Tutor Fi Blog » Parenting

Colleges Welcome Parent Groups

Deborah Williams — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:00:24 +0000

A recent Education Week blog post describes an emerging trend that uses the talents and interests of their students’ parents. The post acknowledges that today’s college students are the children of parents who have been continuously focused and involved in every aspect of their children’s lives and educations; they have used all of their resources to provide as many trips, sports, activities, and supplemental education that often included finding a tutor to remediate and/or prevent weaknesses.

Colleges realize that many of them continue to be involved, and they want to leverage that desire by inviting them to participate in specially formed parent boards. These parents are seen as a rich fundraising group that also can assist with internships and recruiting of new students. These colleges also comply with these parents’ need to have information about “financial aid, graduation rates, and job placement.”

Despite this new trend, the blog writer, Caralee Adams, referred to a piece written in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that suggests that colleges should balance this trend with “the need to maintain policies of privacy that allow students to fight their own battles with grades and disciplinary issues so they can emerge from college as adults ready for the real world.”

Good Television for Girls

Deborah Williams — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:00:30 +0000

Part of the negative fallout from television programs has been the rash of programming that depicts girls as competitive, mean, and bullying others. A recent post on the Common Sense Media site laments this relentless trend and acknowledges that parents may find it somewhat difficult to steer their daughters toward positive viewing. In the post “Beyond Catfight: TV That’s Good for Girls,” Common Sense Media lists several good options for parents to consider for their daughters, especially those aged 7 to 14:

SciGirls (ages 7+)
iCarly (ages 8+)
Picker Sisters (ages 10+)
Born to Dance (ages 12+)
Tia & Tamera (ages 13+)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (ages 13+)
2 Broke Girls (ages 14+)
Parks and Recreation (ages 14+)

Parents Who Ruin Their Children’s Sports

Deborah Williams — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 12:00:50 +0000

Encouraging your child to participate in physical activities has many benefits, including better health, improved self-concept, more efficient brain functioning, etc. It’s seems like a win-win, but a recent study suggests that parents need to limit their enthusiasm in this area. According to The United Press International website article “Overzealous Parents Can Ruin Kids’ Sports,” University of Alabama researcher, Sandra Sims, a child’s early interest—sometimes as early as age three–in a sport can wane by middle school.
Sims points out that children who participate in sports have two needs that must be met: to have fun and to feel worthy. She gives the following guidelines:

AGE SIX OR YOUNGER – Young children should have unstructured play.
AGE SIX TO 14 – Children complete a season in a sport, evaluate it, consider other options, and switch if desired.
AGE 15 – Children can commit or specialize in a favorite sport at this time.

A final reminder: A child’s participation in a sport does not equal 60 minutes of activity each day. It “depends on the sport, the position that they play, and how much time they get on the field.”

Signs Your Child Might Be Bullied

Deborah Williams — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:45:12 +0000

October is Bullying Prevention Awareness Month, so we found the suggestions and reminders about this pervasive practice that is too common among all schools and across several generations. The article “Bullying and Teasing: No Laughing Matter” on the Scholastic Parents website reminds parents about this practice, but, in light of the recent high profile, bullying-induced suicides in the national news, the warning signs are of particular interest to parents:

Increased passivity or withdrawal
Frequent crying
Recurrent complaints of physical symptoms such as stomach aches or headaches with no apparent cause
Unexplained bruises
Sudden drop in grades or other learning problems
Not wanting to go to school
Significant changes in social life — suddenly no one is calling or extending invitations
Sudden change in the way your child talks — calling herself a loser, or a former friend a jerk

If you have noticed any of these warning signs in your child, the suggestions for how to help also appear in the article.

Adjusting Parent Attitudes Motivates Their Children to Do Homework

Deborah Williams — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:04:14 +0000

A recent study reported on the Science Daily website concludes that if parents want to improve their children’s motivation to complete their homework, the parents “need to change their own attitude and behavior.” Researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev concluded that if parents convey “a more positive, supportive attitude and communicated the learning value as motivation, rather than focusing on completing an assignment or getting a higher grade, then the child’s attitude and motivation would improve.”

The researchers recommend that parents let students choose when or where to do homework and to improve their children’s competence by letting them set up how to complete their homework assignments. Further, they can encourage more competence in their children by assuring their children that they are loved and supported no matter how successful the children are in school. This may seem like a laissez-faire approach to parenting for many but everyone can recognize that parental attitudes, no matter what they are, can positively or negatively affect any child’s educational development.

Is Self Regulation the Key to Academic Success?

Deborah Williams — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:27:22 +0000

Parents and teachers of young children might be able to improve those children’s chances for academic success by teaching self-regulation skills to them. That is what new research suggests. The study’s researchers, Claire Cameron Ponitz from the University of Virginia and Megan McClelland from Oregon State University, found that kindergarteners with high levels of self-regulation at the beginning of the school year performed better on reading, vocabulary, and math tests near the end of the year than did those children with low levels of self-regulation.

Self-regulation, the “ability to control and direct one’s own feelings, thoughts, and actions,” can be improved with interventions from teachers and parents. These children need organization, consistency, and structure. It requires the adults to follow through with rules so that children have the chance to practice controlling themselves.

Additionally, the researchers suggests that certain classic games that require children to follow directions and wait to take turns can help children to self-regulate:

Red Light, Green Light
Simon Says (Science Daily also reports on the effectiveness of this game in helping children in different countries to improve academically.)
Hide and Seek
Role Playing

Your Child Should Be Reading This Summer

Deborah Williams — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 04:02:42 +0000

It’s almost back-to-school time for some families, but it is the middle of the summer break for others. Most students want a true break from anything that resembles academic learning. They just want to have endless days and weeks of relaxing and doing fun things only, and for their beleaguered parents, it’s a break from supervising and supporting all the activities and the homework! It’s easy to see why both parents and children relish these months off, but at what cost?

A recent article in the National Education Association’s website, NEA Today reminds us all of the price of students not reading during the summer:

Students who don’t read during the summer often lose or slide back about two months or more in reading comprehension
Over years of not reading during the summer, the achievement gaps grows larger and larger
Summer learning loss is the reason for 2/3 of the achievement gap between lower-income students and more affluent ones by the ninth grade.

It’s never too late to implement a leisure reading time at home, and this summer is a perfect time to do that. Require your child to “drop everything and read” for at least 30 minutes for five or six days a week. It is even more meaningful if the entire household participates. Continue this throughout the school year as well.

If you need some guidance about what your child should be reading, check with his or her school to see if there is a suggested list. Many school libraries post this online, and many school divisions have required summer reading and suggested reading lists such as in the Accelerated Reader Program. If those don’t exist, contact the children’s section of your local library for assistance. Finally, there are suggested lists online like the 2011 Summer Reading Lists of Children’s Books and Young Adult Books – Summer Reading List for more ideas.

Why You Should Emphasize Science with Your Kids

Deborah Williams — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 03:49:27 +0000

A recent post on the Huffington Post’s education blog provides another reason to encourage your child’s proficiency in science, one of the diminishing STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects. It seems that an adequate pool of workers science and engineering workers is needed in the workforce, and those workers currently represent only a small portion of the nation’s workers. A more personal reason to encourage science proficiency is that science and technology workers tend to have less difficulty finding employment and are generally better paid than their counterparts who studied other disciplines. Parents would do well to encourage their children’s interest in science and technology by purchasing science-related toys and gifts, taking them to science museums, enrolling them in science enrichment courses, ensuring that they have as much science as possible, and providing interventions to assist at the first signs of academic difficulties in science or technology with a tutor; tutoring online is a natural fit!

An Inexpensive Way to Improve Your Child’s Vocabulary

Deborah Williams — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 18:21:49 +0000

A parent asked me recently what she could purchase to help her child to improve her vocabulary. I told her that one of the easiest things that she could do is to implement a required reading time at least six days a week. I did this with my son, and we both read for at least 30 minutes. Many times we went over that amount of time. Sometimes we read significant passages to each other as well. During the school year, he was completing school requirements for book reports or for the Accelerated Reading Program (AR), but during the summer, I used the AR ratings to give him choices that were on his reading level. Even when he visited his grandparents or his father, he continued this ritual. The result? He reads well, has a good vocabulary, and has even opted to take a creative writing course as a college elective because he wants to create something that others might want to read.

I’m not the only one who suggests this. Author James Patterson suggested the same thing on AOL recently:

The message: Start a required daily reading time right now and continue it throughout the year.

Easy Help for Better Brain Functioning

Deborah Williams — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 10:51:25 +0000

Helping your children perform better in school might be as simple as providing higher levels of folic acid in their diets!

A team of scientific investigators led by Dr. Torbjorn K. Nilsson of the Department of Laboratory Medicine at Orebro University Hospital in Sweden collected data on the folic acid levels in 386 15-year-olds. After factoring out differences in the socioeconomic status and genetics of their subjects, the researchers found that those adolescents with the highest levels of folic acid had the best grades!

With such a new finding, it is not clear whether or not children should be taking folate supplements, but making sure that your child has foods that are high in folic acid seems like a no-brainer. It’s probably a great idea for the entire family because low levels of folic acid among elderly people seems to affect their mental faculties and have been associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Parents who want to add more folic acid to their children’s diets should make sure that they serve plenty of the following foods:

Leafy green vegetables
Fruits
Dried beans
Peas
Nuts
Folate-acid- enriched breads, cereals, and other grain products

Just as concerned parents do “the extras” such as providing an online private tutor, making sure their children have enriching life experiences, and ensuring the best education possible, this is one additional thing that might give your child the little nudge that will take them over the top!