The Happy Student

It's the last episode and Katherine gets very personal talking about the end of The Happy Student, and how she works hard to build her grit and growth mindset. McQuaid, M. (2016) Are you suffering from stupid grit?. Psychology Today Mindsetworks

Self-criticism can be a powerful motivator. It can also really harm your mental health - increasing your anxiety. Teens use self-criticism a lot to motivate themselves and they also seriously struggle with anxiety. Self-compassion (being nice to yourself when you mess up) is the answer! At first glance, teens often think that if you're nice to yourself when you mess up, you'll actually lower your standards and spend all day watching Netflix. Research shows that's not actually the case. Self-compassion actually helps you be more productive and keeps you happy and reduces your anxiety! Check out the episode to find out how! For some extra reading, check out: Dr. Kristin Neff's work at www.self-compassion.org and Rachel Simmons's article in The New York Times called "The Promise of Self-Compassion for Stressed-Out Teens"

Traveling with kids over the holidays is hard. Fireborn’s got a few tips for you to keep the meltdowns at bay. We hope you have a happy holiday season!

For some people, the holidays are too much fun or maybe just too overwhelming. Kids’ schedules get totally thrown off with all the travel, family, and fun. They eat way more sugar and unhealthy things than they normally do. And they can get totally overstimulated by family, activities, parties, and toys. With all of that fun happening, it’s no wonder kids start to have tantrums – they are totally overstimulated and have trouble regulating their emotions, especially when they aren’t having fun because hanging out with their aunts and uncles – a bunch of adults – is not their idea of fun. In this episode, we talk about how to keep the holidays fun by first working on avoiding meltdowns and second figuring out what to do when meltdowns happen.

Every year my husband and I watch Home Alone to start the holiday season off right and every year I hear the things the adults in the movie say to Kevin (the protagonist) and I just cringe! Instead of calming the situation down, they exacerbate it. So, before the holidays, I wanted to review how you can turn a bad situation into a better one using effective communication and discipline.

Today we have a special guest – Katherine's cousin Andrei! Andrei is a sophomore in high school and we were hanging out the other night and I told him – I’m really worried about when my daughter grows up and is a teenager. I don’t think I understand what I should be worried about with teens anymore. I’m totally out of touch. And we had this great conversation about vaping and social media and bullying and I felt a lot better about teens after talking with him. And after our conversation, Andrei said he’d be happy to come on the show. Andrei is here to tell us about vaping and cyberbullying!

There are so many ways parents are told they are parenting incorrectly and we have to protect ourselves! Parents constantly get terrifying, judge-y emails trying to scare us into opening them. This bombardment in our inboxes and Instagram feeds is stressful. And we are much better parents when we are not stressed that we're about to harm our children for life. So here to talk with us today about protecting ourselves from all of this is Margaret Quinlan, co-author of You’re Doing It Wrong! Mothering, Media, and Medical Expertise.   Resources & References: You're Doing It Wrong! Mothering, media, and medical expertise. by Margaret Quinlan & Bethany Johnson Maggie & Bethany on: Twitter Facebook Instagram Their Website     The Cost of Breastmilk (Stop Saying Breastmilk is Free) This is How Much Breastfeeding Actually Costs Fertility for Colored Girls Chelsea Skaggs Midwives for Black Lives The Making of a Black Midwife (Go Fund Me)  

Mental flexibility is a really great skill to have because things change. Plans change. Unexpected life events pop up. You break your leg. Your teacher assigns you a big paper. You get a bad grade on a test. Your friend gets mad at you. Helping kids develop mental flexibility is a little bit about helping them with anxiety and a little bit about helping them with creative thinking. We’ve got 7 tips that help with both of those things. References and Resources: Amelia Bedelia Beautiful Oops! Tinkergarten Understood.org   Meditation Resources: Calm Sitting Still Like a Frog Stress and Anxiety 101

I give you advice and I really try hard to follow every piece of advice that I give you because I hate being hypocritical, but I’m also human. And you are too. So I don't always succeed. And it’s okay. So today I'm listing out some of my recent failures. So in the future, if you’re listening to this and you think the advice is overwhelming – it’s overwhelming and impossible sometimes for me too. The goal is to just keep trying our hardest to improve.

Being a kid feels really dangerous these days. Kids are eating Tide Pods, getting cyberbullied, and sending sexts. And technology is really leading the way for so many of these dangerous things. Kids are watching YouTube and Instagram stars do stupid, risky things and they are constantly getting notifications from apps about who knows what. And so in response to this, we have more apps. Apps that are meant to keep our kids safe and that let parents know a lot of information about their kids – like who their children are talking to and how much. But that is a problem for kids who need privacy. Privacy is something that kids want and need and something that was already hard for parents to give when we were growing up, but feels even harder and even more dangerous these days. Research shows that parents who give their kids more autonomy and privacy are actually victimized less frequently than kids whose parents are more controlling and invasive. So we definitely want to give kids privacy! So how do we do that? Fireborn has 9 tips! Resources: Gosh, A.K., Badillo-Urquiola, K., & P. Wisneiwski. (2018). Examining the effects of parenting styles on offline and online adolescent peer problems. ACM. New York: NY. Ketteler, J. (2018). When is a child Instagram ready? The New York Times.

Distractions surround our kids – their attention doesn’t stand a chance. There are TVs, video games, phones, tablets, computers, and apps. Distractions are a big problem because they interrupt our focus. Maintaining our focus while we work is really important. When we get distracted, it takes us longer to get back into whatever we were doing before – there are transaction costs to switching between activities. To help prepare kids to succeed this school year, start helping them make a plan to deal with distractions now so they can focus on their homework later. Resources: Duhigg, C. (2014). The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. New York: Random House. Ruston, D. (2018). 5 Homework Strategies in the Digital Age. Screenagersmovie.com

Stress. We’ve all got it. I’ve got it. You’ve got it. Your kids have it. Some stress is good for us – it can help motivate us to do stuff and it activates our brain so that we really pay attention to what we are doing. But too much stress and those benefits go away. Too much stress and your brain starts worrying and stops working. You actually lose IQ points when you have too much stress. This is a problem. We’ve got 7 tips for building your stress-tolerance!

“Be careful.” What a common phrase parents say. Your kid is climbing a tree – “Be careful!” Your kid is carrying hot liquid – “Be careful!” Your kid is going for a drive –“Be careful!” My parents still tell me to “Be careful!” And that’s fine. But it’s also not great. It’s not that helpful. What does “careful” mean to a kid? Maybe a good alternative to careful is to be slow – to take your time because what you're doing requires concentration and thought and you don’t want to rush it because you could get hurt. But being slow and careful is boring. And kids hate boring. So I’ve got an alternative, let’s start telling our kids to “Be strategic.”

Organization isn't the only thing we need to work on as we go back to school. Being on time and able to manage our time is also super helpful to ensuring our kids are ready to start learning. So this week we have a few tips on how you can help your child develop some time management techniques. For instance, teach them about TIME ROBBERS, get them an Octopus, or teach them about the passage of time with an analog clock. 

Teaching your kids to make good decisions can be really hard. Developing a family motto can make that a lot easier. Family mottos, such as “We are kind” or “We are inclusive” help kids develop a sense of self. Then, they naturally want to behave in ways that confirm that they are indeed kind or inclusive. When faced with a tough decision, parents can refer their kids to the family motto to then help them make a good decision.   Reference: Borba, M. (2017). UnSelfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World.

Metacognition: a useful skill that can help you study better because you know what you’re good at and what you need to improve. It can help you make better decisions, like when you just want to yell at someone because that would feel good but you realize that’s not actually the best course of action – which is helpful as a student, in the workforce on a team, as well as as a partner, parent, and friend. But it’s a really difficult thing to teach. Fireborn’s got 6 tips to make it easier!   Resources: Inner Drive Questions Teaching Metacognition  

If your kid doesn’t believe in getting started on homework as soon as possible; if procrastination is a problem; and if tasks are often left to the last minute, your child most likely struggles with the executive function skill called task initiation. Fireborn’s here to help with 8 tips for building task initiation skills this summer!   Resources: Brain Breaks Center for BrainHealth  

We so often value logic and discount the value of emotions – well not today! Today, parent coach Alison Smith tells us about the importance of emotions and gives us ideas on how to help our kids develop their emotional intelligence.    References & Resources: Alison Smith Parent Coach You EQ Games The Ungame Today I Feel…: An Alphabet of Feelings Michele Borba’s book: UnSelfie: How Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All About Me World

“They say” a lot of things about how you should raise your children and it can be totally overwhelming and stressful when what “they say” just isn’t practical for you and your children. Our guest, Lauren from They Say Parenting is here to tell you it’s okay and to talk about how she let go of what “they say” and how you can too!   References & Resources:   They Say Parenting Order Lauren’s Book: They Say… (Not Your Average Parenting Book) TheySayParenting on Instagram @TSParenting on Twitter TheySayParenting on Pinterest

The American Academy of Pediatrics just put out a strongly worded statement arguing against spanking because the AAP argues that spanking can harm kids. This is controversial because a lot of parents spank their kids as part of discipline and no one wants to hear that they are doing the wrong thing, especially when they feel like they don’t have a good alternative. So what’s the deal with spanking? And are there good alternatives?   References & Resources:   Alison Smith Parent Coach A Gift from Alison Smith: The Gentle Parenting Manifesto from   The Happy Student episodes on discipline: “The General Rules of Discipline” “Types of Discipline” “Giving Logical Consequences” “What To Do When Your Kid ‘Talks Back’ with Alison Smith” “The Bizarre Time-Out Controversy” “Lighthouse Parenting”