Category: Parenting

Not only can too much time in front of a computer, tablet, or phone impact the mental and physical health of kids and teens, but things like social media and YouTube can actually diminish their self-confidence. They become so used to the “highlight reels” of people’s lives, or of influencers who simply aren’t living the way the rest of us do.

So, they think if they aren’t living up to those standards, they must be doing something wrong.  The CDC reports that kids ages 11-14 spend an average of nine hours a day in front of a screen. Surrounding ages vary by a few hours, but the statistics provide the same response – that’s a lot of tech time.

What’s the solution?

Why not an outdoor adventure?

Getting kids outside can help with problem-solving, creativity, and self-reliance. A recent report found that four out of five kids feel more confident after participating in outdoor activities. So, how can you encourage your kids to spend more time outside? What can you do to create confidence in outdoor spaces and build characteristics that will have a positive impact on them for life?

Get Creative With Camping

Camping is a great way to bond with your kids.  Camping is one of the best ways for kids to build self-confidence outdoors. It’s self-reliance 101, and while you can help with things and be a positive teacher, your kids will learn that they can accomplish difficult things on their own, and enjoy the rewards that come with it. If you want to help boost your kids’ confidence while camping, you can start by tying it in with some standard safety procedures, including:

• Respecting wildlife
• Using tools properly
• Packing the right gear
• Staying on marked trails
• Learning how to start a fire

Not only can camping give your kids a boost in responsibility, but it allows them to expand their view of nature. Things like hiking, kayaking, and climbing are all great ways to get them interested in the great outdoors while building their confidence and self-esteem.

As you go on more family camping adventures, you can help your kids become even more confident by letting them pack their own bag or allowing them to pitch the tent when you hit your campsite. Those might seem like small things now. But, they are lessons your children will carry with them into adulthood, and they’ll come in handy when they need to feel confident in their problem-solving abilities.

Finding Self-Confidence in Sports

Youth sports have many physical benefits. They can help to manage weight, improve overall cardiovascular health, and strengthen bones and muscles. Most kids have a lot of natural energy that can be “burned off” through an organized sport – it can sometimes just take a little nudge to get them started.

Beyond the physical benefits of spending time outside playing a sport, there are many mental health perks, too, including:

• Reduced stress/anxiety
• Socialization
• Resilience
• Higher self-esteem and confidence

Studies have shown that kids who participate in sports tend to have higher self-esteem and happiness. That can come from practicing something difficult and seeing the positive results, or realizing they’re getting stronger or better at something over time.

Not all sports are outdoors, of course. But, signing your child up for an organized sport that’s primarily played outside can provide two-fold benefits. Spending time in nature is a natural mood-booster and can reduce stress. It’s a great way for kids to feel their best so they have the opportunity to let their self-confidence bloom.

Splitting From Screens

You don’t have to push your kids into a specific “box” when it comes to getting them outside. Simply making sure they get out there is the important thing. What they do from that point is up to them. Whether it’s playing a game of tag with their siblings, reading a book on the front porch, or going for a walk around the neighborhood, simply spending time outdoors can help them to build confidence and have a better understanding of who they are.

One of the best ways to make sure your kids spend enough time outdoors is to set boundaries on screen time. Your expectations should be clear and concise. Once your kids understand the rules regarding their digital devices, they’re less likely to push back. You can use the great outdoors as an option for them to enjoy when they’re done with tech for the day. Assure them that doesn’t mean they need to spend hours outside (though, as they get used to the benefits and realize they can have fun, they’re likely to spend more time out there every day).

Research suggests that as little as five minutes of activity outside every day can boost self-esteem. By encouraging your kids to spend more time outdoors now, you can set them up to form healthy habits in the future, and to be more confident in their abilities as they grow into adults.

Learning how to swim is an essential life skill that everyone should learn at a young age. Children with special needs can still learn how to swim so they can avoid drowning and other water-related accidents. Enrolling children with special needs in swimming lessons can help remove fear of going into the pool.

Swimming lessons also ensures their capability of handling themselves should they fall into a body of water.  There is more to swimming than just water safety. Whether your child has a neurodevelopmental disorder or physical disability, they will highly benefit from this life-saving skill.

This blog discusses the various benefits of swimming lessons for kids with special needs.

Benefits of Swimming Classes for Special Needs Children

Swimming holds various benefits for kids with special needs and conditions. Here are some of the advantages your child will get when you enroll them in infant swimming lessons that specialize in handling these students.

Burns Excess Energy

Parents of children with ADHD can attest to how much energy their child has. Swimming is one way to redirect this energy to learning a life-saving skill. An hour in the water can burn up to 500 calories. It can tire their body quickly as it requires concentration and coordination of different parts. You can sit them down much easier so they can focus on their everyday tasks or turn in for the day.

Since physical exercise drains their energy, it can promote better sleep. Special needs kids will also have greater control over their emotions and behavior even while out of the pool once they are swimming more regularly due to lessons.

Maintains a Healthy Weight

Special needs children have a higher rate of becoming obese. Enrolling them in swimming classes will challenge them to be more active in exercising. Since swimming is a low-impact activity that engages the whole body, it is an efficient way of maintaining a healthy weight.

Provides a Sense of Calmness and Freedom

The water environment also offers a sense of freedom and calmness for children with cerebral palsy, ADHD, and autism. Water buoyancy reduces our body weight by up to 80% and offers a greater range of movements. Children with cerebral palsy complain about restricted actions on land but will love the freedom that water provides. The hydrostatic pressure from the water also reduces everyday noises that can be irritating for most children.

Apart from freedom of movement in the water, the pool is also a serene place where children with ADHD can learn how to swim calmly. You don’t let them swim on their own entirely but instead still facilitate their movement, so they remain alert. Special needs kids may even think of the swimming pool as a fun escape from their everyday living.

Moreover, children with autism will significantly benefit from the predictability and repetitive movements in the pool. Doing repeated movements can be a way for autistic children to keep their anxiety in check and concentrate better. Learning how to float in the water also helps them become more aware of their bodies while dealing with overwhelming emotions.

Improves Communication

There are various activities during baby swimming lessons, including blowing bubbles and regulating breathing underwater. These activities can help special needs children with their speech and oral articulation. Moreover, toddlers become more expressive of their emotions, whether through verbal or non-verbal communication.

Boosts their Confidence

Mastering a skill can be difficult for special needs kids. As they progress through their curriculum, the lessons become more difficult but not impossible. Failure can lead to a lack of self-esteem and may even result in not trying at all. However, learning how to swim lets your child celebrate small attainable victories. With the help of trained swimming coaches, they can perfect a stroke, stay afloat, and do a lap on their own.

Swimming also boosts the confidence of children with physical limitations. While their peers can do everyday activities alone, being disabled limits what they can do independently. Toddler swimming lessons are tailored for special needs children to help them learn and explore beyond their limits.

Moreover, your child can receive rewards for every skill they learn, giving them the confidence boost they need. With these small achievements, they can become more confident to face other challenges in life. There’s no stopping a child who believes in themselves, right?

Build Relationships with Peers

A swimming school is a great place to meet new friends and build a relationship with them. Swimming classes group your child with students of the same age and skill level to avoid feeling shy or intimidated by their peers.

Letting your child engage with other children introduces them to people outside their regular home and school life. In fact, they can also mingle with their swimming instructors and other parents. The public setting lets them be more comfortable with people outside their comfort zone.

Puts No Pressure on Students

Unlike other sports, swimming puts no pressure on passing or catching a ball to a teammate. Swimmers can compete with themselves by finishing a lap faster or swimming a farther distance than before. Enrolling in swimming lessons for kids with special needs lets them learn at their own pace with the help of a swimming coach that tracks their progress.

Enroll in Private Swimming Lessons Today

Swimming offers many benefits for every child, and kids special needs shouldn’t be left out. Provide them with the opportunity to learn this life-saving skill to reap its long-term effects. This low-impact activity goes beyond enjoyment and promotes their developmental health while boosting independence and confidence.

Find a school that offers special needs swim lessons and enroll your child today.

Your children’s education should be more than getting straight A’s or enhancing their memorization skills. Education isn’t only limited inside the school premises. Instead, their learning must also continue even outside the classroom. You can motivate your child to keep learning everywhere, everyday. It’s a lifetime pursuit that continues even when they’re older.

Learning skills are practices one can utilize to be successful in life. But how can you foster the importance of learning so children embrace it with a positive attitude? To get started, here are six ways you can help improve your children’s learning skills outside the school:

Feed Curiosity Through Sunday School

You can encourage your kids to participate in Sunday school sessions during the weekend. Sunday school is full of unique stories that pique most children’s curiosity, a factor in enhancing their creative skills. They will be introduced to Sunday school teaching materials that they wouldn’t normally see in their regular school. Examples are worship storybooks, mystery puzzles, and temple crafts.

The more children are exposed to storytelling, the more they develop their imagination and creativity.

Hit Multiple Learning Skills With Baseball

Starting at age seven, your kids can be signed up for your neighborhood’s baseball program. This is a great sport to help kids improve their motor skills while get much needed exercise. But it doesn’t end there. Baseball touches a lot of life skills and learning skills including teamwork, situation analysis (assessing challenges and opportunities in the field), and decision-making (whether or not to commit interference).

Strategy development (researching and analyzing for potential ways to win in future matches) can be introduced to children who’s inclined to watch footages of their game play. This can also be applied to other team sports your kiddos are interested in, such as basketball, soccer, and hockey.

Moreover, focus can be largely improved if your kid practices hitting a target during this fun activity. A simple pitching net could help them work on their precision and concentration a lot. You can even mark it with colors and set a challenging game of earning points. This will further motivate them to improve their skills and have fun at the same time.

Organize A Day For A Food Factory Tour

If there’s a food factory nearby, and if they conduct tours to their production facility, grab the chance to visit. Kids will love candy and chocolate factories, but you can also consider tours offered by makers of other food products. Factories have equipment and setup that kids don’t typically see. And when they get to see how the chocolates are made, with precision, timing, and speed, they are indirectly introduced to a handful of organizational skills.

Organizational skills are habits that make one’s performance of tasks effective and efficient. The concept may still be very new to children but watching the systematic production at work at the factories may give them insights into many components of this skill set. Example components are time management (prioritizing activities), schedule planning (putting tasks in the most practical sequence possible), and productivity (getting things done).

Solve Puzzles At A Toy Convention

Did you like playing with interlocking plastic bricks as a child? Your kids may do, too! If there is a major convention or even just a private fair of this particular toy in your area, you can definitely head out there with the whole family. Building blocks and bricks teaches a couple of learning skills to children.

Creative abilities they can enhance are problem-solving, innovation, open-mindedness, and repurposing (coming up with many uses of a particular thing). Critical thinking skills they’ll start applying can be paying attention to detail and thinking analytically. By teaching them these 21^st century skill sets, you can put them on a path to becoming sought-after professionals when they become adults.

Find Meaning In Pet Shops And Volunteer Work

Put a cat in a child’s arms and watch that kiddo’s face light up. A dog can have the same effect. Bringing your children to the nearby pet shop can strengthen your kids’ connection to others. The same can be said about volunteer work. Look up age-appropriate volunteer programs in your area.

Examples are cleaning up around the neighborhood, supervised working at soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and animal sanctuaries, and teaching other children if your kiddo is academically inclined. Allowing your kids to have these experiences early on will reinforce their communication skills, two of which are empathy and respect. Aside from these, working with their peers and adults teaches them reliability, task delegation, and engagement. These are significant collaboration skills they can continue to train in themselves as they grow to adulthood.

Gaining Higher Order Thinking Skills At The Library

A child comes out to this world, and they start to have unique personalities. If your elementary schooler is the reading type, spend time with them at the library. They’ll feel quite at home in the quietude of its halls. Let them go to the books they’re interested in, with your supervision, of course. Pick something you like, too, so you can sit beside them while both of you silently read on your own. Or read the same book softly together, if possible.

Reading at a young age gives a lot of benefits not only in terms of expanding your kiddo’s vocabulary, diction, and perspective, but also in higher order thinking skills. Examples of components within this latter skill set are critical thinking (questioning the truth of concepts), inferencing (using reason to get to conclusions), and evaluation (testing the credibility of claims). All are important learning skills.

The Takeaway

Learning is a never-ending journey, and it’s something everyone should do. With these tips, you can create an environment that will stimulate your children to keep learning and stay curious.

Explore 8 ways to support your kids in school.

Attitude is one important aspect to pay close attention to in child development. As they grow, children should learn to adopt a positive attitude towards life as a whole. A positive attitude will boost their ability to deal with stress. It will also play a big role in their level of perseverance and endurance when life gets tough.

Overall, kids with a positive attitude are better placed to face life’s challenges.  They will grow into people who are not afraid to take risks and always do their best.

Things That Create a Negative Attitude

Many factors can come into play for a child to develop a negative attitude. For instance, their temperament can make them naturally inclined towards negativity. In the traditional categorization of personality traits, melancholic kids tend to exhibit such traits. A child’s environment also plays a major role in the attitude they develop.

If they come from a home that models negativity, they will catch on. Basically, this negativity can be in terms of the parents’ response to life, the words they use around them, or how they treat them in general. Introducing kids to positive role models can have the opposite effect. Knowing this as an educator, you can either make the situation better or vice versa.

Here are some tips you can use to help children develop a positive attitude.

Encourage Them to Take Risks

Give children tasks above their current abilities. They may get scared at first, but with time they will realize that taking risks is not such a bad thing.

Be Realistic In Your Interactions With Them

Do not offer false praise. If a child messes up or performs below what you expected of them, say it. You will help them learn to take criticism positively and come up with new strategies to work on things. Plus, they will learn to be realistic too.

Offer Constructive Criticism

In line with expressing displeasure, do it wisely. Do not tear down a child just because they messed up. Find ways to give positive feedback and tell them they were wrong without making them feel like they’re a complete mess who can’t ever get anything right. This way they will learn that one mistake does not necessarily ruin everything.

Make Room For Vulnerability

If you allow the children to express their emotions freely, they learn that it is not a weakness. In turn, they grow into people who work through their feelings instead of bottling them up until they explode. Don’t be overprotective and tell your kids that it’s ok to fail. Let them know it’s a natural process of learning and growing.

Appreciate Effort

Recognize every effort they make towards progress- as little as it may be. It will foster a desire to keep learning and growing because it is worth something. Re-enforce their strengths but equally let them know they don’t have to be the best at something to enjoy it.

Affirmations

You will be surprised at how much difference affirmations can make. Use positive affirmations for kids to help them replace the negative thoughts they have with good ones. Constantly speaking positivity will gradually help them “rewire” their minds.

Instill Responsibility

Give them tasks and quit hovering around to make sure they get things right. When you allow them to take matters on minus your supervision, they understand that they can be trusted. They will then learn to be good stewards of what’s entrusted to them.

Practice Well-Being

Well-being activities don’t have to be slow meditative practices that are boring for kids.  Incorporate self-esteem games that also boost their confidence levels.  It can be done within the family or group games with friends.  Either way, engaging the minds and bodies of children does wonders for their inner selves.

To help you on this quest, you can get effective tools and resources such as journals, teaching guides, and printables for children of all ages from Big Life Journal.

Wrapping It Up

Life seems to be getting more complicated by the day. Hence, raising a society of people with a positive attitude will go a long way in making the world a better place.

Read about the 24 Tips to Build a Bond with your Teenage Son.