At Play
How Music Changes Your Child’s Brain for the Better (by Zac Green)
Improving Your Everyday Life Through Art Therapy Paint, Sculpt, or Color Your Way to Relaxation (by Caileigh Flannigan)
Whether it’s rooted in work, school, the past, or personal relationships, stress is a huge part of our lives. Stress can have many negative effects on physical and psychological systems. An inability to positively control or manage stress may lead to inappropriate behavior such as alcohol consumption, overeating, or neglecting feelings. It’s important to know that stress can be managed effectively, at very little cost, and in a fun way. Art therapy is a great therapeutic approach that you can use in your daily life to keep your stress levels low and your contentedness high.
Playground Politics – What Drives Peer Rejection?
Peer relationships are so important, but they don’t always glisten. Through their relationships – the good and the not so good – children will learn many things. It’s where they’ll start to build their expectations about how the world will receive them, what the world will think of them, whether the world is safe, whether people are safe, and how much power they have. It’s also where they will learn that ‘mean for no reason’ is a thing, that sometimes people do things that don’t make sense, that the people who treat them like rock stars are worth holding onto, and that some people don’t deserve to get anywhere near them.
Helping Kids Navigate Playground Politics (by Melissa Benaroya)
School is back in session, and families are settling into routines. Children are back in the classroom, reuniting with friends, meeting new people, and getting used to their new social environment. During these early months of school, it’s not uncommon for certain dynamics to cause challenges for young children.
Kids and Television – How to Influence What They Learn
Television can be a wonderful source of information for our children, but it can also be a gap filler that does little to nurture their hungry minds. Whether we like it or not, screens are here to stay. The challenge is to find ways to make television work for our kids and nourish their curiosity, their wisdom, and their growth, rather than letting it turn them into couch-dwelling little screen huggers. Fascinating new research has found something that can make the difference.
How Taking Selfies and These Types of Photos Can Increase Happiness and Gratitude, Decrease Stress, and Deepen Connections
For a word that didn’t even exist a decade ago, ‘selfies’ have made their way into our everyday, as though a selfie shaped space has been reserved all this time, just for them. Just try getting through a day where you don’t take a selfie, look at a selfie, or practice your selfie face (s’ok – nobody’s gonna judge – we’re all friends here).
An Easy Way to Develop Empathy in Children and Adults
Being able to understand what other people might be feeling – empathy – is the cornerstone of emotional intelligence and healthy, successful relationships. Empathy is a little bit of wonderful for everyone, so anything that can boost it has to be a good thing. Research has found reading fiction is an easy way to do this.
