Category: Connecting with your child

Ideas for time together, talking and listening, helping your child with feelings, and staying involved in learning and school. See every topic on the Resources page.

Connecting with your child

Stop Asking, “How Was School Today?”

School offers children a wide range of experiences ranging educational to social. They are experiencing what it is like to be part of a larger group, to adapt to a new culture, to make friends, relate with adults, and to change and grow as individuals.  As parents, we want all these experiences for our children

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Connecting with your child

How to Have Difficult Conversations With Your Child?

Do you enjoy having conversations with your child? Of course you do. Except for the difficult ones about hot button issues. Right? Well, today, I am going to help you by sharing some tips you can use when having difficult conversations with your kid. One or two generations ago, the most difficult conversation a father

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Connecting with your child

Ask Questions That Help Your Children Feel

Emotional intelligence (or EQ) is recognised as one of the keys to success – more important than IQ, many say. As a result, books and workshops on this subject have been selling like hot cakes. But, developing emotional intelligence is not rocket science, really. We were all born with it. The problem is that it

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Connecting with your child

Ask Questions To Help Your Child Think

Being able to talk to your kids is important at any age, and is best established when children are young, open, and impressionable. As your child goes through changes in life, like going from Primary to Secondary school, it is likely that they will have less time to spend with the family. This makes the

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Connecting with your child

Go Green

I have flown a kite only once in my entire life. Perhaps that was the only time my dad told me to “Go fly kite” (kidding). But from a young age, I’ve been attracted to scenic landscapes and nature. At first I thought that it was just a personal preference, but later learned that humans

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Connecting with your child

Turn Towards Your Child’s Bids

”It’s so hard to get my 14-year old daughter to open up to me,” a father laments. “The only two times she speaks with me is to ask for her monthly allowance and to complain about how her elder siblings have been bullying her.” Sounds familiar? Obviously, this father isn’t aware that his daughter has

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Connecting with your child

We Must Look And Listen

All of my three children were delivered at the same hospital and the same thing happened for every one of them. A nurse would take the new born away in a towel to clean it up immediately after the gynae had cut the umbilical cord. Soon after, she would announce: “Ten fingers. Ten toes.” The

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Connecting with your child

More Than One Reason To Read To Your Child

Mums and dads read to their children, but they do it differently from one another. A study from Harvard University in the US maintains that children reap more benefit if they are read to by their fathers as mothers tended to ask ‘teacher-like’, factual questions, whereas the dads tend to favour more abstract questions which

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Connecting with your child

Play: More Than Just Fun

It has been said that “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Does it only mean that Jack is bored if he does not get to play, or much more? The eminent play scholar, Joe Frost, in his compelling book, “A History of Childhood Play and Play Environments” (1) tellingly shows that

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Connecting with your child

Use Adventure to Build Trust, Facilitate Communication and Teach Values

Centre for Fathering-DADs for Life’s (CFF-DFL) “Adventure Camp with Dad” (ACD) is an activity-based programme designed to build trust and communication between father and child, whilst nurturing a sense of adventure. Additionally, as an experiential activity that stretches participants and takes them outside their comfort zones, it offers fathers many opportunities to impart values and life skills

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