1. Give your kids boring tasks to do

School life does not always work like an event or a party. There are tasks that need to be done, which might be less interesting for some children. Sure, we all hope that teachers will get the best excitement out of everything but, let’s face it; there will be some dull school work that still must be finished.

Isn’t that part of life? We all have those things we need to do, which we do not enjoy very much. We get done with it, that’s it! But many children these days seem to struggle with such tasks a lot. Life nowadays knows little boredom, there is always an entertaining device nearby that will fill in. Many children never learn to deal with such moments and find these times at school extremely challenging.

⇒ Prepare your children with small tasks that come in as a routine: emptying the dishwasher, setting the table, hanging clothes on a dryer, dusting, vacuuming or brushing the dog. Do not allow to do this with head phones on or while watching a video or listing to music. Just let them finish the tasks, not making it an event!

2. Set rules and apply them

Many teachers will agree with me, that it seems very hard for many children to adjust to rules in the class room or at the play ground.

I believe this has a lot to do with kids just not being used to such. In many households kids simply rule. Whatever is to their liking will be done, and if they do not like something, well then, they do not have to! While this might be working to some extend in a family setting (although it can create a lot of issues there as well), it simply turns life for teachers and staff at school into hardship. Imagine yourself being with 25+ children and nobody listens to your commands?

But it is not only the teacher who suffers but also each and every single student in that class. The kids need rules that give them a feeling of security and safety. It enables them to concentrate on their class work and learning. It frees them of having to think about what will come next.

Accepting and appreciating rules –like everything else in this world- can and should be learned at an early age. And the first teachers for this lesson are the parents.

⇒ Help your children in settling back into school (and liking rules) by setting rules and applying them at home. It should start with small things that can also teach the kids some sense of responsibility like: “take off the shoes when you come home and store them in the cupboard”, “wash your hands before and after meal”, “brush your teeth before bed”.

“Do this” versus “Do not do This”

The easiest rules to follow are the “Do-This-Rules”. These give a clear demand on what to do. Unfortunately many adults love the “Do-Not-Rules”, which mainly say, what should not be done or avoided but often miss out on what should be done instead. Applying them allows a lot of bending the rule by creative kids. Therefore it is always good to turn the “Do-Not – Rules” into “Do-This-Rules”.

For instance if you do not want your kid to use foul language, give them the alternative straight when you articulate your rule. You can say :”we only use nice words” or something alike, I guess you get the idea.

Still, try not to over-RULE.

Whenever you want to create a rule, think whether this is really necessary and will improve your life considerably. I am saying this because the more rules you make up, the more rules also need to be followed through and applied.

Once you start letting down things with one rule, the validity of the other rules will be questioned too. The idea is to make things easier and organized naturally, other than to stress things and poison your relationship.

3. Getting social needs to be practiced

Getting along with other (strange) people is a skill that needs to be learned nowadays more than ever before. More and more people do not mingle a lot with others. Families become smaller, therefore even in family gatherings less other children are around to get along with.

Many kids are not used to do things by themselves, always being accompanied by a relative or guardian. They do not learn how to talk to new people, be it adult or child. A school environment can be quite challenging then. Not only there are a lot of other people but these might also act much different from what this child might be used to. There are different characters, cultures, religions, life styles and backgrounds that might lead to completely different behaviors. Getting along with others and building friendships is so important when making sure that kids are settling back into school comfortably.

⇒ Give your child the chance to experience this social learning in different environments. Sport clubs, events, trips, summer camps – there are so many opportunities to getting used to deal with new people.

4. Teach resilience to strong kids

Interacting with different people and tasks is not always a pleasure. But it is a skill we cannot teach our kids early enough. Being a strong child also means to be able to deal with frustration and negative emotions. Getting angry, sad, frustrated, embarrassed or disappointed for instance, is just human. Understanding how to deal with these emotions is a great life skill.

In my work with children I noticed that more and more children are not able to differentiate and verbalize these emotions. Many actually seem to have only two emotions: they are either happy or angry. The problem with this is that they are complete slaves of their emotions. Only if you know what it is you are feeling and where it comes from, you can take the ownership for this emotion. Only then you can decide whether you WANT to feel this way or not.

⇒ Talk with your child about the different emotions humans can have and how they feel in different situations. Name the emotions. Look at where this emotion came from. Explain that only we can decide what we feel and that it is not other people that make us feel a certain way. Isn’t it so much easier to ignore a provocation if we decide that we are not willing to be angry?

5. Focus on single tasks

In times when ADHD is a common (self-) diagnosis it is a really good idea to learn to focus again. Do you teach this to your kids? Our children learn most things when they watch us. Are you focused on tasks? How about listening to your child when the phone beeps? Sitting all together at the dining table even if your favorite show is luring you?

Focusing and completing tasks has become way more difficult for children these days. There are so many distractions of media, noise and entertainment surrounding them, that attention and focus on single tasks seem to be overly hard.

Actually to learn to focus and to grow attention spans in children is just a question of giving opportunities to exercise them.

⇒ Mentally healthy children should experience an array of different activities each day. Some should be physically exhausting in order to balance out energy levels. But others should involve tasks that need patience to finish them. This could be arts and crafts or old fashioned puzzles. Key is here to stay on the task without giving up, even if there might be distractions.

6. Celebrate success and failure

While I talked about frustrations already, I want to look here at another aspect. When we say: “learning from failure is the best way to learn”, we need first to allow failure –for our children and ourselves.

The world and even the world of our children get more competitive every day. Failure therefore is highly discouraged. But we need to allow mistakes to happen in order to learn. At the end most advancements of human kind happened via trial and error.

⇒ Talk with your children about your own mistakes and failures and what you have learned from it. Encourage them to try things out, even if there is quite a chance that they will fail. If they fail at some task or a test at school, talk with them about their feelings. Make sure they understand that they can restart always again, that failure does not turn you into a loser. Help them to find new ways to try again maybe from a different angle or using a different technique. Celebrate success without over boarding!