The Happy Student

It's the last episode and Katherine gets very personal talking about the end of The Happy Student, and how she works hard to build her grit and growth mindset.

McQuaid, M. (2016) Are you suffering from stupid grit?. Psychology Today

Mindsetworks

Self-criticism can be a powerful motivator. It can also really harm your mental health - increasing your anxiety. Teens use self-criticism a lot to motivate themselves and they also seriously struggle with anxiety. Self-compassion (being nice to yourself when you mess up) is the answer! At first glance, teens often think that if you're nice to yourself when you mess up, you'll actually lower your standards and spend all day watching Netflix. Research shows that's not actually the case. Self-compassion actually helps you be more productive and keeps you happy and reduces your anxiety! Check out the episode to find out how!

For some extra reading, check out:

Dr. Kristin Neff's work at www.self-compassion.org

and

Rachel Simmons's article in The New York Times called "The Promise of Self-Compassion for Stressed-Out Teens"

Traveling with kids over the holidays is hard. Fireborn's got a few tips for you to keep the meltdowns at bay. We hope you have a happy holiday season!

For some people, the holidays are too much fun or maybe just too overwhelming. Kids' schedules get totally thrown off with all the travel, family, and fun. They eat way more sugar and unhealthy things than they normally do. And they can get totally overstimulated by family, activities, parties, and toys. With all of that fun happening, it's no wonder kids start to have tantrums – they are totally overstimulated and have trouble regulating their emotions, especially when they aren't having fun because hanging out with their aunts and uncles – a bunch of adults – is not their idea of fun.

In this episode, we talk about how to keep the holidays fun by first working on avoiding meltdowns and second figuring out what to do when meltdowns happen.

Every year my husband and I watch Home Alone to start the holiday season off right and every year I hear the things the adults in the movie say to Kevin (the protagonist) and I just cringe! Instead of calming the situation down, they exacerbate it. So, before the holidays, I wanted to review how you can turn a bad situation into a better one using effective communication and discipline.

Today we have a special guest – Katherine's cousin Andrei! Andrei is a sophomore in high school and we were hanging out the other night and I told him – I'm really worried about when my daughter grows up and is a teenager. I don't think I understand what I should be worried about with teens anymore. I'm totally out of touch. And we had this great conversation about vaping and social media and bullying and I felt a lot better about teens after talking with him. And after our conversation, Andrei said he'd be happy to come on the show. Andrei is here to tell us about vaping and cyberbullying!

There are so many ways parents are told they are parenting incorrectly and we have to protect ourselves!

Parents constantly get terrifying, judge-y emails trying to scare us into opening them. This bombardment in our inboxes and Instagram feeds is stressful. And we are much better parents when we are not stressed that we're about to harm our children for life. So here to talk with us today about protecting ourselves from all of this is Margaret Quinlan, co-author of You're Doing It Wrong! Mothering, Media, and Medical Expertise.

Resources & References:

You're Doing It Wrong! Mothering, media, and medical expertise. by Margaret Quinlan & Bethany Johnson

Maggie & Bethany on:

Twitter

Facebook

Instagram

Their Website

The Cost of Breastmilk (Stop Saying Breastmilk is Free)

This is How Much Breastfeeding Actually Costs

Fertility for Colored Girls

Chelsea Skaggs

Midwives for Black Lives

The Making of a Black Midwife (Go Fund Me)

Mental flexibility is a really great skill to have because things change. Plans change. Unexpected life events pop up. You break your leg. Your teacher assigns you a big paper. You get a bad grade on a test. Your friend gets mad at you. Helping kids develop mental flexibility is a little bit about helping them with anxiety and a little bit about helping them with creative thinking.

We've got 7 tips that help with both of those things.

References and Resources:

Amelia Bedelia

Beautiful Oops!

Tinkergarten

Understood.org

Meditation Resources:

Calm

Sitting Still Like a Frog

Stress and Anxiety 101

I give you advice and I really try hard to follow every piece of advice that I give you because I hate being hypocritical, but I'm also human. And you are too. So I don't always succeed. And it's okay. So today I'm listing out some of my recent failures. So in the future, if you're listening to this and you think the advice is overwhelming – it's overwhelming and impossible sometimes for me too. The goal is to just keep trying our hardest to improve.

Being a kid feels really dangerous these days. Kids are eating Tide Pods, getting cyberbullied, and sending sexts. And technology is really leading the way for so many of these dangerous things. Kids are watching YouTube and Instagram stars do stupid, risky things and they are constantly getting notifications from apps about who knows what. And so in response to this, we have more apps. Apps that are meant to keep our kids safe and that let parents know a lot of information about their kids – like who their children are talking to and how much. But that is a problem for kids who need privacy. Privacy is something that kids want and need and something that was already hard for parents to give when we were growing up, but feels even harder and even more dangerous these days.

Research shows that parents who give their kids more autonomy and privacy are actually victimized less frequently than kids whose parents are more controlling and invasive. So we definitely want to give kids privacy! So how do we do that? Fireborn has 9 tips!

Resources:

Gosh, A.K., Badillo-Urquiola, K., & P. Wisneiwski. (2018). Examining the effects of parenting styles on offline and online adolescent peer problems. ACM. New York: NY.

Ketteler, J. (2018). When is a child Instagram ready? The New York Times.