by Susie Windle | Sep 28, 2016 | Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, The Power of Play
Playing on the floor with your child is a wonderful way to enhance your child’s attention span. Attention requires practice, and practice will occur naturally during “floor time” for a child who has been blessed with the ability to concentrate and focus. Floor time...
by Susie Windle | Oct 28, 2015 | Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, The Power of Play, Your Child's Brain
The evidence for including physical activity in a school’s curriculum is accumulating as research links students’ cognitive performance with markers of physical fitness, such as aerobic capacity and body mass index. Rather than cutting back on recess time, encouraging...
by Susie Windle | May 6, 2015 | Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, The Power of Play, Your Child's Brain
Adults can easily forget that kids learn a lot through physical play. Physical play might involve roughhousing, wrestling, climbing, swinging, and running around. All children need this kind of play, and participating in it is one of the ways kids can learn to solve...
by Susie Windle | Apr 2, 2014 | Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, Your Child's Brain
The amount of time you spend face to face with your child matters. When you spend time face to face, you are sending the message that you delight in just being together. For your child, there is magic in your eye contact, smile, and voice. You are sending the...
by Susie Windle | Oct 9, 2013 | Discipline and Trying Times, Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, The Importance of Emotions, Your Child's Brain
Whining, that fussy tone of voice between talking and crying, is commonly heard from toddlers, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you have a spoiled child. Often, children whine when they can’t truly express their feelings. You are most likely to hear whining when...
by Susie Windle | Aug 14, 2013 | Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, The Power of Play, Your Child's Brain
Preschool is one way to gently introduce children to a school setting. When school is viewed as inviting and tempting, a love of learning is more likely to develop. Preschool is appropriately a time for children to explore, feed their curiosity, take initiative, and...
by Susie Windle | Mar 6, 2013 | Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, Your Child's Brain
Dyslexia has historically been considered a developmental reading disorder. But parents, teachers, and other children’s caregivers may be interested to know that new research suggests that assumption may be inaccurate. According to a new report in Current Biology,...
by Susie Windle | Feb 13, 2013 | Discipline and Trying Times, Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, Your Child's Brain
Children differ in their rate of development of self-regulation. Because of this difference, it can seem that some children won’t follow instructions when in every other way they seem perfectly capable of taking direction and completing tasks. Children can even seem...
by Susie Windle | Sep 12, 2012 | Discipline and Trying Times, Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, The Importance of Emotions, Your Child's Brain
As emotional beings, we all need more than food and water to feel satisfied and healthy. Eric Berne, a psychologist, first coined the term “psychological hungers.” Three of the psychological hungers he first identified were stimulation, recognition, and structure....
by Susie Windle | Jun 20, 2012 | Parenting Playbook, Parenting Skills, Sensory Information
During the first few months of your baby’s life, you can begin to help your newborn learn to be calm, regulated, secure, and interested in his or her new world. Likely, your baby is already a sensory sponge, learning from the sights, sounds, smells, touches, and...
