Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader A story that comes to me from my childhood is from my days of being a Girl Guide. We used to collect badges in return for completing requirements that pertained to that badge - all listed in a handbook and accompanied by a tick box and a space for the supervising/certifying adult to sign when you’d met the standard. A requirement for one of...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader Going flatting … it’s a big step! How often have you stopped and thought about what kind of a flatmate your young person will be? We think about all kinds of things for their futures, like what they’ll do when they finish school and how they’ll make the most of their gifts and talents, and we work towards encouraging them to follow their...
5 months ago • 2 min read
Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader What if you were able to change your focus from a place of inflicting blame (and shame) on another, to a focus on giving space to grace? This quote from Brené Brown has really got me thinking, and I know it will get you thinking too! "Grace means all your mistakes now serve a purpose instead of serving shame." How often do we leap to a blame...
6 months ago • 2 min read
Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader Research studies have found that every negative interaction has a weight of a five in our brains, while every positive interaction has a weight of a one in our brains. It's a leftover bias from our evolution that ensured we remembered the danger and difficult times simply so we could survive. In modern day life, we continue to have a bias...
6 months ago • 2 min read
Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader There’s a law of motion that is not often acknowledged, or recognised, yet we all understand its truth: a little task uses more energy than a large task. When it comes to doing the little things, how often do we put them off while they’re still little? We think things like: I’ll do it tomorrow I’ll do it later It’s such a small thing, I’ll...
6 months ago • 1 min read
“Do not give your attention to what others do or fail to do; give it to what you do or fail to do.” Buddha Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Ngā mihi ki tō tau hau, happy new year! It’s so easy to play the blame game. To slip into giving our precious time and energy to pointing the finger of blame at others and at circumstances. We get so good at “If only …” and “It’s not their fault …”...
7 months ago • 1 min read
“No one is coming to save me. I’m on my own. And that’s awesome.” Melanie Medland Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader Back in my teaching days I had two rules for the kids in my class: Be in the right place At the right time I loved these rules and so did the kids I taught. These two rules gave everyone simplicity and clarity. No one had to remember lots of complicated...
7 months ago • 2 min read
“Parents don’t owe their kids a subsidised life, an easy ride or a shortcut to success.” Yvonne Godfrey Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader Our role as a parent is to grow our young people into being self responsible adults. It takes time and guidance to strengthen and condition our children so they can make the most useful choices in every aspect of their lives. Sometimes this...
7 months ago • 1 min read
“Inspire yourself to take measurable steps towards who you want to be.” Anon Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader Self Responsibility - two words we use regularly. What EXACTLY do we mean when we trot these words out of our mouths? If we’re not sure, chances are our teens won't know either. And … given many teens are in that push back stage of life, they’ll be delighted that...
7 months ago • 2 min read