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 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. Research shows that's not actually the case. Self-compassion actually helps you be more productive.

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. 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.

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. So he's on the show to help us all fe

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. Margaret Quinlan, co-author of You’re Doing It Wrong! Mothering, Media, and Medical Expertise, talks with us today about it!

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.

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 - so we have apps for that! Apps that are meant to keep our kids safe and that let parents know a lot of information about their kids and privacy gets lost.

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!