Helping Children Manage Anxiety

With camp around the corner, G1’s anxiety levels are at an all-time high. It was pretty good timing that our school ran a workshop on anxiety and learning to manage it. These are my notes from the workshop (with annotations)… Defining Anxiety Anxiety is defined as “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something

Lessons from a Hiking Adventure in Kota Damansara

Over the Summer Holidays, we took a hike through a new trail in Kota Damansara. I had never been there before, but I thought we would try something new. I think I remember seeing the words “family friendly” somewhere and figured the boys could manage it. The trail we took was pretty easy up until

Teach Your Kids the Real Key to Happiness

When you ask parents what they want for their children, a common word that often comes up is “happiness”. The problem with happiness is that we don’t often know what makes us happy. Some of us think it’s money, and others think it’s recognition. More and more, we’re beginning to see that it isn’t either of those.

Parenting: Concerning Addiction and Dealing with it

When we hear the word addiction, we immediately think of drug addiction, but this post is not just about drugs. It’s about everything that we can possibly get addicted to, including our digital devices. If we accept Steven Kotler’s premise that we are all addicts to a degree, then we need to pay attention to

A Lesson in Perspective Taking

In her book Mind in the Making, Ellen Gallinsky highlights the importance of “perspective taking” one of the seven essential life skills that all children need to be taught. I read a story recently that highlighted this important lesson… A Man Pushed His Wife to Save Himself from a Sinking Ship A cruise ship met with an accident

Life Lessons for Children: The Power of Believing

This is part of a series of lessons that we try to teach the children about living life with a positive outlook and having strength of character. For as much as we believe in honing our children’s skills and abilities, it is becoming evident that these are nothing if the mind is weak. “The mind is everything. What

Life Lessons for Children: Learning from Failure

There are many lessons in life I would love to teach my children. Sometimes I don’t have the words to express them adequately so when I see videos like these, I try to save them so I can share them with my children and hope that they will take away the positive messages that they teach…

The Value of Being Humble – Teaching Humility to Children

For 2015, my goal as a parent is to focus even more on the character development of my boys. One particular value I have been thinking about lately is humility. At first glance, humility probably doesn’t sound like a significant value but what I’m talking about is not false modesty or a pretense of being humble, but the true essence

Real World Preparation – Developing the Entrepreneurial Spirit

When I think about education for children, I think about preparing them for the world at large. One way to prepare them is to help them develop the entrepreneurial spirit because there is a lot they can learn from this experience, including but not limited to: how to set goals recognising opportunities financial literacy creativity

Child Safety Awareness: How Prepared are Your Children?

There was a workshop at our school recently about child safety awareness and it brought back a memory from my childhood that I wanted to share… One weekend, when I was 8 years old, my brother, my cousin and I went to our school playground to play. We lived really near the school – only two