right, "we certainly teach our kids about fairness; there's definitely a component we learn early on, Help kids develop this ability by asking questions, such as, "Was that fair? Why or why not?"
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Explain and practice. Even if the sense of fairness is rooted in our emotions, we still use judgment to make complex moral decisions. As your kids grow up -- and their brains develop -- continue to point out more sophisticated examples of sharing, as well as injustice.
Teaching Children to be Fair.By Susan Kuchinskas, WebMD Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/teaching-children-to-be-fair
Dina,
ReplyDeleteYour blog is very well done. Your quotes are very moving and all so true. It is not the things that we do for our children that matter the most, it is the quality that we spend with them that is the most valuable. Childhood seems to go by so quickly. It seems like it was just yesterday that my sons were born, and now they are fathers. I find myself asking a lot, where did the time go? You are correct in advising parents to spend as much time with their children as they can each day. I liked the quote about if we want to always be a part of their memories, we must make the deposits now that will cause them to build lasting memories. The ones that do not come from things, but from experiences.
Dina, I loved all the pictures with the quotes in them. I don't think people often realize how much time they don't have with their children. I remember working 50 fifty hours a week away from home and then trying to fit in every possible idea I had to do with my children and always feeling like there was just never enough time and now I see that same thing with the parents of the children I take care of. And when they say things like, "Oh we had a babysitter this weekend so we could go out, just us or I have to have my hair and nails done and shopping by myself "and I look in their little faces and you see the sad eyes that have been so excited to see the parents and now again someone else is taking care of them. I think we had time before we were parents and we will have time after our children grow, can't we sacrifice a little time for some one else now? Thank you for the quotes, they are precious.
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