Tag Archives: Parenting

Parenting: Importance of Breakfast

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We all know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. We’ve also heard the adage “Breakfast like a king, Lunch like a common man and Dine like a pauper”. Breakfast which literally means breaking the fast between dinner and the morning is one meal which should not be missed.

 

There are reports from the Healthy Child website which say there are around 20 – 30% of teens who do not eat breakfast before going to school.

 

The first meal of the day is very important in providing energy to your teen for their activities in school. School work takes up a lot of mental energy and those who don’t fill up adequately before going to school may find their energy dwindling down before recess and a chance to eat food.

 

I am very particular that BB & GG eat something to fuel up before school and so far they’ve not disappointed me here. But somehow since school started this year, they both on different days would decide that they are full from the previous night’s dinner and so don’t want breakfast. Nothing I say would make them change their mind. It’s not because they sleep on and wake up late and so there’s time for breakfast. They are ready much earlier than S but would prefer to use their phones to eating, though on days when they do eat breakfast, they do both simultaneously.

I usually give BB & GG the analogy of a car with no fuel which can’t run for long on reserve fuel when they don’t want to eat breakfast before going to school. I also believe that without a healthy and hearty breakfast you will not be able to concentrate in class which will hamper performance in school. This is because those who miss breakfast lack the glucose which is needed for neurotransmitters to function properly in the body.

I sometimes suspect most teens (and BB & GG) skip breakfast as a way to reduce or control their weight. This tactic actually backfires on them as a study found that teens who ate breakfast daily had a lower Body Mass Index or BMI and gained less weight compared to those who skipped breakfast.

 

So this, in essence, is why breakfast is the most important meal in a day, not just for teens, but for everyone. Does your teen skip breakfast? What do you do to make him/her eat a good breakfast before school?

 

Parenting: Delayed Gratification

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January is drawing to a close and so I wanted to share some thoughts on one of my words for 2017 which is ‘Delayed Gratification’

 

Delayed Gratification refers to the ability to resist the temptation for an immediate reward and wait for a later and maybe bigger reward.

So why Delayed Gratification? I have read research that say those people who perform delayed gratification on a regular basis are, perceived to be more successful in all walks of life, including success in school and work, better physical and psychological health as well as socially more active.

 

Someone who is able to delay gratification also is able to be more patient, have better impulse and self-control and also be able to control their willpower, basically anything that requires self-regulation.

I also came across a series of research conducted by Stanford University in the 1960s by a psychologist and Stanford professor named Walter Mischel who conducted a series of studies on delayed gratification on children aged 4-6 years old. In these studies, a child was offered a choice between one small reward provided immediately, or two small rewards (i.e., a larger later reward) if they waited for a short period, approximately 15 minutes, during which the tester left the room and then returned. The reward was sometimes a marshmallow, but often a cookie or a pretzel. The children were followed up for years, some as long as 40 years, and in follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores, educational attainment, body mass index (BMI), and other life measures.

 

What the research essentially confirmed was that the ability to delay gratification is more often than not the measure by which you become successful later in life.

Another study took the Stanford study a bit further and saw that the ability to delay gratification was not an innate ability, it was not something which was genetic. What it was instead, a result of life experiences. When children were promised rewards for completing something (delaying gratification), but not given the reward, they tended not to delay gratification as their experience told them it was better to take the smaller reward first instead of waiting for a bigger, but later reward. Those whose life experiences did otherwise were able to delay gratification and so became more successful later in life.

 

As a parent to teens, I believe that this age is the perfect age to teach them the techniques with which to learn to delay gratification so that it stands in good stead in life for them later. So how would you go about creating a plan or strategy to delay gratification?

 

Avoid Distractions
When we don’t see it, we don’t need it. In the Stanford experiment, when the children closed their eyes and were not able to see the cookie, they were able to delay gratification. Similarly, make your children keep away distractions when you want them to say study or do something else. So keeping their smartphones or laptops away from their room may help them focus better on their studies.

Know what you want
Teens are (hopefully) more mature than young children and talking to them about their life goals may give them something to work on. Once they know what they need to aim for, they may be able to make the right choices to reach those goals. In our home, this is a crucial year for BB & GG as it is streaming year for them. I keep emphasising the subjects they need to choose now so that they can take the subjects they need to major in when they reach university so that they can become what they want to do. As teens, they should have at least a vague idea of what they want to do when they grow up. If you child has that idea, use that to help them make goals and try to stick to it.

Talk out of Temptation
Teach your teen to talk themselves out of temptation. When faced with a temptation they know they should not give in to, let them engage in self-talk that they can use to distract themselves. For example, when they know they need to finish their homework before playing games, they can tell themselves “I need to finish xyz and then I am free to play”

Reward Periodically
Some goals are far away in nature (like career goals for a teen, for example) and so will take some time to reach them. In such cases, break down the goals into smaller, attainable goals and when each smaller goal is reached, reward your teen with something they have been waiting for – another delayed gratification!

It’s important that parents consistently apply these tips to allow your child/teen to become competent in being able to delay gratification. I read an article where a psychologist who studies self-control has compared it to a muscle. This means that it can strengthen with exercise.

By helping our children apply their best self-control strategies to delay gratification in everyday situations, we can help them to develop better self-control overall, which should help them become better individuals when they grow up in life.

Code Switching

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When I was a student, years back, my school had an ‘English Only’ policy. What this meant was that we could only speak English while in school. If teachers found students talking in any other language other than English, they would punish the student. However, this enforcement was possible only in kindergarten and primary schools. By the time we reached secondary school, we were effortlessly speaking multiple languages with each other – English when speaking to our teacher and a mixture of English, Hindi, Gujarati and even Parsi when speaking with each other. What we didn’t know then was that we were actually code-switching!

 

What is Code Switching? According to Wikipedia, “in linguistics, code-switching occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation. Multilingual speakers of more than one language, sometimes use elements of multiple languages when conversing with each other.”

Code Switching happens in societies which are multilingual in nature, so you see a lot of ode switching in places like Mumbai and Singapore which have people living in close contact who speak different languages. I guess it also happens when people who speak multiple languages live and work together. I’ve been known to speak in English, Hindi and Tamil all in the same sentence!

While working, when I have colleagues who speak Hindi or Tamil, I more often than not speak to them in those languages, especially when we want to speak things we do not want the others to know about, switching to English when another colleague joins us. I see this a lot here in offices here when ethnic Chinese people usually speak in Mandarin, but here, many do not speak English when others who don’t know the language join them.

 

GG code switches more than BB moving between Mandarin, Singlish and Standard English. I am pretty particular about not using Singlish at home, but I am sure both GG & BB code switch between Standard English and Singlish when they are out with friends. This is actually fairly common in Singapore, where Singlish (or Singapore English), a colloquial version of English is the localised version spoken here. While English is the official language of business, Singlish is the language spoken between friends and while relaxing at home with words borrowed from Mandarin, Hokkien, Malay and Tamil.

 

When people are skilled Code Switchers, it allows them to connect culturally to people immediately. When you travel, when you hear Singlish or even Hinglish (the Indian version of Singlish), you immediately know you are among friends. It also allows you to make friends easily, especially when you and the person opposite you speaks a similar language. Code Switching also allows you to fit in immediately in a new environment.

 

I realise this when I go to Mumbai, I immediately start speaking in Hindi over English, even with friends with whom I’d text in English. I assume the reverse would happen if we go to a predominantly English speaking country – we’d automatically start speaking in English and also possibly start mimicking their accent.

 

I think back and realise we do this without realising it – one of my old bosses was a Brit and when I spoke to him, I realised my accent had become more crisp, almost copying the British accent.

So do you Code Switch? I’d love to hear your views on this interesting phenomena!

What’s Happening to the World?

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The past few days have been very disappointing and depressing for me as a woman, as a feminist, as a mother, as someone who is a minority in my country and most importantly as a human being.

Like many others across the world, I was following the US elections and was hoping and praying that the glass ceiling will finally be shattered in that country. But like many others, our hopes were instead shattered that day and millions of women, minorities, and others were left devastated and crying.

As a woman it makes me wonder why a country which has taken the lead on the world stage can’t come off the patriarchy it seems to be in and vote for the person most qualified for and most competent for the position? Instead, they (and by they, I am not only referring to the white male, but also to the 53% white female who voted for patriarchy) voted for someone who not only showed absolute disdain and contempt for women and minorities, but who also ran a campaign on a racist, sexist, misogynistic and xenophobic tone. How could this person be so much better than the woman who opposed him? I am not saying she was perfect, she did have her faults, but how was he better than her? I still can’t get my head around that one!

What’s more frightening to me as a mother of impressionable teens is that how they will now perceive the world around them. I’ve always been telling BB that she can be anything and anyone she wants to be, even the Prime Minister of her country, but suddenly now, I am not too sure. As a female of a minority race, does she even have the same chances and options as a male of the majority race? This election is making me rethink what to tell her now. Maybe our country will be enlightened enough a couple of decades later to elect a minority female prime minister, but do I have the conviction to tell her that now? Can I continue to tell her to work hard, do her best, be nice to people and she will get the results she is hoping for? Or is this all a big fat lie we parents tell our girls?

And then there’s BB. I have always believed that mothers of young boys have a greater job in ensuring that their young boys grow up to be men of integrity and character, that when they grow up, the teachings they learn from their parents and especially their mothers should be the foundation which they base their interactions with the women in their lives – be it wives, daughters, friends, colleagues and every woman they meet in their day-to-day lives. They should be polite men who believe internally that the women in their lives are equal in every respect to a man. But this election has blown that out of the water. That a man, who denigrated women at all times, who was caught doing this so many times, has become the most powerful man in today’s world is nothing but catastrophic for parents who want to teach their boys how not to behave as opposed to how to behave. Now when you teach boys good behavior, it’s going to come to pinch you in your back when they see the reality around them. What they see around them tells them that their parents are wrong. You do get rewarded for bad behavior and the reward is nothing else but becoming the most powerful man in the world! I have no words….

It’s going to take me some more time to get my head around the new reality of our world today and I think I need more time to process it further. I also need to think about how I am going to continue to teach my children how they need to navigate this new reality. This post is the reaction if my feelings from the past few days and is actually a very early morning (4:30 am to be precise) post where I had to write down my thoughts and feelings.

I’d love anyone who reads this to react and comment. Maybe I get a better understanding of the situation and also some tips on how to navigate it.

Dreams

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quote-walt-disney-all-our-dreams-can-come-true-if-247All our dream can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them – Walt Disney

This is a quote from Walt Disney which really resonates with me – this is even my tag in some social media sites! So I decided to take this quote and see if I could write a blog post out of it.

Every human being has a dream – for some it could mean making lots of money, for others it could be as simple as a hot meal at the end of the day, but everyone does dream of something or the other.

dreams-goals-action-planBut what do we do to ensure that our dreams do come true? Probably nothing more than sigh and keep it aside for another day. If you do not act out on achieving your dreams, then it is just that – a dream, an ephemeral thought, something that will never materialise.
But if you want your dreams to come true you need to do something about them, and not just as an “I will do this someday” (actually I as a world-class procrastinator should not be writing this, ever!)

I actually feel that to get out of your comfort zone and actually do something so that you are one step closer to achieving your dream takes a lot of courage. One is not sure at all if the steps you do to work on your dream will come true or not, or if you will fail spectacularly. But if you do not take the first step, you will never know if you can do it or not.

One of the most important aspects in ensuring that you reach and achieve your dream is to be persistent. Persistence is defined as “the quality that allows someone to continue doing something or trying to do something even though it is difficult or opposed by other people”. Only if you persistently and with a single-minded devotion to the end goal work on reaching your goal, will you be able to achieve it.

dreams-goals

Here are some steps which you can take to make sure you are able to reach your dream

Quantify your dream: Write out in detail what you want to do as well as the steps you need to take to achieve your dream. This will be a document which you refine as you go along life. Bring the document to life and update it frequently (at a pre-set interval) on the steps you’ve taken so far and the steps you need to reach.

Practice Positivity: Don’t get negativity discourage you. Let the naysayers negative thinking slide off you like water slides off a duck’s back. Reinforce your positivity on a regular basis and the universe will conspire to make sure you reach your goals. Believe in yourself and the fact that you can reach your goals

Visualise your dreams and successes: Dream with open eyes on what your achieved dream looks like. I’ve heard world-class athletes do a similar technique to constantly see themselves winning the race and seeing themselves on the winners’ podium, so if you see yourself as having achieved your dream and being part of that life then visualising it makes it more real.

Broadcast your dream: Do not keep the dream inside yourself, tell it to as many people as you can. Maybe one of these people to whom you’ve told your dream will come on board as a mentor or has some ideas which help you refine your own. Telling others also makes you accountable to doing something about your dream and taking steps to actually achieve it.

Work Hard on your Dream: Finally all these steps are of no use if you do not work hard on your dream. We’ve all heard of the saying that ‘little drops of water make a mighty ocean’, so even a tiny step taken today will lead to incremental benefits later in life. Whatever your life circumstance, make sure you spend some time every day to work on your dream.

All these steps are important to reach the goal you’ve set for yourself in life. Most importantly, enjoy the process of achieving your goal. Also when you reach the final goal you’ve set for yourself, give yourself a big reward for reaching there and pay it forward, help someone else achieve their dream!