Tag: family

Storytelling for Children: Love, Colors, and Joy

Posted on by baso877

 

What role can storytelling play in a child’s cognitive and emotional well-being? Storytelling for children is vital because it is the best conduit to teach valuable lessons while children actively follow an organized set of acts packed with stimuli in the form of colors, shapes, and characters.

Children are easily distracted. They have a short attention span, normal for their age, which is enhanced by today’s countless signs around them: colors, noises, and even smells. Plus, everything is new and presents an excellent opportunity to explore for them.

On the other hand, adults have numerous subjects to teach children during those first years, like science, morals, nature, good manners, the importance of friendship and family love, etc. Storytelling is the best way to address all those subjects, often with an entertaining and satisfactory ending.

Many questions might sound repetitive, but these are necessary for children to gain confidence.

 

More Benefits in the Long Term

 

Storytelling shows children that every story has a past, a present, and a future. It means it involves origins and consequences. A lesson can be learned if there is a consequence, a result that promotes or condemns certain attitudes or acts. Children can see themselves as the characters of a story and use that idea to hone their communication skills with their parents.

Children also need to ask questions. If they feel they are in a secure environment, they will ask more and more questions. Many might sound repetitive, but this is necessary to gain confidence. In the same way, parents can ask for more details and let children complete with their imagination what the stories don’t show.

On our side, Friends of Rick Daniels storytelling books, we have created numerous stories with valuable lessons about telling time, counting, addition, subtraction, exploring the world around us, and the power of imagination.

 

What to do after Reading?

 

Talk. Talking is the best way to share opinions. It is possible you encounter answers you didn’t expect. Let the children speak their minds; it might surprise you.

Help them verbalize and offer words they might seek to translate their thoughts.

Remember that storytelling also comes out of your own experiences. You can share stories and experiences of your childhood, so your children understand you have also gone down that same path and came out of it with a valuable lesson.

Let the children speak their minds; it might surprise you

By teaching children to create stories, you nurture their storytelling abilities and potentially ignite their passion for art, language games, creativity, and innovation.

Children Creating their own Stories.

 

Take a piece of paper and ask your children to draw characters and create a story about them.

Are they friends or perhaps rivals? Do they have an objective? Do they find difficulty reaching that objective? Do they reach their goal on the first attempt or after several? Are they happy with the result, or maybe it differs from what they expected? T

his exercise will help them find solutions in complex situations. We all have been in a scenario where we do not know how to say or express something we feel.

Family: a decisive connection to healing

Posted on by Eduardo Guillen

The importance of family union during sickness is undeniable. When a family member is sick, particularly a child, the rest of the family needs to work and focus on the child’s physical health and mental wellness.  

During sickness, many questions haunt the patient’s mind. How did I get sick? Why now? When would I recover? Why are others totally fine while I am sick for so long? During extended treatment periods, the family plays an essential role in sustaining their relative and caring for his needs and expectations.

Family and emotional support                                 

Family love brings cohesion and a sense of belonging. If the patients are children, they will feel supported and eased thanks to a sense of predictability which will calm their anxiety. They know their family will be there the next day for another battle.

If children suffer from a complex battling illness like cancer, this unconditional love must be cultivated and nourished daily. Of course, there will always be difficulties, and some days might look longer than others, but eventually, if you keep fighting, every challenge turns into a victory.

How can I cultivate love to improve the bond among family members, particularly children undergoing such significant trials?  Here are some ways you can nurture your family love:

 

  • Listen to your children’s desires, hopes, and wishes.
    • Spend some time talking about their dreams. They might keep some thoughts for them, which is fine, but ask them to tell you about their ideas and plans. Children still don’t have all the tools in their vocabulary to clearly express their feelings, and in some cases, they might think it is hard and consider that nobody understands them, so be patient.
  • Do not expect your children to change their mood.
    • Your children must acknowledge their feelings if they suffer from a disease like cancer. Sometimes, they would like to express their impotence and be angry before they calm down and regain confidence. Avoid trying to force them to feel happy all the time. Instead, give them time and space to express all their feelings.
  • Express your love generously.
    • When they achieve a milestone in their treatment, be very visual. Children need to feel they are being recognized, particularly after difficult times. Remember that the children who might express they do not like an emotional display of happiness usually need it most. Some kids are introverted and want something more personal and private but still want to feel recognized.  A gift would always be well received.

 

Preparing children for the future

Enjoying family love is essential to shape the human brain and guaranteeing its better function over the years. Adults who have received affection during demanding situations in their childhood have a better chance of recovering from depression, anxiety, and mental health problems.

 

Dysfunctional family?

No two families are the same; there are families where a father, mother, and maybe even both are absent. However, not only the unions made from bloodlines are families, but also the ones where love has transcended links and losses.

On the other hand, if there is a complex family history where love was not the center, individual and family therapy is available. Often, facing and coping with the past is the best way to heal in the present and secure a better future for all the family members.

Love must always be the center of any union, a love that does not look for pride, self-benefit, or self-satisfaction but only for the well-being of the other.

 

By Eduardo Guillen

Why do kids engage in bullying?

Posted on by Eduardo Guillen

Can kids be cruel? Most definitely. However, it is important to remember that their cruelty is often based not on any inherent evil, but on the bully’s experience at home, a lack of proper parenting, or a lack of empathy towards others.

Definition of Bullying

 

 

Bullying is the exertion of power from one person or a group to another, often in the form of physical or psychological violence. Bullies take advantage of any power imbalance, whether that be by strength, popularity, social status, or other factors.

There is also a proclivity in some kids to be more violent than others. Here, we need to clarify that there is a difference between being violent versus being mean or rude. Violence is exerted to hurt another person, whether physically or mentally while being mean or rude is lacking manners with little to no power imbalance involved.

Bullies can use a multitude of resources to harass others, such as verbal and nonverbal messages, social rejection, stigmatization, and nowadays, even social media, aka cyberbullying.

Why Do Children Bully?

According to Trudy Ludwig, in her book Confessions of a Former Bully, a bully is a child who displays bad behavior. It is important to separate the bad behavior from the intrinsic identity of the child and to stop considering bullies as inherently bad people. Bullying often occurs because something is occurring at home or around the area of influence where the ‘bully’ lives.

However, the reasons why kids engage in bullying are usually to gain social status, to maintain power and control, or get attention from their peers. This often occurs when there is no supervision.

Years ago, bullying was considered an action performed by kids filled with insecurities. While this has truth to it, there is a lot of evidence in academic research that suggests that also bullying occurs due to a child’s desire to achieve popularity.

Furthermore, we need to ask ourselves why bullies have this desperate need for attention. Usually, it is because they have seen similar interactions within their social groups and feel the need to emulate such behavior.

The Victims

 

The victims of bullying vary, but these kids are usually the ones considered special or different from the rest of the class. In this group, we can include creative or intelligent students, isolated children, children with a different appearance, children with a disability, and children from a different religion.

Also, it is important to note that the bully and bullied can change according to the situation. For example, a child that is not as smart as the rest of the students can be bullied for being deficient in math or English, while popular kids could be victims of other bullies if they represent an attention threat.

How to Help

 

 

To reduce bullying in schools, adults need to be aware of the situation and intervene consistently; not only once, but every time it happens. Adults also must hone their senses to detect when a real case of bullying, not rudeness, happens and act immediately and accordingly.

Finally, teachers and parents must not consider bullying as something that ‘just happens’ during childhood and teenage years.

Adults need to identify the children involved in bullying incidents, identify needs, create a culture of comprehension and kindness, monitor the areas where bullying has occurred, and create dynamics where professionals can assess these situations to improve kids’ social behavior.

 

By Eduardo Guillen.