At this time of the year, family calendars tend to fill up with parties, shopping, decorating, dinners, more shopping, out of town guests, and trips of our own to visit family, friends, or take a holiday vacation. It can be stressful on us, and is often very stressful on children.
Kathryn Kvols, parenting educator and author of Redirecting Children's Behavior, offers a few suggestions:
"Emphasize the joy of giving.
Find a family service project i.e. read to shut-ins, pick up trash or make cookies as a family project and give them to neighbors.
Ask your children how they feel in their heart after they have given a gift or done something for someone. This helps them to get in touch with how good it feels to give of oneself.
Model giving and share with your child how it feels to you when you give. Your giving does not have to be something big. It could be a smile, kind words, some encouragement offered, a flower or a card.
Children learn more from our modeling than they do from our words.
Teach them the importance of gratitude.
All too often our children sit in a pile of toys and ripped wrapping paper and look for the next toy. This attitudes grates on even the most loving parent.
Practice saying things you are thankful for as a family before you go to bed. Challenge everyone to think of different things each night.
Write or make thank you cards to send to people you got presents from together as a family.
Hold an encouragement feast with your family. Everyone gets in a circle and chooses someone to be "it."
The rest of the family says, "What I love about you is..."
Then that person says what he or she loves about himself or herself and chooses the next person to be "it."
Make sure everyone in the family gets chosen to be it.
This exercise is great to do if tension gets high, which frequently happens during the holidays.
You may have to teach the difference between encouraging statements vs. discouraging statements.
Doing activities like these are the glue that bonds families together.
They create closeness, fun and sometimes opportunities to resolve conflicts!
Kathryn Kvols is the President of the Inter- national Network for Children and Families, a worldwide parent-training network that teaches her course life changing course, "Redirecting Children' Behavior." The course teaches skill-building strategies to families. They emphasize teamwork, creating win-win situations, and effectively avoiding power struggles using kind-but-firm methods promoted by Alfred Adler and Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs.
www.incaf.com
The Journey is a unique learning experience for parents. First we walk silently through the classrooms observing the environment and materials. Then we will choose the materials that call to us and work with them as if we were children. Finally we will discuss what we have discovered about Montessori and childhood. This is a day you will remember!
At the last Community Meeting, we agreed to reintroduced the Scrips program. Scrips is a program used by many schools and other nonprofit organizations to raise money by allowing interested families and friends to buy "Gift Cards" from major stores, restaurants, and more through a simple order form. A copy was sent out recently, but, in response to several requests, here is the link to a PDF copy of the order forms and information.
