Play Region

Hardcore bullies!

Which staff members are best suited to deal with them during the school year?

In my experience of coordinating the Bully Zapper Mentor Program for 7 years, guidance counselors are the most effective with these hardcore bullies.

1. Our building principal has mentored several hardcore bullies and, believe it or not, this was not an effective relationship in stopping this student from bullying.

Why?

Because the hardcore bully felt that they were “above the rules” with the principal being their mentor. No matter how much they were told that they would receive disciplinary consequences, they did not stop bullying because they felt like they had an advocate at the top.

Obviously, this is not the purpose of the Bully Zapper Mentor Program!

2. Teachers and even Educational Assistants have had some of our more hardcore bullies. If the teachers spend inordinate amounts of their personal time with the bullies nurturing and talking to them, often the hardcore bully was neutralized and even did a major turn around.

3. Some of our staff are outstanding in this way but most teachers do not have the time or any extra emotional resources to invest in a hardcore bully.

4. A few of our Educational Assistants have had success with the hardcore bullies, but they lack the professional experience and education to deal with them effectively on a regular basis.

5. Our most successful staff bully zappers have been the guidance counselors because not only do they have a more flexible schedule to deal with a bully crisis as it comes up, they have the training and experience to deals with these difficult kids.

Also, guidance counselors are privy to more personal information about the families, past history and personal issues of the hardcore bullies and many of them have already worked with these students and their families.

So, put your most effective mentors with these hardcore bullies - your able-bodied guidance counselors!

Purchase the latest Bully Zapper publication, 11 SIMPLE STEPS TO ZAPPING BULLIES! Discover tips on working with the bully as well as the victim, talking to parents effectively, using behavior checklists with success, enabling teachers to deal with bullies in their classrooms, and much more practical and useful information you can use immediately to Zap the Bullies in your school! To order, go to http://www.bullyzapper.com

©2005 Permission granted to reprint this article in print or on your web site so long as the paragraph above is included and contact information is provided to the email coach@bullyzapper.com and http://www.bullyzapper.com

Paula McCoach invites you to join the Bully Zapper Newsletter. New and effective bully zapping techniques will be sent directly to your email, so you can start zapping bullies immediately! Just published is the long-awaited ebook, 11 SIMPLE STEPS FOR ZAPPING BULLIES and THE BULLY ZAPPER MENTOR PACK both available at http://www.bullyzapper.com

Playing online toddler games gives toddlers plenty of opportunity for learning as well as fun! Toddlers are naturally inquisitive and will love the challenge of learning how to use a mouse while they play all of those exciting online games.

Toddler online games engage children in several key aspects of development-

Hand/Eye Co-Ordination- by using the mouse to drag and drop or chase moving objects

Problem Solving- recognising pairs, simple puzzles and learning about opposites

Recognition- sounds, shapes, colors and animals

Social/Interactive- songs, stories, ABC’s and rhyming games

Creative- using a painbrush or bucket to color images- also teaches about cause and effect

Of course the time spent on a computer for toddlers should be limited. They only have a short attention span so sessions of 5-10 minutes will be plenty to start with. As with all activities for this age group, moderation is the key.

Selecting the right websites and games is very important for this age group. The online games that toddlers play need to be suited to their attention span, brain development as well as their dexterity with a mouse. There are plenty of kiddy websites out there but you only want the very best, preferably without advertising everywhere and easy for parents and kids to navigate.

The time spent online should be seen as valuable and relaxed time to enjoy with your toddler. Plenty of praise and encouragement will keep them involved and you can relish the chance to sit down- something that happens rarely when you are busy chasing a toddler around all day long!

Visit Kids Fun and Games for all your games needs- the best online games, indoor and outdoor games, babies and toddlers, crafts, party games, festive events and much more…

Viewers log in 50,000 commercials per year

Commercials are another significant problem with TV watching. Viewer’s pocketbooks are the primary victim. The average person who logs in 4 hours of TV per day also tunes in to more than 50,000 commercials per year. Even if adults can resist the manipulative marketing tactics, children do not have the ability to discern fact from fiction from cheap advertising.

Marketers target children and teach them to nag

Worse, during each of those cute commercials, your children are facing an army of ruthless marketers who want to teach and encourage your child to nag for their products until you purchase them. The marketing term is the “Nag Factor”, or how many sales companies can make from kids who beg, plead, and yes. . .NAG their parents.

Once upon a time, society viewed children as precious beings that parents and society needed to protect until they learned to navigate in the larger world. Today TV marketers literally look upon your kids as cash cows. Take heed of the words of one of the gurus of this trend, James McNeal: “With all their purchases ahead of them, and with their ability to pull their parents along, children are the brightest star in the consumer constellation.” [emphasis added]

McNeal sees three separate markets in children. There is the primary marketchildren’s allowances, part-time jobs, and other direct income. There is the influence (read ‘nagging’) market in which children “pull their parents along” to purchase goods and services. Then there is the future market, which envisions customers who are branded for life.

Alternatively, consider the words of Cheryl Idell, a pioneer in teaching kids how to nag: “Nagging falls into two categories,” she explains. “There is persistent nagging, the fall-on-the-floor kind, and there is importance nagging, where a kid can talk about it.” In other words, Ms. Idell teaches and encourages your children to argue with you, which can also stress your family relationships.

How marketers plan to “brand” your children for life

It is no accident that children’s environments have become saturated with logos and characters associated with corporations. To brand children for life, marketers deliberately saturate your children’s environment. For example, marketers, like the aforementioned McNeal, combine TV exposure with such manipulative marketing tactics as associating smells with specific brands, exploiting infants’ ultra-sensitivity to smell. There is also the lovely tactic called the “Drool Factor,” which exploits the fact that infants tend to look down at where their drool has landed:

Ever notice how a 5- or 6-month-old sometimes watches to see where his drool lands? Discovering that was an ”aha!” moment for former Texas A&M marketing professor James McNeal. He reasoned that if the drool dripped to a diaper or a bib imprinted with an image of a character that’s linked to a brand, and if the baby sees the logo repeatedly. . .

If the baby sees that logo repeatedly on them and on TV, marketers hope he or she will be “branded” for life. This is why diapers now all have pleasant smells and large, visible characters in the front. It is not to benefit the parents.

That is the mentality of the marketers behind TV commercials. If you let your children watch TV, these marketers get a chance to reach your children thirty-two times every hour.

Grab the headache relievers!

In 2001, the Nag Factor influenced an estimated $300 billion in sales. That amounts to over $4,000 per pestering child per year. Who knows how much more money was spent on the subsequent sales of headache relievers!

Protect your kids, because no one else will

Neither the government nor media control groups have been effective in controlling these marketers. However, protecting your kids is your job as a parent anyway. To protect your kids from these marketers and their tricks, reduce your children’s TV viewing time and skip through the commercials. Either teach your children how to fast forward through these manipulative commercials, or do it for them.

About ‘The Awful Truth About Television’ Series:

What happens when the average American spends 4 hours 32 minutes every day watching television? Trash Your TV’s ‘The Awful Truth About Television’ Series explores the multifaceted problems with TV in eleven hard-hitting articles. Read the full series and you will never look at your television set the same way again.

Sources:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4021/is_n4_v20/ai_20497111
http://www.mothering.com/articles/growing_child/consumerism/whine.html
http://medialit.med.sc.edu/marketers_babies_profits.htm
http://www.biz.colostate.edu/faculty/joec/BG655/Projects_Fa01/Marketing%20to%20Kids.htm

Katherine Westphal is the founder of Trash Your TV! and the author of a revolutionary e-book system, The TV-FREE System. Get in control of your TV watching and create the life you want, whether it is to create the body, the mind, the business, the family, or the community of your dreams. Receive free sample pages of the TV-FREE Workbook, when you become a member at Trash Your TV!

As a teacher of elementary grades I was always trying to get the children to expand their thinking capabilities. I would ask impertinent questions such as, “How do you know that is a horse?”

The kids didn’t like it. “Anybody can see it is a horse; can’t you?”

After some struggle and mental wrestling, some of them came to see that there is a process by which we come to decide that a particular object in space is a horse. It has something to do with definitions and classifications and differentiations; that sort of thing.

The big problem was that I was ever inclined to see children as more competent than they were. I was pushing them beyond their built-in zone of overwhelm. If someone were to have presented me with a math problem much beyond multiplication, I would go blank too. A point would be reached after which my effort would no longer produce fruit. I would just not have the resources to comprehend the situation.

My fellow teachers were pretty much comfortable with figuring out where the children’s’ capabilities lay and teaching what the kids could handle. They were as successful as one gets in the bureaucratic world of big-city teaching. Not me. I kept wanting for the children to be more than they were capable of being. I guess I was something of an educational stage mother.

I suspect some of you out there think I was being noble and progressive. Probably it was more like wishful thinking. Maybe I did stimulate a couple of kids in the process, but the real lesson is: “You can’t make a purple cow out of a sow’s purse.”

Jack Wilson is a writer and artist from Los Angeles and Phoenix. http://www.geocities.com/galimatio/jackwilson.html

Tropin. Human chorionic gonadotropin. Sound
Familiar? You may or may not have heard of hCG,
but if you have, it may be because you read it on the
box of your home pregnancy test. That’s because
hCG is the basis of home pregnancy tests. It’s also
the basis for the blood and urine pregnancy tests that
your doctor performs. But there is much more to hCG
than simply being an indicator of pregnancy.

HCG is a hormone produced by the placenta during
pregnancy. It begins being produced and released
into the blood almost immediately after the egg
attaches to the uterine wall. Since hCG is released
into the blood so soon after conception, it can be
detected there even before your first missed
menstrual period, as early as six days after
implantation. Its function is to prevent the disintegration of
the corpus luteum of the ovary and thereby maintain
production of one of the main pregnancy hormones,
progesterone.

HCG Levels
HCG levels rise steadily for the first 14 to 16 weeks
after your last menstrual period, doubling every 48-
72 hours in about 85% of normal pregnancies. After
this time, the levels will slowly decrease. The
increases in the hCG levels in early pregnancy can provide
invaluable information about your pregnancy and the
health of your baby. HCG levels return to zero shortly
after pregnancy.

HCG levels are often measured as part of a maternal
serum triple or quadruple screening test. These tests
are done by measuring three or four substances in a
woman’s blood and are used to estimate the baby’s
risk of certain problems or congenital birth defects.
The triple screen measures beta human chorionic
gonadotropin (beta-hCG), alpha-fetoprotein (AFP),
and a type of estrogen (unconjugated estriol or uE3).
The quad screen measures the hormone inhibin-A in
addition to the other three.

Abnormal hCG levels do not necessarily mean that
there is a problem. It could simply be due to a
miscalculation of pregnancy dating. Unfortunately
though, abnormal hCG levels could also indicate a
more serious issue. There are several things that could
cause a high or low hCG level, so you should be
retested within a few days to see how the levels are
changing.

A high hCG level could be an indicator of a multiple
pregnancy, in which there is more than one fetus
present, or a molar pregnancy. A low hCG level
could be an indicator of a possible miscarriage or
blighted ovum, or an ectopic pregnancy, where the
fertilized egg implants itself somewhere other than
the uterus.

By now it should be apparent that you will be hearing
quite a bit about hCG during your pregnancy, and
now you will know more about what you are
hearing.

Susan Tanner is a wife and mother of three. She is also the editor of pregnancy-guide.net. Pregnancy-Guide is an online community for mothers to find support and valuable information. Please visit Pregnancy-Guide for valuable pregnancy information.

“What is that white patch on my baby’s mouth”? Any mother could have mumbled a similar statement like this while giggling with their angels. Basically, those white curd-like patches that can be seen in the tongue are not simply food residues but thrush. What is thrush in simple terms?

Thrush is yeast infection caused by specific species of fungi called Candida Albicans. Usually, these organisms live in any healthy intestinal folds of all humans except that when the environment of the body undergoes drastic chemical changes, the yeasts grow in uncontrolled amounts causing irritable symptoms of thrush anywhere in the body.

The tongue is one of the perfect places for yeasts. In the mouth, which is the main receiving vessel of all foods and beverages, it has all the possibilities of infection while its alkalinity is always changing constantly every meal. If it is not hygienically maintained, thrush can spread in no time.

The trouble with thrush is that it is never attractive to look at whenever your baby smiles. Usually, thrush in infants is always mistaken to be traces of milk, as they appear nested at the tongue. If the baby is undergoing diaper rashes at the same time, expect that what you have seen in the mouth is not ordinary milk residue. Actually tongue thrush in infants is not harmful, however it can cause some amount of discomfort and irritation to your baby.

No matter how you scrape the white residues with a brush, it usually does not get removed at once.

For infants, the mouth must be religiously wiped by a wet washcloth after feeding to prevent accumulated food residues from sticking long to the mouth. Avoid sugar altogether. Breastfeeding moms must make sure that if they contract thrush in the nipples, they take precautionary measure not to contaminate the infant’s mouth.

For adults, thrush is easier to determine. Sometimes it is caused by some medicines that alter the natural balance of the body flora. Such medicines must be taken with caution. These medicines are: antibiotics, birth control pills, steroids found in meat products, cancer drugs.

Tongue thrush is a very common disease that happens to anyone from time to time. It will be hard to deal with if there is not enough prevention done. The best way to avoid tongue thrush is of course through good dental hygiene.

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Note: This article may be freely reproduced as long as the AUTHOR’S resource box at the bottom of this article is included and and all links must be Active/Linkable with no syntax changes.
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Charlene J. Nuble 2006.

For answers to All your frequently asked questions about thrush, please go to: http://thrush.candidaanswers.com/

I’ve had the privilege of working with teenagers and their families now for over 25 years. I’ve been at it long enough to have a teen with whom I once worked in the eighties bring in their teenager to get help. That came sooner than I expected it would.

One of the many things I have learned over all these years is the greatest emotional need of teenagers. It may not be what you thing, and may surprise you.

The greatest emotional need of teenagers (after music, the computer and the phone) is a strong sense of belonging.

They need to feel they are a part of something bigger than themselves. If they don’t get it in a healthy place - with family, worthwhile friends, clubs, sports, youth groups, etc. - they will get it in an unhealthy place - with inappropriate friends, drugs, gangs or cults.

One of our many jobs as parents is to make sure the first place they feel a sense of belonging is in the family.

The second place we can foster a sense of belonging is with friends in clubs, church, sports or other groups.

One of the questions I am most often asked by parents is what to do when there teen wants to quit a club or sport that they have been a part of for a long time.

My answer is it is OK to quit if the following criteria are met:

1. The desire to quit is not a symptom of depression or drug use,

2. It’s not a situation where it would be better for the teen to see something to completion, and

3. The teen replaces what they are leaving with something else that is healthy. The sometimes exception to that rule is if the teen is already over loaded and quitting something gives them a more normal and healthy schedule and life.

Remember, teens are going to get a sense of belonging somewhere. It’s our job to make sure that somewhere is a good somewhere.

Visit ParentingYourTeenager.com for tips and tools for thriving during the teen years. You can also subscribe to our f*r*e*e 5 day e-program on The Top 5 Things to Never Say to Your Teenager, from parenting coach and expert Jeff Herring .