The beginning of the school year and 7th grade science is often stressful for both the child and the whole family. How can we help children cope with the increased stress?
What should parents do to help their child get used to the new conditions?
Make sure he goes to bed on time.
It is extremely important for children to get enough sleep! Sleep deprivation provokes everything from lower grades and intelligence to childhood depression.
Here is a rule of thumb from the American Academy of Pediatrics: an hour before bedtime, take away all the gadgets from your child. This is the only way he can calm down, because playing with a gadget excites him.
Another rule: never leave a smartphone or tablet in the same room with children at night. Because they will take them and look under the pillow. If suddenly there is a notification, the child is sure to take the phone. Remember: the gadget always “sleeps” in another room, not in the child’s room.
Organize the day so that the child could move around enough, go for a walk and read 4th grade science
And again about gadgets: their main disadvantage is not that they negatively affect vision due to the flickering monitor, blue light. They have immobilized our children, “paralyzed” and tied them to their couches. This leads to low physical fitness, excess weight, to progressive myopia. By the way, it progresses not because children look at the screen, but because they do not look far away – there is simply no reason to do so if the person is sitting at home.
You have to go for a walk and read 6th grade math workbook for at least an hour or two a day. For preschoolers, again from the American Association of Pediatrics, I saw this recommendation: young children should have so much physical activity every day that they fall on the bed in the evening from fatigue.
For schoolchildren it is more complicated, they study, they often need a laptop and a tablet to study. But minimally: an hour a day walking with vigorous activity, two hours with moderate activity.
Be supportive, have a conversation.
Don’t limit yourself to the standard “How was your day?” question. Because kids will just answer “fine.” That’s not a question, but some hackneyed catchphrase that means nothing at all.
“Tell me what was hard today,” “tell me who you interacted with today,” “do you have any new kids in class,” “how do you like the new teachers?” – Ask some more substantive questions that don’t have a formulaic answer. Ask questions so that the answer is something you have to think about and formulate. Your child needs real, not superficial, involvement.
Stress is normal, and we all have a good safety margin. By and large, you don’t have to support the child in any particular way in September or October. It’s like the popular story about “losing weight by summer”: you don’t have to lose weight by summer, you just have to get your eating habits right. It’s the same with children: you have to build a trusting relationship, make sure that there is always a balance of exercise and rest.