1. Learning at home takes much less time than at school because you are not managing a large group.
2. It’s okay that you are not a trained teacher. Be kind to yourself. Some days will go better than others.
3. Learning doesn’t have to happen at a desk. Have at least 3 work spaces that your child can choose from such as a table, a chair on the porch or in the fort they made in the living room.
4. Every activity of the day has the potential to become a learning activity. Things that you haven’t previously thought of as educational become a learning opportunity.
5. Co-plan the day together. Draw simple pictures of the upcoming tasks on a white board then you and your child can put numbers beside each activity to plan the order.
6. Include household tasks in your plan including food prep, cleaning, laundry and yard work.
7. Scavenger Hunt! Hide parts of a work activity in different areas of a room and let your child find them one at a time to complete them.
8. Bring learning concepts to life. Do a baking activity to learn a math concept. Do a science experiment. Act out a play related to a history lesson. Make a comic or video about a topic.
9. Have field trips both as a lesson as well as a reward.
10. Incorporate your child’s areas of interest. If your child likes planes, make sure math, science, vocabulary and writing activities relate to aviation.
11. Remember to include electives! Music, Art, Drama and Physical Education. Let your child help choose the activities.
12. If you have multiple kids, set up a station for each child and you rotate between them; have your older child help teach lessons to your younger child.
13. Let your child be the teacher and you be the student! Pretend you don’t understand so your child has to “teach” the concept to you.
14. Have Fun! Kids remember better when the activity is pleasurable. You can teach a lesson in the pool, at the beach or in the yard.
15. Schooling at home is an opportunity for a connected sweet time together that you and your kids will remember for years to come.

Originally published in Maui Family Magazine.

The post Tips for Schooling at Home appeared first on Maui Center for Child Development.

Self-Regulation – The child’s first skill that develops in infancy is the ability to maintain a ‘calm state’. This skill continues to develop as your child’s world become more complex, and she learns to regulate around different environments, people, stressors and her own emotions. One of the most important self-regulation skills is to learn how use the people close to her to cope and recover. This is foundational to later developing a sense of self-control and self-discipline.

Social Community – The child needs to learn to be part of a community. This of course starts with his family community and then extends out to the neighborhood, the school, spiritual community and extra curricular activities. Becoming a member of communities allows your child to learn the impact of his actions on others, expand his world past his own needs, how to share and to work towards a common goal. These experiences lead to a sense of contribution, pride and responsibility.

Social-Emotional Skills – The child needs to learn to communicate around a wide range of emotions and work with others to problem solve when things don’t go the way she expects. She needs support from adults to be able to sit in her big emotion and know that the emotion will get smaller, to see possible solutions and to work with others to execute a solution. She needs to be able to tolerate a robust range of emotions and to see herself as a competent problem-solver.

Play Skills – This seems self-evident, but in our world of technology, kids are quickly trading in multi-sensory, creative, imaginative play for electronic stimulation. The second culprit is homework and the third is overscheduling of extra curricular activities. Kids need time to engage in 3-dimensional, creative play involving both indoor and outdoor environments, with their caregivers and with their peers. These experiences shape creativity, social skills and cognitive thinking skills.

Originally published in Maui Family Magazine.

The post Life Skills Every Child Needs appeared first on Maui Center for Child Development.

• Take daily opportunities to verbalize your emotions about daily experiences with your child i.e. “I was disappointed when …”
• Verbalize a variety of emotions (happy, frustrated, sad, angry). This lets your child know it is ok to have a variety of emotions
• Validate and repeat back your child’s emotion so that she feels understood by you
• Avoid the urge to correct your child’s feelings (“you should not feel mad about that…”). If your child gets any sense that he will get in trouble or be corrected when he shares with you, your child will stop telling you how he feels
• Begin to talk about the SIZE of emotions i.e. “Were you a little sad about being rained out or sad in a big way?” This helps your child learn about range and variety of emotions”
• Each day, have each family member share one thing that they were happy about in the day and one thing that was “tricky”. This helps your child to keep a balanced perspective on daily emotional experiences and to avoid feeling like any one event is ‘catastrophic’
• When your child is having a BIG emotion, avoid the urge to distract them or solve it. You are your child’s co-regulator. Sit in the “puddle” of her emotion with your child and help her to process through it, not avoid it.
• Help your child learn how to calm his body when he has a BIG emotion i.e. have quiet time, have something to eat, play outside for a while to calm down
• Discuss how others may feel the same or different in the same situation. This builds the foundation for your child’s ability to understand someone else’s feelings.
• Facilitate your child to problem solve around her emotions. What are at least 2 possible solutions if she were to be faced with that tricky situation and/or emotion again?
• Discuss different ways to express emotions in different situations and with different people. Who do you feel safe telling your emotions to? What is the balance between being true to how you feel and not hurting someone else’s feelings?

Originally published in Maui Family Magazine.

The post What an Upset Kid is Really Trying to Say appeared first on Maui Center for Child Development.

A tantrum can be due to a physiologic reason and may simply mean your child is overwhelmed. The primary culprits are fatigue, hunger, change in diet, coming down with an illness or a change in medication. Most of us have probably experienced at least one of these ourselves. The goal is to help your child calm and proactively plan for prevention.

Tantrums can also be a result of emotional stressors such as a change in routine, positive stressors (i.e. visitors, an exciting trip) or negative stressors (i.e. strife in your household, a low test score). These underlying reasons for overload may not be apparent and the goal is to help your child calm, and later, to process what may be going on under her big emotions. A cozy space provides a safe place to calm and have a “break”.

Tantrums can also be the result of child having learned that this is an effective way to get attention and or something he wants. This is absolutely normal in some stages of development as your child seeks to find your ‘boundaries’. In these cases, it is important to set a reasonable boundary and calmly stick to it. Your consistency will send the message that no matter how big the tantrum, you are sticking to what you said. Once a child knows the boundary, tantrums will usually decrease.

Tantrums can also be the result of a child having difficulty with her own ability to self-regulate (calm her self). The child who is more sensitive or anxious is more easily upset by small events not going as expected. The highly active child is already in an elevated state much of the time and small things may send him into a tantrum with seemingly little provocation. A child who has a hard time verbalizing around her emotions is more likely to act out her big emotions.

A tantrum is one way your child communicates and your goal is to support your child to regulate and process feelings verbally rather than through behavior. Be consistent. Help your child anticipate and make a “plan B”. Help your child to self-calm. Strengthen your child’s ability to verbalize around the experiences that occur each day.

Originally published in Maui Family Magazine.

The post Tantrums: What Do They Communicate And What Should You Do? appeared first on Maui Center for Child Development.

There are, however, some key areas you can focus on to support the relationship of your children.

1. Support the individuality of each child. This creates the platform for celebrating your kids’ individual differences! Let them know you expect them to have different ideas and support them equally. This is particularly important later for dealing with siblings wanting to have whatever the other sibling has; they will learn that they are equal but not the same.
2. Facilitate communication and problem solving (rather than doing it for them). Support your children stopping, verbalizing their ideas, their emotions, watching the other sibling response and negotiating around how each other feels. Give your kids the experience of sitting in the ‘puddle’ of discomfort when they don’t agree and allow it- they will learn that they move toward their goal faster if they come up with solutions together.
3. Let your kids know verbalizing a full range of emotions is acceptable. Positively reinforce the verbal expression of emotion (even if it is heated). Words are far better than pushing, door slamming, taking items out of each other’s hands/rooms, leaving, etc.
4. Help your kids learn how to negotiate by offering something that makes it a win-win for them and their sibling. If they want to ‘go first’ this time then have that child problem solve what their sibling can get in return. This puts the focus on each child knowing what is important to the other and problem-solving with the other’s feelings in mind.
5. Celebrate in your kids’ individual talents! This is important for each child to feel competent & confident without having to ‘measure up’ to the other. One sibling may be an athlete and the other may be good at story telling or, one child may get homework done fast and the other may be detail oriented and thorough. One sibling may have many social friends and the other may prefer one on one experience with a chosen friend.

A resource: Siblings Without Rivalry; How To Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too by Adele Faber & Eileen Mazlish.

Originally published in Maui Family Magazine.

The post Supporting the Dynamics of Sibling Relationships appeared first on Maui Center for Child Development.

It is important to consider that these children often have a much higher need for movement before feeling satiated and need supports to move to a calm state where they are best able to attend, process and problem solve. The spirited child can be impulsive, acting before thinking it through and thus miss how others around them are feeling.

Events not going as expected can feel catastrophic for this child. Here are some specific strategies to build self- regulation skills and thinking about others:

• Allow plenty of movement each day for this child, both before and after school
• If sitting all day in a chair is tricky, work with your teacher to allow your child a standing desk and small movement breaks throughout the day. Remember he is working harder at sitting still than other kids
• For prolonged sitting activities, like dinner or church, give your child movement breaks i.e. go for a walk, get a drink of water.
• Discuss the main sequence of events for the day in advance. Then your child can verbalize her feelings with you in advance, negotiate and she knows what to expect for the day.
• For specific activities, discuss the parameters/”plan” first with input from your child. Be clear and stick to what you’ve decided together. Let him know his reward for sticking to the plan you’ve both come up with (i.e. 5 extra minutes to play).
• When something goes awry, help your child to calm and then find a quiet place to have her tell you what happened and how she felt about it; in this way she will feel understood by you and get practice verbalizing feelings rather than having a big behavioral reaction.
• Talk about emotions! Verbalize a wide range of emotions in your everyday events. Help your child identify the difference between a big, medium and small disappointment/happiness/upset/worry, etc.
• Help your child consider other children’s perspective. You can do this by talking in advance “how will Makena feel about …” or after the fact “I wonder what Makena’s idea was? I wonder if his idea was the same or different than yours?”
• Create a family “quiet time” daily where all media is off and you & your child engage in a quiet activity (reading, drawing, Legos, game) so your child learns to sustain a calm state.

Originally published in Maui Family Magazine.

The post Tips for Parenting the Spirited Child appeared first on Maui Center for Child Development.

The first thing is to realize that when your child is inconsolable is that he is overwhelmed. Your response might be to problems-solve, offering options to feel better, however your child won’t likely be available even to your best idea. Avoid the temptation to ‘distract’ your child from his emotions. Part of his developmental journey is to feel the full range of his emotions robustly and to be able to recover from them.

The best thing you can do is to be present, sitting with your child in the “puddle” of her emotion. Specifically, being in close proximity, little to no verbiage and offering comfort through touch if your child seeks it. This can take a short time or quite a long time.

Physiologically, when your child is in an overload state, she is simply not available for talking things out or problem solving. In fact, words will likely escalate your child’s emotion. Big emotions are so overwhelming and your child needs to experience her emotion getting smaller and moving to a calm state.

Helping your child to calm applies even when he has done something wrong. You still want to help him learn to calm in order for him to be able to process with you what happened! Here are some other specific strategies to support your child to self-calm:

• Little to no talking from you; wait until she initiates and then respond with empathy “yeah, this is tricky”
• Deep breaths are the fastest way to help your body calm, so you can model taking slow deep breaths while beside your child
• Once your child has started to calm, drinking something will further help to regulate your child’s breathing
• If your child is calm enough to drink, offer a snack; continue to be present
• Once your child is calm, it still may be too soon to go back and reflect on the situation (your child may go back to being inconsolable) so you can offer to “check-in” about it later in the day
• Later, with a drawing medium such as a large white board, paper, sand, you can offer to draw out what happened as your child narrates it to you
• You can then discuss if she liked the way it turned out and problem-solve other options together. If your child needs to repair the situation with a peer then you can plan that out too.

Congratulations! You have supported your child to tolerate his big emotion, to self-calm, to be reflective about his actions and to problem solve, all important life long skills.

Originally published in Maui Family Magazine.

The post The Most Powerful Response When Your Child Is Inconsolable appeared first on Maui Center for Child Development.

Have a fidget toy/activity

Planning in advance

Movement before hand

Originally published in Maui Family Magazine.

The post Best Self Control Techniques for Your Keiki appeared first on Maui Center for Child Development.

The ability to self-calm is among the greatest life skills your child will learn. She will use it to cope with changes, to manage friendships, schoolwork and other stressors into adolescence and beyond.

You want to harness the opportunity to build your child’s self-calming skills and having strategies to do so will help you keep calm too!

• Make sure you are attending to your own self-care so that you are able to keep calm
• Have designated “time in” with your child throughout the week; this will prevent him from tantrumming to get your attention
• Have a daily “check-in” and each talk about one thing that went well and one thing that was tricky; this builds verbal skills to replace tantrums
• Have an identified “cozy space” at home that your child has designed with blankets, pillows and other soothing items. Talk together about how this is a good space to have a “break” when he needs space to calm his body down.
• When your child is becoming elevated, breathe deeply and slowly to keep yourself calm
• Move your body at a slower speed
• Speak calmly & quietly
• Don’t try to problems solve; your child cannot “hear” you when she is in an elevated state
• Use a tone that lets your child know you understand how upset he is and his feelings are important
• Know there is no short-cut; you want to support your child to move through her big feelings (see ‘Train Analogy’ Article below)
• Keep your child’s body and your body safe
• If you are in a public place, as you move your child to a quiet spot, narrate aloud to give those around you context for his behavior “oh, you’ve had such a big day and this is too much; we are almost done and then time to go home”
• Later, when your child is calm, talk about the “tricky” event. Ask about what helped her body to calm and what didn’t. Help your child tweak her self-calming plan☺

Article: Use The ‘Train Analogy’ To Help You Deal With Your Kid’s Tantrums (scarymommy.com)

Originally published in Maui Family Magazine.

The post How to Stay Calm When Your Child Throws a Tantrum appeared first on Maui Center for Child Development.

Consistency. Create a rhythm for the day; it doesn’t need to be rigid, but should have some elements of predictability. This will be the stable base in the face of other upcoming changes.

Create a sense of safety. Make sure you have increased face-to-face time with your child, which includes the sweet intimate parts of his routine that may include physical closeness and affection such as having a snack or reading a story together. This is the glue for your child’s emotional sense of security.

What to say. Think about how to frame the information about the upcoming change in a way that matches your child’s development.

How to say it. Be authentic and calm in your facial expression, voice and body language. You need to convey that you and she are safe.

Think about timing. Discuss the change when there is time for your child to digest your information and for you to respond to your child’s questions

Why? Let him know that the change is related to the adults or other factors, not to him.

Break the big change into small manageable pieces. Perhaps address a week at a time.

Use a visual. Map the week out with your child on a large white board or large piece of paper by drawing pictures of what is coming up. Use colorful pencils together. Add and cross off activities as the week progresses.

Daily check-ins. Create a quiet moment to talk together about what you each think went well in the day and what was a bit tricky. This keeps you in the loop of your child’s inner world.

Planning together. When planning for the upcoming week, reflect on what went well and what was “tricky” in the past week; problem solve together to make changes to the upcoming week. Again your are teaching your child to be adaptive in the midst of change.

Problem-solve. When your child brings up a worry, help them create a ‘menu’ of possible solutions for their worry. It is a great opportunity to help your child generate solutions around their big feelings.

Monitor yourself. Do what you need to stay calm. Consider looking at the news only twice in the day.

Movement. You and your child will need daily movement to discharge your internal stressors and worries.

Less screen time, more engagement. For both you and your child. This builds your emotional glue.

Celebrate perks of the situation. What special game might you be able to play, food to make, project to start while you are at home. Find humor and laughter in daily events.

Originally published in Maui Family Magazine.

The post Preparing Your Child for Big Changes appeared first on Maui Center for Child Development.