Prioritising food in your household budget
When extra costs come up and squeeze our budget the first area we seem to cut to pay for extra items is our food money. Living more cheaply by eating noodles, pasta or spaghetti on toast may be ‘doable’ for a week or so but in the long run it’s not a healthy diet and people get sick which compounds their problems. It can make for a vicious cycle.
The Importance of Dramatic Play
Dramatic Play for children has so many benefits when it comes to learning and development. Children learn how to communicate and interact with other children, they use language to explain or describe what they are doing, ask and answer questions and develop a vocabulary that helps them to co-ordinate and negotiate in social settings.
Continue Reading February 27, 2012 at 3:08 pm Leave a comment
The Importance of Play in Child Development and the Need for Space
Child development involves a process of learning and mastering skills, like sitting, walking, communicating, socialising and turn-taking. Play is essential to child development because it contributes to the cognitive, physical and emotional well-being of a child.
Play allows children to be creative and use their imagination, and is important for healthy brain development. Play gives a child the chance to engage and interact in the world around them.
The pressure to be perfect
The pressure for teens nowadays is unprecedented. With so many high-achieving kids, it’s no wonder that teens and their parents feel as if a child has to have a multi-page resume, be a world-class athlete or manage their own business by the time they are 18. But that just isn’t possible for everyone.
Sharing Children over Summer
For our family Summer-time means long lazy days, BBQ’s, beach, rivers, fun sun, family and mates. Family nowadays for many children is often a busy life of mum and dad in separate homes, maybe separate towns, day to day care and contact negotiations, step-mothers and/or step-fathers, new brothers/sisters, and with them comes the respective grandparents, possibly re-partnered themselves with children, varying gaps in ages of blended families…and so on.
Affordable Finance or Food on the Table
Families bringing in less than $900 a week struggle to live a modest Kiwi life and support 2 adults and 4 children after rent, power, food, petrol, insurance, school costs , phone, doctors bills are accounted. Quite simply, they can’t have anything break down or go wrong. But of course stuff happens.
Post Natal Adjustment
Women can feel huge pressure to live up to the expectations of society’s view of how a mother should be coping and her own expectation of how it will be when baby arrives. When the reality includes perhaps a birth that was a whole lot different to her belief or the feelings afterwards towards baby aren’t as she had hoped – that she didn’t instantly fall in love with her newborn – or that she’s lost a sense of herself and the ‘joie de vivre’, post natal depression can result.
Strengthening Your Step Family
Finding ways to honour and understand traditions from each other’s past as well as actively creating and building on new family traditions is key to finding a new strength as a step family. Remember that ‘evil witch’ label? It’s time to let it go. We know as parents that children respond positively to adults who are calm, approachable and have good coping strategies when people are getting stressed. Most importantly, the new step-family life, complex as it is, can grow in new strength, give children security and be rewarding for you.
