Don't Forget The Most Important Back To School Item

The most important thing for children to bring to school is a healthy happy prepared mind that is ready to learn. Without that everything else is just sort of useless.

• Anxiety gets in the way of learning.
• The teachers first impression is not good and that set's the tone
• Everything then just spirals downward

When this happens year after year children just get further and further behind.

Attitude Affects Everything

Those who approach school with a smile quickly surpass those who come in with a frown. Here are some tips to help

1) Physiology - It is becoming more and more clear that the fastest way to control our emotions is through our physiology. Posture and breathing have a profound effect on attitude. Teach your child how to feel better just by pulling their shoulders back, standing up straight, and breathing deep into their belly. It sounds to easy but it works.

2) Power Pose - This is more physiology but it takes it one step further. You can learn about power pose here.

3) Reinforce with Mirror Neurons - If you get anxious over your child's anxiety you will amplify their anxiety. So make sure that you practice 1 and 2 above and use them yourself. If you can keep yourself strong emotionally then this strength will lift your child up instead of causing more worry. In other words, be strong for your child and their mirror neurons will pick that up and reciprocate. It's not magic, it's neuroscience. (But sometimes it seems like magic)

These are useful tools and will get you through the tough days until you get your child on a complete program for helping them develop the needed skills

It's very easy to produce (or eliminate) anxiety in children just by a few simple changes in the way we say things. 

What we want to achieve is a growth mindset. I know that you are a great parent who works hard at developing a great mindset in your child ( <---- Pay attention to what I did there ). And you can do that by the way you structure praise.

When in a learning context, praise is best structured to praise the effort, not the outcome. This is not true for a testing context such as a school test or a sports game. In those context success or failure can be framed to congratulate effort in the case of a win. Or signal the need for more effort in the case of a loss.

Just know which context you are in and express praise accordingly.

This video explains praising effort quite well, the author obviously worked hard at it :-) 

We tend to think happiness is the default. It's not. Developing a good attitude in your child takes a little work. But with the right tools it's not that hard.

Although tantrums and attitude do signal that something is wrong, they do not have to persist. You can work on ways to help your child through the tough times while at the same time building their learning skills and love for learning so the bad attitude doesn't last forever.

Emotions can actually be very addictive. They are, in a sense, chemicals flowing through our body. If the wrong chemicals flow through our body for too long we actually become addicted to them. Becoming addicted to anxiety and fear has long lasting effects. Elementary and middle school ages being so developmental these bad emotions can stick. Forming a life long personality.

It's much better to deal with them and correct them now rather than put up with them for a lifetime.