Fill Yourself Up! (The Oxygen Mask Rule)

It is insidious, how, little by little we give up doing things for ourselves, because we believe that we should be spending more time with out child. Until finally we realize that we are doing nothing for our own pure enjoyment anymore. Everything is a compromise, or hinged on that love we have for our child. We end up having no 1:1 time with ourselves, and instead we snatch stolen moments at the computer while we yell to the other room “just a moment honey…”

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.

The Joyful, Illiterate, Kindergartens of Finland!

What Kindergarten Used to Like like here…and still does in Finland!
Approaching the school’s playground that morning, I watched as an army of 5- and 6-year-old boys patrolled a zigzagging stream behind Niirala Preschool in the city of Kuopio, unfazed by the warm August drizzle. When I clumsily unhinged the steel gate to the school’s playground, the young children didn’t even lift their eyes from the ground; they just kept dragging and pushing their tiny shovels through the mud.

At 9:30 a.m., the boys were called to line up for a daily activity called Morning Circle. (The girls were already inside—having chosen to play boardgames indoors.) They trudged across the yard in their rubber boots, pleading with their teachers to play longer—even though they had already been outside for an hour. As they stood in file, I asked them to describe what they’d been doing on the playground.

“Making dams,” sang a chorus of three boys.

What “Be Nice” Really Means When We Say it to Our Kids

“Be Nice” is one of the most common phrases we say to our kids, especially our young ones. It comes out of our mouth without thought, like a reflexive reaction to our eternal fear that our kids will grow up to be unscrupulous and cruel. Let’s stop to examine, what “be nice” really means. For […]

Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School

Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options. Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise. Indeed, these studies show that 4-year-olds understand how teaching works and can learn from teachers. But there is an intrinsic trade-off between that kind of learning and the more wide-ranging learning that is so natural for young children. ..

The Good Enough Motherhood Process

“Dear Riviera,
What do you do for a teen who picked a major clearly not suited for them? Do you let them take the classes or do you talk them out of it and advise them to sign up for the classes that better suit them? Especially if you are worried that it was your biases that influenced that wrong decision in the first place….?”

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.”

It’s in the Dirt! Bacteria in soil may make us happier, smarter

…a strain of bacterium in soil,Mycobacterium vaccae, has been found to trigger the release of seratonin, which in turn elevates mood and decreases anxiety. And on top of that, this little bacterium has been found to improve cognitive function and possibly even treat cancer and other diseases. Which means that contact with soil, through gardening or other means (see Elio, above), is beneficial.

Taking a Step Back

We all know that our children are not reflections of us, but every once in a while we get tricked into that lie again! It sneaks in, and we spring into RE-action, rather than mindful response.

The Decline of Play

I love this.  

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