Kids Need Parents to be their Parents....Not their Friends It’s impossible to relate to your child as a buddy or an “equal” on one day, and the next day expect your child to look up to and obey you. There’s a line of authority between children and adults and, once you cross it, kids get confused. They end up having to retest the boundaries again and again to determine who’s in charge and how they are supposed to act around parents and other authority figures. Being your child’s “best friend” is not the best way to show your love. Children really need parents who care enough to do the more difficult job of setting and enforcing limits and being a role model.

Be friendly, but make sure you stay on the parental side of the line. You are the parent, and only you can decide how to carry out discipline in your own home. But, no matter what you do, the experts say the secret of success is to be firm, fair and consistent.

Be Firm You are the adult, and you are in charge. You have the maturity and the experience not the child. Only an adult can establish the limits of acceptable behavior in the household. With loving firmness and authority, you must establish the rules and firmly enforce them.

Be Fair Children have a keen sense of fairness. They will accept nearly any rule you make if they understand that it is fair and that it is being applied fairly. If kids believe a rule is unfair, they will resent and disobey it.

Be Consistent Children will test you to find limits. That's natural. It's how they learn what you really believe and what the rules really are. Your actions always speak louder than your words.

You may say the rule is “No TV until homework is done.” But, if children find they can sometimes talk you into letting them watch a TV, they learn that the rule really is, “No TV-unless you can talk me into it.”If you are consistent, children will learn the important lessons discipline can teach them. If you are not consistent, children will be confused and won't learn much of anything.

 

DID YOU KNOW? Most children born after the year 2000 in 2000 in developed countries will live to be 100, according to researchers projections. Source:The Lancet

Have Dinner With Your Kids Parents, want to improve your kids’ grades, their health, and stop them from trying cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs? Then skip the sit down talks and have sit down dinners instead. Here are three reasons to gather ‘round the table: Family meals make kids healthier. In a University of Minnesota study, teens who ate the most meals with their families while growing up turned into college students who ate the most fruits and vegetables. The same study showed that family meals drastically reduced the risk of kids developing an eating disorder. Your kids will be smarter. In a study done at Harvard University, younger children who ate with their parents had better vocabularies. Columbia University researchers found that high-schoolers who had dinner with their families got 40 percent more As and Bs than those who didn’t. Kids who eat with their parents are less likely to try alcohol, cigarettes and drugs. Miriam Weinstein, the author of The Surprising Power of Family Meals, says that kids who don’t sit down to dinner with their family at least three times a week triple their risk of experimenting with alcohol, nicotine or drugs. If you’re thinking, “Good luck getting my kids to sit still for dinner,” check this out...In a national survey, eight out of 10 teens said they preferred eating with their parents.