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Take Your Kids Outdoors
Kids spend well over 40 HOURS per week in front of electronic screens, but less than 40 MINUTES per week in nature. Screens are ruling teens. Delayed Gratification A major component of growing up is learning to deal with long waits and unexpected delays, yet nearly everything is now available in an instant. If we are going…
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Doodling
My wife, my 13 year old son, and I went to see The Taming of the Shrew outdoors last night in Forest Park. Since it’s a free and first-class show, we had to get there very early to get a spot with any sort of good view. Before the show started, just as we settled…
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Our Friend, Failure
I once heard a speaker named Dan Miller at an educator’s conference tell the audience about how he learned to fly an airplane. First, you should know that he is disabled from polio as a teenager to the extent that he can only use one arm, and he walks with a serious limp. His sickness…
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Get Out and Play!
Yesterday afternoon was a cold one – a great day to be inside with some hot chocolate. The wind chill was in the single digits. Four inches of snow and ice covered the ground. Inside, we were perfectly warm and dry. There were five of us (ages 7, 11, 19, 38, 39), standing around in…
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Career Guidance
Shaping Your Future Worker By: Ken Canfield Don’t you wonder – and worry – about your child’s future career path? If your kids are like mine, people started characterizing them from an early age: “Wow, she has long fingers. She’ll be a great piano player some day.” Or, “He loves to push buttons and figure…
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Just Believe in Yourself
“Just believe in yourself, and you can achieve anything.” “Pursue your dream, and don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do it.” “If you dream it, you can be it.” Countless movies, songs, TV shows, and motivational speakers have preached this message. And countless teachers, coaches, and counselors preach the same message. Parents teach…
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Being a Good Loser in Youth Sports
After a weekend out of town at my son’s soccer tournament, I’m a little tired of hearing, “Did you win?” It was, without question, the single-most popular question of the weekend. Even strangers in the hotel would ask my uniformed son, “Didja win?” And each time he would sadly reply, “No,” followed by an awkward…
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Facebook Kids
The most common questions that parents have today are all related to Facebook, since every student wants full access and most parents don’t know enough about it. It is a generational thing, like rock and roll was misunderstood by our grandparents. In the same way that our parents monitored our use of the telephone, television,…