Dealing with Parental Anger: Book Review of Peggy Ployhar’s Be Angry… and Train Your Kids
By Kathy Kuhl We parents don’t like to admit our anger with our kids. If our children have learning challenges, we know life is harder for them. So we want to be patient. Nevertheless, our kids and their challenges can annoy and frustrate us. Deliberately or not, our children sometimes act in ways that […]
Taming Smartphones: Using Handheld Tech to Help, Not Hurt
by Kathy Kuhl A smartphone is both a great tool and a great distraction. How can we harness the technology to help our struggling learners, without making life harder? Last week in Missouri, I spoke on helping distractible students succeed. For teens, I weighed the pros and cons of carrying smartphones. A few of […]
Manage tasks with less stress
By Kathy Kuhl If you homeschool kids, you have a lot to manage. But when you homeschool a child with learning challenges, special needs, and/or giftedness, you don’t just need lists. You need sub-lists, lists that repeat, lists to save for next year. Some of us have distractible kids, and some of us are […]
Tips for Distractible Moms
By Kathy Kuhl Whatever the cause of your distraction, these tips can help you stay on target! Be Smart about Smartphones Don’t keep your smartphone next to your bed at night. If you’re worried about missing an important message from kids or other family, turn up the volume. Some smartphones have a “Do not disturb” […]
Habits: Building them, breaking them
by Kathy Kuhl How do we help our kids develop good habits? Why are bad habits so hard to break? “Habits emerge, scientists say, because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort,” says Pulitzer Prize winner writer Charles Duhigg in his book, The Power of Habit. When you act by habit, your brain is […]
Is your child time-blind?
by Kathy Kuhl (Part 2 on helping kids be more punctual. Part 1 is here.) What’s worse: being chronically late—or having a child who is? Either way we feel frustrated and helpless. In my last post, I recommended four ways to train your children to be more aware of how long it takes them to […]
Help your child be more punctual, part 1
by Kathy Kuhl A Wall Street Journal article headline declared, “We know why you’re always late.” I thought, “I’ve been found out!” Though I’ve learned how make myself punctual (usually), I know the looming guilt of being late again and disappointing people who think being punctual is just common courtesy. How can we help our […]
Need help managing your time on the computer?
By Kathy Kuhl Here are two helps I learned about at the same 2012 LDA conference. I do not guarantee this software. I have not tried StayFocusd yet. I pass them along for you to consider. If you have Google Chrome, you may likeStayFocusd, an extension that lets you limit how much time you spend […]
Using the Internet wisely
Using the Internet wisely: Why do we crave distraction? Many tools can help you guard your family from the ugly, immoral side of the Internet or to limit their time on the web. But even if all you read on the Internet is recipes and Bible stories, using the Internet affects how you think and […]
Is Google making us stupid?
If you don’t have time to read Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, here is the article that led to the book,“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic magazine.