Teach Your Children to be Resilient – The Parents Guide

One of the big ideas to come along lately in child development circles is that if parents want their children to be successful, then they need to start teaching their kids resilience. The argument is that we have been so focused on trying to make sure our children avoid pain and disappoint at all costs, that children are so insulated from unpleasant situations or challenges they are incapable of dealing with any sort of failure or adversity.

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The idea of developing resilience in kids started to gain some traction after the publication of the groundbreaking book NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children that explored the problems with the self-esteem movement and the helicopter style of parenting.

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More recently, the huge success of Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character put the idea of resilience back in the spotlight. Tough argues that character attributes such as perseverance and resilience are a better predictor of future success than standardized tests, and that character is created by encountering and overcoming failure. So our job as parents shouldn’t be trying to protect our kids from making mistakes, but instead letting children fail because it helps to develop resilience.

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Since developing resilience in kids does seem like a pretty good idea, we thought, why not jump on the bandwagon and find out where you can get more of the best practical advice on how to build resilience in kids.

After going through lots of books on resilience and reading way too many reviews, our top resources for learning how to create resilience in your kids are:

  1. Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg is an expert on how to build resilience in children. Dr. Ginsburg has a wonderful site called Fostering Resilience that has all sorts of great advice, including his 7 C’s building blocks to resilience. The 7 C concept (competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping, and control) is also explored more in-depth in his book Building Resilience in Children and Teens: Giving Kids Roots and Wings. This is a great (almost 400 page!) book with a lot of practical advice about how to teach kids to make wise decisions, how to recognize and build on their natural strengths, how to deal with stress, and so much more practical advice that will help develop resilience.  We highly recommend this book.
  2. Another of our favorite resources is Dr. Wendy Mogel.  Dr. Mogel is a clinical psychologist and author of the bestselling books, The Blessing Of A Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children and The Blessing of a B Minus: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Resilient Teenagers. You don’t have to be Jewish to benefit from her books. The Blessing of a Skinned Knee is a wonderful, funny book that gives advice about how parents can get back to the basics of being authority figures in children’s lives, instead of grown-up “friends”. It also talks about how to teach kids that what you do is more important than what you think or believe, why it’s essential to do a thing in moderation, kids and adults are not equal, how to celebrate or embrace our child’s faults, and lots more stuff.  The Blessing of a B Minus is an excellent book for parents of teenagers that shows parents how all the terrible or frustrating parts of being an adolescent can be viewed as blessings and why they are important for psychological growth and character development. This book has a lot of tools and advice that parents can utilize.
  3. Finally, our last choice for the best resource is Raising Resilient Children: Fostering Strength, Hope, and Optimism in Your Child. This is a great book that lists ten essential behaviors or guideposts to try to incorporate into your life to help teach your kids resilience. The guideposts are:
    • Teach and convey empathy
    • Listen, learn, and influence to communicate effectively.
    • To change your words of parenting, rewrite your negative scripts.
    • Find ways to love your children that help them feel special and appreciated.
    • Accept your children for who they are and help them set realistic expectations and goals.
    • Nurture islands of competence; every child must experience success.
    • Mistakes are teachable moments.
    • Help your child develop responsibility, compassion, and social conscience.
    • Teach and emphasize the importance of solving problems and making choices and decisions.
    • Discipline in ways that promote self-discipline and self-worth

You can check out the book or the author’s website to find out more about these ten behaviors and how to work them into your life.

 

Teach Your Children to Tell Time

Learning to tell time is an essential skill for kids to learn. These days teaching kids how to read a clock is easier than ever because of some of the amazing resources that are available. Since there is quite a lot of material around, we have rounded up some of the best websites, free online games, apps, books, clocks, DVDs, and teaching watches to help you teach your kids how to tell the time in a simple and easy way.

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Websites with Lessons

There are several sites with online lessons on how to tell the time. We checked out Time Monsters, Apples 4 the Teacher, and  Visnos. The site that was the most fun, according to our kid testers, was Time Monsters. It is an animated website that has cartoon fellow by the name of Professor Tempo, giving mini-lessons while monsters try to distract you from the task of learning to read the clock.

Sites with Games

There is no easier way to help kids learn something while having fun than online games. Luckily there is no shortage of time telling games. To help you wade through the vast number of games around, we have picked the ones our kid testers liked the best and tried to find games for a variety of ages and skill levels.

  • Turtle Diary Time Zone introduces the concepts of seconds, minutes, hours, A.M., and P.M. through this simple exercise, as kids read the clock and fill in the correct time.
  • Toy Theatre is a simple learning game where you choose the correct answer from a selection of clocks.
  • ABCya Time Travel is an activity where you practice setting the clock by selecting a type of clock and then dragging the hands of the analog clock or by clicking the up and down buttons of the digital clock.
  • Stop the Clock a slightly different variation of matching analog clocks to digital clocks. It’s fun.
  • Mr. Nussbaum’s Bedtime Bandits is a bit different than the other games that are out there. Players take the form of a child with a flashlight, avoiding going to bed.
  • Primary Games relatively simple game matching an analog clock to a digital clock.

Apps

Apps are kind of perfect for teaching time, they are easy, cheap, and kids love them.  Since there are a lot of excellent ones out there, we tested out a few apps, and two that you should check out are Tell Time and Interactive Telling Time. Both of these apps are standouts in the crowded time telling app market.

Books

Another option to help kids get used to the idea of time and clocks is from a workbook or a storybook. There are quite a few books to choose from but here are a few that we like:

  • My Book of Easy Telling Time: Learning about Hours and Half-Hours is a Kumon workbook that introduces children to the concept of telling time by concentrating on the hours first, and then incrementally teaching children to half- and quarter-hours. The reason we liked this book is that Kumon uses repetitions to enforce the basics to the children. It is also colorful and worth the price for the kids to learn to tell “basic” time on their own without much supervision. The basic requirement though, is the knowledge of reading and writing numbers from 1-12.
  • Another book we like is Telling Time with Big Mama Cat. It is a book that tells the story of Big Mama Cat as she goes throughout her day and what she does at particular times of the day. This book includes a fold-out page that has a clock with movable plastic hands. Readers can change the time as Big Mama Cat moves from one adventure to the next. The reason we liked this book was partly because of the overwhelmingly great reviews and partly because teachers seem to like this book as a way of teaching time to kids.
Teaching Clocks

A lot of teachers use teaching clocks, they are a great way to help kids learn, you can easily make a simple teaching clock on your own, or there are some handy ones that you can buy.

A really popular teaching clock is the American Innovative Teach Me Time! Talking Alarm Clock and Nightlight. It is an interactive, talking time-teaching game that has adjustable skill levels and teaches concepts on the analog and digital clock faces. There are few complaints about how bright the feet are on this clock at night and some other complaints about difficulty in programming the clock and some design issues (numbers too small). But what we like are the features on it.

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DVDs

We found two DVDs that people seem to like that helps kids tell the time. Both DVDs have great reviews:

  • Munchkin Math: Telling Time is a DVD that will help your child learn how to tell the time in a fun, interactive, and engaging way. You can see a promo for this DVD here.

 

 

 

Teaching Kids to Cook

Teaching your kids to cook is probably one of the most useful things that a parent can do for their children. There are lots of great resources that parents can use to help their kids learn about food and cooking. We have rounded up the best cookbooks, cooking shows, websites, and apps that are perfect for kids to help them learn all about cooking.

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The Best Cookbooks for Kids

There are too many wonderful cookbooks for kids to choose from, so we decided to find the best cookbook for kids ages 3-7 and the best cookbook for kids ages 7+.

The Best Cookbook for Kids Ages 3-7

Our favorite cookbook for kids ages 3-7 is Pretend Soup and Other Real Recipes: A Cookbook for Preschoolers and Up. This is a fantastic cookbook for kids. One of the authors of this book, Mollie Katzen, is well known for involvement with the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York.

We couldn’t find anyone saying anything bad about this book. Most of the reviews comment on how fun to make the recipes are and how well-illustrated the book is.
The Best cookbook for kids ages 7+
For older kids ages 7+, there is a bit more selection, so it was much harder picking our favorite cookbook for kids. The book we ended up choosing is The Silver Spoon for Children: Favorite Italian Recipes.


People who know food and cooking love this cookbook. This book is mentioned on posts or articles about the best cookbooks for kids on The Chicago Tribune, Grandparents.com, The Independent, TheKitchn, Babyology, Forkandbottle, and many others.
The best thing about this book seems to be that it gives children recipes to cook and eat that are ‘adult’ food, so although they’re presented in a fun and colorful way, the recipes themselves don’t pander to the notion that there is specific ‘child’ food.

*** As a side note, if your kids need a little bit more of a push to get them into cooking, you can try one of the many niche cookbooks that are available for kids. Here is a brief list of some of the ones that look good to us: The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook: From Cauldron Cakes to Knickerbocker Glory, Fancy Nancy: Tea Parties, Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook, Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes and some of the Star Wars cookbooks including Wookiee Cookies: A Star Wars Cookbook and The Star Wars Cookbook II -Darth Malt and More Galactic Recipes.

Best Cooking Websites for Kids

If cookbooks aren’t your thing, there are some great websites around that give wonderful video demos or ideas for cooking with kids, here are just a few of our favorites:

  • Weelicious is one of our favorite sites that has some satisfying recipes and great videos with kids helping out in the kitchen.
  • Kitchen Monsters is a very kid-friendly site that has a nice option that groups recipes by difficulty level, and the recipes look delicious.

Cooking Shows and Webisodes for Kids

One of the easiest ways to get inspired to cook or learn about cooking is by watching a cooking show, and luckily there are lots of great online cooking series or videos for kids or featuring kids to choose from:

  • Kids Who Love to Cook has excellent videos featuring kids that show various recipes, cooking tips, and also cooking trips to find out where the food comes from(such as how to make cheese and how urban honey is made).
  • Hey Kids Lets Cook This is the website for the PBS kids show.
  • Telmo and Tula –Little Cooks Short cooking shows with the animated character Telmo and Tula – Little Cooks

For older kids/teens try:

  • Kickin Kitchen is a fun show for preteens that “brings kids and cooking together.”
  • Tastebuds TV has video games and recipes based on the terrific TVO cooking show for kids.

Cooking Apps for Kids

As most people know, cooking apps are super handy when you are in the kitchen and looking for a recipe. A few that are fun for kids to try are:

  • Cooking With Kids has over 90 child-friendly recipes and is designed to show kids just how much fun cooking for themselves can be. Easy-to-follow, and nicely illustrated, it will help teach children cooking skills to help them learn to love cooking.
  • Kung Fu Panda 2 Interactive Cookbook is a fun cookbook for kids that has Kung Fu Panda recipes, cooking demonstration videos, clips from the movie, cool animations, and much more.