Group items tagged

adults in charge stay aware, set a good example, intervene to stop unsafe behavior, and teach personal safety skills to the young people in their lives. Make your expectations clear by saying, “You have the right to

be safe and respected – and the responsibility to act safety and respectfully towards others. If you have a problem, I want to know!”

Coach your child to turn, stand up tall, put his or her hands up in front of the body like a fence, elbows bent to be close to the body, palms out and open, and say loudly, “Stop!” Pull back and coach your child to walk away.

Recent surveys show that children spend an average of 49 minutes a day on these games. If a child’s video-game console is in the bedroom, play time increases dramatically, to nearly three hours.

Video games hold special attractions for children with ADHD.

When a child strikes out in a baseball game, he’s doing it in front of a crowd of peers. But when he makes a mistake while playing a video game, no one else has to know.

Sleepwalking and sleep terrors often run in families. Some things that can cause this are: Lack of sleep. This is the most common trigger for sleep terrors and sleepwalking. Illness Noisy or new environment Stress Some medicines

Sleep terrors and sleepwalking are related disorders of sleep that usually go away by adolescence.

Dealing with Bullying

Unless you’ve directly experienced bullying, you may not realize just how devastating it can be, especially to a child or teenager. As well as being deeply hurtful, bullying can leave anyone feeling frightened, angry, depressed, and totally undermined. But bullying should never be tolerated. Whether you’re the one being bullied, or you’re a teacher or parent who thinks their child is being bullied or engaged in bullying behavior, there are steps you can take to deal with the problem.

Hours after bedtime, do you find your little one wandering the hall looking dazed and confused? If you have a sleepwalking child, you're not alone. It can be unnerving to see, but sleepwalking is very common in kids and most sleepwalkers only do so occasionally and outgrow it by the teen years. Still, some simple steps can keep your young sleepwalker safe while traipsing about. Despite its name, sleepwalking (also called somnambulism) actually involves more than just walking. Sleepwalking behaviors can range from harmless (sitting up), to potentially dangerous (wandering outside), to just inappropriate (kids may even open a closet door and pee inside). No matter what kids do during sleepwalking episodes, though, it's unlikely that they'll remember ever having done it! As we sleep, our brains pass through five stages of sleep — stages 1, 2, 3, 4, and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Together, these stages make up a sleep cycle. One complete sleep cycle lasts about 90 to 100 minutes. So a person experiences about four or five sleep cycles during an average night's sleep. Sleepwalking most often occurs during the deeper sleep of stages 3 and 4. During these stages, it's more difficult to wake someone up, and when awakened, a person may feel groggy and disoriented for a few minutes. Kids tend to sleepwalk within an hour or two of falling asleep and may walk around for anywhere from a few seconds to 30 minutes.

We experience some deep, quiet sleep and some active sleep, which is when dreams happen. You might think sleepwalking would happen during active sleep, but a person isn't physically active during active sleep. Sleepwalking usually happens in the first few hours of sleep in the stage called slow-wave or deep sleep.

Sleepwalking may run in families and sometimes occurs when a person is sick, has a fever, is not getting enough sleep, or is stressed.

Children who are having a lot of bad dreams are often very worried about going to bed, and may refuse to stay in bed by themselves.

Children have different kinds of monsters in their dreams, and the action involved varies. When a monster is hiding in the closet or under the bed, or lives under the front porch, this makes the situation doubly scary, because there is nowhere safe or off-limits.

Teens who do their homework without complaining might do it because they want to get good grades, and some teens don’t want their parents to get mad at them for not doing their homework. As for those teens who fail to do their homework, child behavioral therapist James Lehman believes it’s not that kids aren’t motivated, it’s just that they're motivated to do the things they want to do. What they want to do might not involve doing homework.