Parent-Teacher Night Tips for Middle, High School ABCNews (Education/Learning Coaching Post)

Hi All –

I had the wonderful experience of speaking with Beth Harpaz of the AP for an article about Open School Night tips for parents of Middle and High School students. The article is fantastic and I know that parents (and I think teachers) can get some great ideas of how to focus and best use the  time with each teacher. You can find the article here http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=12815684 As always, feel free to email or call with questions.

Note: Until our Education, Learning and Parenting site is up and running I’ve been posting here. I’ve just posted a series called “Helping Your Children Fail Successfully” which is a 3-Part series and one of our most popular. I run seminars and workshops on the topic on a very regular basis and coach parents & educators at all levels on it as well.

Read the posts and enjoy them – feel free to email coach at dlcecc dot com or call 646.355.8759 for more info or with any questions you may have.

Enjoy the day your way,

Rebecca (Kiki) Weingarten M.Sc.Ed, MFA   DLCECC/AtypicalCoaching

Helping Children Fail Successfully – Part 3 of a 3-Part Series

In Part 1 and Part 2 of Helping Children Fail Successfully (below) I talked a bit about changing the term “fear of failure” to “fear of learning nothing from failure” and outlined a first step for approaching this attitude change. Asking yourselves questions about your thoughts and reactions to failure. I was amazed at the email and session comments and questions. Hmmmm, can you imagine? Just about every single email mentioned a failure that hit you very hard. Of course they did. You wanted something, you worked toward getting it, you imagined your life after it and it didn’t happen.

I loved hearing about how you reacted and why. The ways in which it moved you forward or sometimes kept you stuck. But enough about you for right now. Let’s talk about you and how your reactions to failure affect how you interact with the children in your lives when it comes to succeeding. Most of you asked for specifics. How-to deal with competition, success and failure.

Quick Start Coaching Tips for changing “fear of failure” to “fear of learning nothing from failure”.

1. Begin the dialogue before the event. Discuss the different outcomes as you are working with your child toward the goal. Use the following questions as an outline for the types of conversations you might have.

Note: Use an intro to talking about it that is most comfortable for you. You can use the internet to surf ways to practice or get information on the topic together, the drive to and from practice, the dinner table, going out to a movie,lunch or shopping together for some special-together-time. Whatever works for you.

* Would you like to win/get _____?
* Why do you want to win/get _____?
* What might happen as a result of winning/achieving?
* Do you know anyone who has ever won/finished/gotten ______________?
* Do you know anyone who wanted to ____________ but didn’t?
* How can you prepare to achieve it?

2. Identify role models (yourself included!)

* Choose role models that mirror the activity or goal involved. Actors if it’s a role in the school play, athletes if it’s a sport, musicians if it’s music, astronauts if it’s space-travel related, scientists etc.

* Discuss their achievements and what makes them positive role models.
* Ask the tough questions – do you think they reached every goal they set out to?
How do you think they prepare? What happens when they lose/don’t achieve?

Note: Try and get some information for yourself so that you can mention it in the conversation. There’s tons of biographical information available online. You might also include experiences from your own life to include.

3. After the fall….. Ok. The worst happened. Disappointment, dejection, sadness…name the bad feeling that’s washing over your child and give her/him a chance to feel them. THEN – dig in and figure out;

* What happened?
* What do you think might have contributed?
* Note all the circumstances within and OUT OF the child’s control.

4. Change the language of the event. Move forward. Use these two simple words and three simple words.

* Next time….
* In the future….

What you’re doing by using those phrases is moving forward immediately, planning for the future, getting into a “try again” mentality and showing your child that the situation is not a be-all-and-end-all. It’s an experience. There will be other experiences if they keep on moving forward and trying again.

Many parents try and shield their children from disappointment, rejection, failure and anything negative but in the long run that’s not the best way to assist children in preparing for the future. It can be a tough world out there. We all want things we might not get, or might get them later than we wanted or in a different way than we anticipated. Children need to develop the mentality and the skills to deal with setbacks, disappointments and failure. That’s how they can continue onward and upward to eventually succeed.

Look at anyone you know who has accomplished something, or many things. Now, ask them how many times they’ve failed.

Enjoy the day your way and let me know how it goes!
Rebecca (Kiki)
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Daily Life Consulting
For information on individual coaching, workshops, seminars or classes and materials for your group or institution please call or email at 646.355.8759 or info at dlcecc dot com

Posted by Rebecca “Kiki” Weingarten M.Sc.Ed, MFA

Helping Children Fail Successfully Part 2 of 3

Helping Children Fail Successfully – Part 2 of a 3 part series

In Part 1 of Helping Children Fail Successfully (below) I talked a bit about success, failure and how to teach children to fail successfully. I proposed we change the term Fear of Failure to Fear of Learning Nothing From Failure. Today, we’ll start on the sometimes tough work of thinking about how one reacts to failure and next week I’ll provide some Quick Start Coaching Tips for teaching children to succeed at everything they attempt. How? To succeed in their endeavors, certainly, but also to get something positive from the times they fail. The way I see it it’s a win-win, lose-win situation! 

Quick Start Coaching Tip: This weekend it’s all about you.

Who likes thinking about their failures? Well, it won’t be forever (a great lesson to be learned from a failure!) and it’s an important step in understanding how your methods of dealing in both positive and negative ways might impact the way you approach it with your children.

1. Can you remember a situation where you really wanted to succeed at something but didn’t? (think back to last week or as far back as grade school)
Was it a job? A competition? A marathon? A game? A promotion? A personal goal you set but weren’t able to achieve? A part in the school play? A date for prom? A grade you wanted on an exam? A course you wanted to take? That cute guy/girl you were just dying to go out with? The account you wanted to land?(I just came up with about a dozen myself!)

2. Write down the words that come to mind that describe how you felt.
Angry, sad, furious, enraged, depressed, dejected, ashamed, annoyed, blase, hysterical, whichever words work for you.

3. What did you do next?
Did you brood? Did you give up on the whole thing altogether? Did you try and figure out what you might have done differently? Did you blame yourself completely for the failure? Did you ask other people for support? Did you shut yourself away alone until you got over it? Did you abandon all hope for ever achieving the goal? Did you recharge and attempt it again? Did you try to achieve it a different way?

The list of ways one reacts is vast. Everyone has their own way of dealing with failure what we’re trying to do here is identify your particular way of reacting so that you can think about how that impacts the way you react to the failure/s of the children in your life.

4. Would you react differently to it today? How?

Experience is a great teacher (I love her but I really wish she was always kind to me instead of teaching me some lessons the hard way!). Time often provides us with a new perspective on an old situation.

5. What did you learn about yourself and what’s right for you by going through the situation?

Take a couple of days to think about it. Next week you’ll use that personal knowledge to move forward with teaching the children in your life about failing, failing good, and how to learn from their failures and disappointments so that they can move forward successfully. That might sound like a contradiction but it really isn’t.

Email me your war stories, tears, upsets and all. I love hearing from you.
To read Part 1 of the series click HERE

Enjoy the day your way,
Rebecca (Kiki)
DLCECC/Atypical Coaching
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For more information on coaching, groups, workshops, seminars or classes, lectures and materials for your group or organization please call 646.355.8759 or email me at info at dlcecc dot com

Posted by Rebecca “Kiki” Weingarten M.Sc.Ed, MFA

Helping Children Fail Successfully – A 3 Part Series

Fear of failure? Let’s change that term to Fear of Learning Nothing From Failure.

No one wins all the time. No one. The greatest athletes mess up, fumble, strike out, fall, choke (fill in the term you use) all the time. It happens. Actors flub lines and get stage fright. Business leaders and owners make wrong decisions with serious consequences. Politicians lose elections. Scientist’s experiments don’t go the way they thought they would. Writers get writer’s block or write something that they hate. Chefs burn the main dish.

The question is what happens after a failure? What do you do next?Did anyone get anywhere without some kind of failure along the way? Not a chance. The people who have achieved the most have also failed.

I’ve worked with so many children and parents throughout the years and this one area seems to trouble both groups the most. Failing at something. Whether it’s not getting the lead, or any part, in the school play, not making the team, failing on a test or not doing well, making a public mistake at the recital, failing emotionally, failing socially, failing interpersonally…the list goes on and on. What to do? Parents are agitated and upset, the children are despondent and often anxious about their parent’s reaction to the failure/upset.

The pressure to achieve everything, at all costs, publicly and every single time has been seeping into our collective national personality for a while. It’s causing unreasonable expectations for parents and children.

I’ve decided to spend the next few posts talking about ways in which parents and adults who work with children can manage their expectations for themselves and their children, learn how to accept failure and disappointment in themselves and their children, and learn how to use failure as a positive learning opportunity.

When working with clients to achieve the above an amazing thing happens. They and their children try more new things! The fears are manageable, a failure doesn’t become a catastrophic event and can be seen in context. Parents and children learn about managing frustration and disappointment. They also learn about expanding their options, being realistic about abilities and new ways to try achieving the same aims.

In short they learn my clients learn that “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again – oh – and try, try differently – oh – and try, try something new – oh – and try, try to measure yourself against only you”.

I look forward to writing more about it – it’s a topic I work with people on, lecture and teach but maybe I can learn some new things by approaching it in this new way.

Enjoy the day your way,
Rebecca (Kiki)
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For information on coaching, workshops, seminars, classes or materials for your group, school or institution please call 646.355.8759  or email me at info at dlcecc dot com.

Posted by Rebecca “Kiki” Weingarten M.Sc.Ed, MFA

Keeping Anxiety Levels Down

Hi All,

We’ve been swamped doing new workshops and seminars dealing with the impact of the economy on children and families as well as our regular client, workshop, training and seminar schedule.

One issue keeps coming up over and over with most of you can be summed up in an email request from a new client “Mollie”.

“….my biggest problem right now is dealing with my own anxiety, supporting my husband emotionally while he looks for a new job without letting on that I’m freaking out, and not losing it with the kids or letting them think that the sky has fallen…”

Ok – now this issue isn’t one that we can solve in one email or post. Mollie and I have been working together to

* manage her anxiety levels
* find ways to take a “time-out” when she’s feeling overwhelmed
* find ways to have some private time with a support network where she can talk about her issues and ways to deal with them.
* learn ways to communicate what’s going on to her children in a way that they’ll understand and still feel safe and comfortable.

Lots of work to do. But it needs to be done if you want to come out of all of it successfully and intact.

Good luck – take some time out for yourselves, take care of yourselves physically as well since stress can have physical impacts as well.

Wish I had the time to write more and in more detail right now but it’s impossible today.

Please keep emailing. If you’re new to the blog and AtypicalCoaching and want more information please call 646.355.8759 or email info at dlcecc dot com

Enjoy the day – your way,
Kiki