The article "Take Advantage of Your Child's Energy Levels" talks about family, it was released by Joseph Browns.
“Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those
you hold well.” -Josh Billings
If praents want to be able to make best use of time with their
children, then it is crucial for a parent to start becoming
alert to the state that their kids are in.
Tired? Satisfied?
Bored?
His shoe hurts him?
She has a stomachache from the
spaghetti?
And so on....This applies particularly during the
time that kids are playing with toys. They want to be euphoric.
And you want them to be euphoric too..
Here’s one way of looking at it: it’s a bit like dealing with a
baby. Your baby cries. So you figure, usually and probably it’s
one of four things. One, the baby is hungry. Two, the baby needs
a diaper change.Three, the baby is tried. Or four, the baby
wants to be held. You would probably test each of these out to
see if the baby will stop crying. What’s happening here is a
continual process of trying to figure out and be sensitive to
the the baby’s nedes.
Right?
So we are dealing with a
sensitivity to the child, and a willingness to experiment to
find out exactly what the baby needs.
Once the thing is done
(for example, changed a dirty dipaer and put on a clean one) and
the baby stops crying, and is now smiling and gurgling, you
think: “Bingo! I did the right thing there!”.
So the checklist is a key to a parent’s success, cuase it
provides the parent with the various possibilities of dealing
with a baby’s (or child’s) needs.
As babies turn into toddlers who turn into pre-schoolers who
turn into kids (and so on), their needs naturally get more
sophisticated. In order to keep up with their kids, paernts need
to increase their checklist.
Not only that, but to change the
checklist as the kids grow, as some needs get taken off the list
and others get put on. So it helps to start off with this idea
of a checklist for each of your kids. It can be simply a
mental checklist.
For those who are more organized, they can
write it down.
An example of a checklist for a 6 year old can be: 1)Parents
2)Food 3)Friends 4)Clothes 5)Sleep/Fatigue 6)Homework
7)Entertainment 8)Siblings & Famliy (relationships)
For each of these items you can ask yourself- is my child happy
and fulfilled in these areas?
What areas does the child need
help in?
It would be difficult for them to be having fun playing
if they have issues elsewhere.
In dealing with each of these items, here’s an example of
dealing with a checklist item: Energy Levels/Fatigue: Let’s take
a closer look at this.
Children ntaurally have routines during
the day. Wake-up, get dressed, breakfast, school, after-school
activities, suppertime, homework, evening snack, bedtime. Yet
you cannot expect kids to have the same energy level in the
afternoon after a long day of school/play as they wuold have in
the morning when they are fresh from a full night of sleep. Many
experienced parents know that when kids are tired,
especially little children, they just do not function as well in
being able to do activities, in listening to their parents, or
even at tiems to behave normally (!!).
So this is a good item
for the checklist: How tired is your child?
“I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to
think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to
read, and all the friends I want to see.” John Burroughs
For parents, the same can apply for the time spent with their
children! Parents who want to get the most out of being able to
build relationships with their kids should consider (as
difficult as it is) to schedule their day around the times that
children have high energy levels.
An example of a good time to be with the kids is after
supper. Often kids are well-fed, and the time spent sitting
at the dinner table allows them to recharge their batteries.
They are refreshed and well-fed and ready for some evening
activity.
The time this is well-spent with kids is like deopsiting a
lot of value into a bank account of love and trust with your
child.
And what could be more valuable than that?
“Life is half spent beofre we know what it is.” George Herbert
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