Tips for Parents to make family summer holidays a positive experience

The long summer vacation is often greeted with mixed feelings. Whilst we love having our children home, months of unstructured and unproductive free time can be a frustrating spectacle for parents often resulting in confrontation & emotional meltdowns.  Children are demob happy at the end of exam season but it can feel as though the pressure and anxiety a child has been under shifts on to parents.

Finding a way to use the holidays so that children can relax but also learn some important life skills, will ease the tension at home.

Here are 10 ways to not only survive the next few weeks, but also to have a positive influence on the adult your child will become:

 1.    Aim for a ‘Holiday Plan’: How parents approach incendiary topics like bedtime, getting up, helping around the house & screen usage is key.  We learnt to Do As You Are Told, but our children have been taught to have opinions/views, argue/debate, weigh up & decide, so its best to tackle The Plan with a “Can we talk through how things are going to work this holidays?” approach.  Not only does this encourage collaboration, decision making and team playing, but once you have got your mutually agreed plan in place (which may include “No lectures or nagging please Mum”), it is easier to stick to it. Being irritated by a child’s lack of helpfulness is contagious and damages the home atmosphere.    If you helped your child to make their plan, you can hold them accountable “I’m cross…it’s lunchtime, you’re still in bed and you said you would…..” “You & I agreed….. about computer time…” “I thought you said you would stick to 3 beers….”

2.    Get a structure in place: After they have had an appropriate, well deserved rest and some post exam lie ins, aim to get a framework in place. Some structure to the routine at home and some mutually agreed rules will improve the emotional climate and everyone’s behaviour.  Whatever you agree (Breakfast done & dusted by midday? Help yourself to lunch but clear & wash up? Family supper, everyone helps + no screens?) - lead the way so everyone sticks to it.

       3.    Encourage healthy sleep patterns: 10 hours sleep is ample and it is advisable to help establish good habits.  Late night horror movies or on-line activities under the duvet and no sleep until 3am, will result in late starts and persistent lethargy.  Daytime TV/screen time will zap motivation & enthusiasm because it interferes with dopamine in the brain.  Help your child to organise their day with screen-based activities as a reward after they have accomplished other things.

      4.    Create a focus: During the weeks when children are on holiday, but parents are still working, help children to have a focus/purpose.  This could be volunteering or finding a couple of weeks paid work - a local farm/garden, shop/cafe, doing some bar work/waitressing, youth club, pony club, activity centre, cleaning holiday cottages, nannying, babysitting, looking after Granny, domestic chores – what about shopping & cooking the family dinner?

      5.    Choices and Responsibility: Long holidays are an ideal time to get your child to take responsibility - social life, travel plans, bookings, arrangements and their own washing/ironing/packing. Thinking, weighing up choices & making decisions encourages future independence, problem solving and develops an “I can” attitude. Tempting as it is to micro manage/help/advise/do it for them, try and rein yourself in.  Remind yourself that without practice, children can’t learn how to make their own decisions. If they have always looked to adults for guidance, they become helpless passengers in their metaphorical car.   Easygoing compliance from your child is nice whilst you are behind the wheel, but when someone undesirable hops in, your eager-to-please-child will be easily led astray because they have no inner compass to guide them.

      6.    Expect some mishaps: Letting go and allowing some (safe) risk taking gives children a chance to learn (from any mistakes).  The brain is gradually wiring itself up to have self-control but it is work in progress and can only develop via experience. How parents manage mishaps (at the pub, a party, festival or excursion) can offer vital learning - about accountability, establishing limits (alcohol, sex, drugs) & developing an emotional gauge, a conscience and a brake pedal.  Our book helps with this.

      7.    Keep talking: Keeping lines of communication open is vital, so your relationship and how you talk to your child needs to be as good as it can be.

a.    Try not to harbor resentments, a “I am still furious about what you did last week” may drive them underground and they will not confess when they next mess up.

b.    Limit the lectures and instead have balanced discussions.

c.     If they are off to a festival, a holiday with another family or off travelling with a group of friends, ask them where they stand on key issues before they head off.  The aim is to encourage an independent mind by asking them to articulate their values.

d.    If you want to steer the chat to meaty topics like sex, porn, legal highs or marijuana arm yourself with facts and plan what you are going to ask – approach with caution, opportunities don’t come by that often.  Reading “The Drug Conversation” by Owen Bowden Jones may help

      8.    Encourage a new skill/experience:  The long summer holidays are a chance for your child to develop a skill, an interest or pursue a hobby.  Young people should thrive on competition, being part of a team, getting physically fit or getting better at something – sport, music, art, riding, cooking.  This boosts confidence, self-esteem and IQ in a way that Gaming, TV reality shows or Facebook do not. 

      9.    Do something together: try and find an activity or sport that you manage to do regularly with your child over the holidays (camping, tennis, chess, golf, cycling, cooking, fishing, walking). Being together is important bonding time, influencing a child’s confidence levels, and less easy to manage during the busy school terms.

     10.   Make time for yourself: The holiday period is a long haul for parents so use teenage late starts to read, meet a friend for a cup of coffee, go for a walk.  Prioritise family mealtimes as a time you can enjoy being with your children.   It is a chance for them to engage and interact face-to-face with all ages, be interesting and look interested in what others have to say, listen and be able to accept other viewpoints.  The best way these skills are imbibed is via experience and what is role modeled to them.  Make it a device free time.   

In Brief…..

1.    Get a framework in place so the whole family knows the routine

2.    Agree screen rules & establish self-policing so you don’t have to micromanage

3.    Get your child inspired to roll their sleeves up & earn some money or volunteer

4.    Encourage them to take responsibility for all their plans

5.    Accept mistakes and see these as a chance to develop and learn

6.    Keep lines of communication open and don’t shy away from the difficult conversations (about alcohol, porn & drugs) 

7.    Get them to get out of their comfort zone, give things a go & try new things

8.    Encourage them to spend time developing a skill, hobby or interest away from screens

9.    Find an activity that you can regularly do together with your child (tennis, camping etc)

10. Make time for yourself – parents set the emotional climate at home.  Enjoy family time & wind down on occasions

(This article originally appeared in The Weekend Telegraph)

Top 10 Tips for Revision during Easter Holidays

Here are our Top Tips for Holiday Revision, based on what we teach children in Schools who have a robust & relevant PSHE programme from Year 7 - Year 13.  Teenagers thrive on self-motivation.  What holds them back is feeling emotionally out of control (fear, anxiety, panic, uncertainty).  Once children have learnt how to self-regulate, they establish good mental habits which will work into adulthood too.  Print this off and help your child get into a good mental & emotional space.  

1. Get organised at the start of the Easter holidays.  Locate a good place to work (ideally NOT your bedroom).   You need an environment which:
1. Feels calm & under your control
2. Has no distractions (like wifi)
3. Separates work time from relaxing/chilling time.
2. Look after your brain:  Its like a muscle, if you were running a marathon, you would
1. Have a regular training plan
2. balance workouts with rest/downtime
3. Eat healthily & sleep well
4. Have FUN, see friends, boost happy chemicals  
3. Make a realistic plan (and ask for HELP with HOW to revise or specific subjects if you need it):
1. Divide your workload up into do-able revision sessions 
2. Decide how many days you have available
3. Make sure you have a decent rest from work (ideally a block of 5 days)  
4. Set daily work goals and reward yourself when you have achieved them.   This helps boost levels of motivation
5. Intersperse each study session with plenty of breaks.  Physical/outdoor activities boost mental activity & energy levels (get running, walking, biking, any sport or hobby – even if it is short 15 minute bursts)
6. Sleep  You need around 9 uninterrupted hours per night to perform well
1. Leave devices outside your room once you are ready to go to sleep
2. If you want to party/see friends, plan in advance & accept that the next day is not a revision day - Levels of focus/memory are affected by late nights & alcohol
3. Give yourself an hour of no screen before bed: Bath, Read, Chat instead
7. Food/Drinks  You are what you eat/drink.  Give your brain a healthy boost from now to exams       
8. Avoid screen-based distractions during your working slots  
1. Use device as a reward when you have completed revision for the day
2. You’re only kidding yourself if you “revise” for “the whole day”, when in fact your brain has been multitasking (Work, Revision, music, TV, Facebook, You Tube, Instagram, Xbox, Minecraft, Snapchat)
3. Screen based activities excite, tire, then dull your brain (like sugar highs/lows).  Your device is far more fun than revision, so you will need to exercise some self-control.
4. Work first, Play later.
9. End each day with a positive focus:  on what you have accomplished rather than on what you have not.  Remind yourself that you are developing effective work habits for life.  If you continue to feel worried, have a look at the Headspace App  
10.  Train your Mind to think about plans for each day & how to accomplish them.  Don’t allow it to get into the habit of worrying and ruminating on “What ifs?” because drama stokes anxiety/panic levels and affects your ability to work effectively

Find out more about helping your child become more emotionally resilient by attending our Course at Maudsley Learning in May 

Why SHOULD parents be concerned about pornography?

If parents can cast their mind back to the pre-internet days, it was almost impossible for most young children to stumble across porn, but if they did come across a magazine or pornographic photos, this might have satisfied the average teenage boy’s curiosity.  Nowadays live sex, rough sex, same/group sex etc are a click or two away on the house computer and millions of children (around 7 million) as young as 5 or 6 have stumbled accidentally on graphic images.   There are a number of statistics available, for instance:

• 3% of teenage boys and 17% of teenage girls have never seen internet porn, the rest may have occasionally looked at sites and others seek out such sites regularly.

Whatever the figures, the number of people viewing internet porn is growing faster in the UK than the rest of the world and the largest group of internet porn viewers are reputedly aged 12 – 17, the young, impressionably and easy to brainwash.   So if, like us, your children are this age, it’s time to take action.

Since 1995 the internet porn market has grown to an estimated 250 million pages/sites.

And brainwashing is exactly what is happening.  The teenage brain undergoes massive re-wiring, laying down behavioural templates, call them habits for the future.  The internal brain modifications are influenced by external experiences, impressions and memories which are banked in the brain.  During adolescence the brain becomes hard-wired resulting in your child developing their adult attitudes, values, core beliefs and personality.   

The more exciting, risky, arousing and exhilarating those experiences are, the greater the likelihood for addiction.   How?  It’s all to do with biochemical thrills.  Introduce the teenage brain to a biochemical rush via drugs, alcohol, food issues, self harming and the brain will wire itself up with receptors which need “feeding” with more of those feel good chemicals.   Watching porn results in a massive biochemical rush. 

During the teenage years the sexual template starts to develop.  In evolutionary terms dormant cells become activated by the innate human need to find a mate, commit and procreate - it is a powerful force of nature.   Adolescence is also a time of natural curiosity, experimentation, risk and the need to move away from family/home towards peers and other influences.   But while the accelerator is being applied, so is a teenager’s innate brake pedal at work – natural feelings of uncertainty, insecurity, fear, confusion, shyness, sometimes loneliness are present during this time.

Today’s young are under a lot of pressure (academic, performance, image, sexualisation etc) and the need to reduce stress is quite high.   Porn, alcohol, drugs, food, smoking and so forth work as de-stressors because they give you a "high", numb negative emotions, make one feel calmer and more socially at ease.   However these coping strategies tip, during the teenage years, very quickly from occasional usage into a habit and onto an addiction.

Porn is probably the new big concern parents should have in terms of addiction potential. What are the consequences? 

Their psychosocial development (mind/emotions/identity in a social environment) is affected, e.g. a boy’s sexual appetite/attitudes & practices develop within 3 years following first ejaculation.  So a 14 year old boy, experimenting with pornographic images for arousal in lieu of an actual relationship is affected by:

• Being massively de-sensitised whereby he can only get aroused by the images/practices stored in his newly formed memory bank as opposed to having an actual relationship

• Developing a skewed attitude towards girls, relationships and expectations.

So if we wish our children in the long-term to have the potential to form a “normal” healthy relationship - with one person, which develops slowly, is based on trust, respect, love, commitment - then exposure to porn prior to this time needs to be avoided.  

Counselling Services are a source of up-to-the-minute issues as they are working at the coal face and from what we hear there is a massive rise in young men, in their 20s who are seeking help because they are unable to have a normal sexual relationship, and worse, some can’t be bothered. 

And your daughter?  We live in a sexually charged culture, and she is impressionable and sensitive to outside influences.  We can’t ban TV or the Internet, and with books like “50 Shades…” becoming best sellers and MTV’s inappropriate music videos, the general sense girls imbibe is that media celebrates beauty and sexy, promising popularity, attention and success.  

The concerns amongst parents we talk to is that our children (e.g. age 13) are getting involved in age-inappropriate activities, at parties, sleepovers or in homes where there are no parents present (eg after school), and the pornographic nature of their activities demonstrates the powerful influence of media/internet. 

So what can parents do?  A lot – but here are a few ideas:

• Get computer savvy: find out about internet controls and firewalls, restrict Adult Cable TV and explain why you feel it appropriate to place restrictions at home

• No teenage boy has inbuilt self-control, and certainly not when with his peer group and it is late at night…..

• Educate your children to protect themselves, logging on to dodgy sites means that you can be traced via your IP address

• Talk to your teenagers and find out what their view ARE on pornography, hopefully you may be reassured by their attitudes and choices. 

• Don’t avoid embarrassing topics and leave things to chance – Dads MUST start talking to their sons!  Your influence now is important, otherwise he is at the mercy of what is going on in society.

• Help your daughter to see that trading sexual “favours” to gain acceptance & popularity is social suicide long-term.  Some things have not changed, boys may want more from girls, today’s girls may be willing to deliver, but their label/reputation will last forever

• Appreciate her innate qualities at home in order that she can nurture her self-respect, don’t let her acquire admiration from her peer group by being included in activities which do not accord with her values

• Role model respectful loving communicative relationships at home so they have an innate sense of what a healthy relationship looks like