The Mask We Live In: watch this for your children and LOVE YOURSELF

Life is Easy!!! … and simple: a great way to learn about who we are is to pay attention to how we feel inside our bodies throughout the day.

Social-behavioral readiness in kindergarteners impacts long-term success — ScienceDaily

“These results are important,” says Gross, professor and the Leonard and Helen Stulman Endowed Chair in Mental Health and Psychiatric Nursing. “They show how critical social and behavioral skills are for learning, how early the struggle begins for young children, and how important it is to address the problem of social-behavioral readiness well before children enter kindergarten.”

Raising Entitled Children

Several of the schools Kian attended over the last 5 years gave us both the feeling that he was being programmed to “fit in.” The implication there is that something about his authentic self was somehow in need of repair or renovation. Attention to “fitting in” can make a person learn the “eggshell walk” at an early age.

My 5th Grader’s Surprising Choice for Schooling this Year…..

Have you ever watched a cat shift its ears like furry radar dishes, surveying the terrain, all the while calmly relaxing and purring? My brain was like that cat; my awareness was a due to a radar-like brain function that I was not particularly keen on desensitizing. I would prefer to alter my environment, than alter that perfectly operating function in my brain.

Pressure has no place in a learning environment. It is counter to the goal, in fact. Pressure creates cortisol rushes that burn through healthy brain networks and, left uncorrected, the stimulation can create new cortisol pathways that actual seek to fill themselves again and again in an addictive cycle. Think of a child sitting on the edge of his seat, neck craned, eyes bugged out, peering at a video game screen, for example. That looks like a cortisol rush unfolding to me. Video games can do it, and so can crowded, noisy, or distracting atmospheres wherein a child is expected to perform.

TKG Parenting Workshop: CONSUMING KIDS, THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF CHILDHOOD

Consuming Kids throws desperately needed light on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car. Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children’s advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children to one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the world.

Parenting Workshop: Oh Siblings!

“I secretly believed that sibling rivalry was something that happened to other people’s children. Somewhere in my brain lay the smug thought that I could outsmart the green-eyed monster by never doing any of the obvious things that all the other parents did to make their kids jealous of each other. I’d never compare, never take sides, never play favorites. If both boys knew they were loved equally, there might be a little squabble now and then, but what would they really have to fight about?