We know how finding quality time is essential to maintain a strong connection in all relationships. I believe in intentional parenting and I want to fill my children’s life with as many happy memories as possible. If you are reading this post, I know you would like to build a stronger connection by doing fun-filled activities with your family. WHAT ARE FAMILY RITUALS? WHY ARE THEY IMPORTANT? Family rituals are activities that you do repeatedly on a consistent basis. Family rituals need not be anything complicated and not always involve money. For example, you might be having a ritual of morning snuggles every day or a special handshake or gestures that you do with your family that no one else knows. If you have a movie night every week, it’s another family ritual. The benefits of creating family rituals are: Stronger bond between family members: By engaging in activities of common interest,…

Guilt is one of the biggest emotions that can weigh us down. But it also gives us feedback on our behavior so that we can work on what needs to be corrected. Wait, why am I talking about guilt here? It is because I see it a lot in parents. The guilty feeling stems from the beliefs that “I am not a good mother”, or, “I am not doing as much as other mothers do for their kids”, etc. I experience it myself too. At the end of the day, when I look at my sleeping kids, I feel guilty about so many things and I take the resolution to work on them. As parents, the words we speak to kids are of utmost importance. The words we speak to them have a role in determining their confidence, abilities, happiness, and well-being. What I have found is, talking positively and…

Resilience means the ability to cope with misfortunes and other unplanned events in life and adapt to them. If a person has good resilience, he will be able to adjust to the events quickly, wheres a person with less resilience becomes overwhelmed by such experiences and resort to unhealthy coping mechanisms. And due to this reason, it’s important that children be taught resilience. Because, if their resilience is not developed, they become less ready to face the hardships in life. As a result of poor resilience, they can develop diseases – physical and mental – and also, develop addictions to unhealthy substances as a coping mechanism. Resilience is what helps us face unfortunate events in a positive way and rebuild our lives from the experiences we have learned. Kids can face a lot of hardships in life like a divorce between parents, moving schools or cities, physical disabilities/illnesses, bullying, abuse,…

I don’t like math. It’s hard. When my second grader told me this, I remembered my own childhood. For me, math was not a hard subject in the second grade, but it was hard when I reached high school. And then I set out to focus more on it and ended up loving the subject. In fact, later I went on to do a major in math. And my belief about math changed. So when my daughter said this, I immediately thought how a change in mindset could change her belief. And that’s the difference between a growth mindset vs fixed mindset. **This post contains affiliate links. I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you if you make a purchase through my affiliate link** FIXED MINDSET VS GROWTH MINDSET Carol Dweck, a lead researcher on the topic defines a fixed mindset and growth mindset as, In…

I have been reading self-help books for about fifteen years. I first learned about the power of affirmations from these books. But only recently I had the breakthrough that we all use affirmations regardless of we are into personal development or not. Our kids use affirmations too. How is it that we all use affirmations? All our thoughts and internal monologues are affirmations. When struggling with a subject, does your child say that “I hate math, it is hard”? There. It is an affirmation. When struggling with parenting you might tell yourself “ I hate having to fight with my kid every day. It feels like I am a failure as a parent”. All these are affirmations. The sad thing is most of us use negative affirmations most of the time rather than positive ones. And it is not conscious but happens unconsciously. We all have our moments of self-doubt.…