I started exercising (a lot) in the year and found that has helped me fall asleep faster. It doesn't have to be a whole lot either. 30 minutes of jogging or fast walking is enough to do it for me.
I definitely feel it on days where I sit and do nothing. I have a harder time falling asleep.
I find a light exercise for extended duration of time right before sleep helps my sleep the best. The key for me seems not doing anything stressful right before sleep after the exercise, and drinking plenty of water but not food/sugar. I wonder blood sugar level is associated with some of the sleep problems.
I've always considered Blind to be a a source that's almost exclusively people unhappy with their company so the way I'm seeing this poll is "on a website of people unhappy with their employment, 91% are unhappy about the latest decision" or "in today's news, the sky is blue"
In my tech crowd, I often have the most kids (four). Sometimes I meet others with 4 but it's pretty rare.
I have a non-tech group of friends. With four, I'm probably more average.
Yes. We live in a lovely neighborhood. My daughter knows and talks to all our neighbors. She plays outside and can even walk to some neighbors kids houses and we increasingly let her.
However talking to other parents about what it was like when their kids were growing up... The streets were filled with kids. Now we have couples who don't have any...
I hope they do.
Luckily our neighbors are nice and have a kid and hopefully another.
> Does families having fewer number of children contribute to this?
It could have decades ago, when kids still had places to go. Not now.
I had 5 who spent their childhood persistently locked away in one adult construct or another - because there was/is no local community. Within their reach were roads and private property and that's about it. They were in the same boat as most other US kids.
Doubt that. The majority of kids in the US are living in suburbs or cities, both places with lots of community. What you're describing sounds distinctly rural.
Some cities-yes, but vast majority of us suburbs are not designed to promote community, rather the opposite and many cities were buldozed so much that a community existing there is rather an exception
My kids faced the same situation, though at least the neighbors also had kids. I think that parents have to revolt en masse against saturating their kids with extracurriculars. One family going it alone is going to have lonesome kids.
The competitiveness has to go away -- the feeling that your kids have to be 100% occupied in order to give them a fighting chance in the future.
The problem there is college. You'd have to either make college admissions much less "holistic", or make sure there are non-college paths to success (something people have been trying hard for many years with little success), or both.
Or just go to a state school. My alma mater apparently has an 87% acceptance rate. My extracurriculars were playing Counter Strike, Battlefield 2, and WoWcrack. It doesn't seem to have had any negative effect on my life.
This has to be some segment of the middle-class and especially newly-upper-middle-by-income-but-not-socialization running into this trouble. Parents “under” that set just send their kids to [name of state] State where OK test scores and grades do the job. That’s a large majority of parents of college-bound kids, right there.
Parents “above” that set let the legacy admissions advantage and golfs-with-Ivy-admissions-officers prep school counselor sort it out.
Kids seriously looking to get into highly-selective schools are a minority.
This does mean you’re opting your kids out of elite schools by not playing that game from an early age, but hey, you and everybody (the colloquial “everybody”—most folks) else.
What I observed in my neighborhood is that the school playgrounds which used to be unfenced were essentially secondary parks. But they have since been “locked down”, removing more places kids once could just go to hang out in our paved over subrbia. I also had the benefit of an undeveloped forest behind my house to go explore and play in, but I don’t think most kids these days have access to that without an adult driving them to such a location. Walkability to nature is a big plus.
There's a good number of googlers that understand the system is a game. They always vote that they want more even if they believe they are being paid more than most.
I was very much going to take a similar approach to help train a child to know what the right behavior is. I have four children and it turns out they're all very different in terms of varying amounts of self control. I can definitely with my second one to use it at appropriate times but my oldest is way too impulsive and doesn't have the self control to exercise good behaviors (this isn't just a smartphone problem).
I'm in the same boat...2 kids. The one who always wants a tablet also always want snacks and candy. Any good resources on curbing this before it gets worse?
I would suggest approaching the impulsive kid as a trainer might approach a dog. Determine what the motivation is, and then use that as leverage to get the behavior that you want (and which is better for the child). So, if you want them to practice reading, offer the tablet or candy as a reward for a certain amount of time or, perhaps better, a certain realistic goal. You haven't mentioned anything about ages or other personality characteristics, which has a big influence on this sort of approach, so take with a big grain of salt.
I love my kids more than life, but I find a lot of dog training stuff crosses over very well. I taught them "come" command from an early age - and they know to come immediately, without question. The idea being if they are in a dangerous situation, like in the middle of a street or about to be hit by a bike or something, that this is how I will get them out of it. I don't use the command very often, but damn if those kids don't come running! It makes me feel so much safer.
I really believe having two rescue dogs (with their own issues) before having kids was a really good intro on how to set expectations and build up patience.
This is dead on. I find, however, that you have to be careful about revealing your secret, at least in so many words. I had (more or less) the following interaction with a parent we see occasionally:
Them: "How'd you get $oneYearOld to do $that?"
Me: [Explains]
Them: "That's clever"
Me (unguardedly): "Yeah, it's basically like dog-training - [more or less what you said]."
Them: [Dirty look]
A year on I don't think they've started another conversation with me. Lol. I have the "bad parent" rep, but everyone likes our kid, so I really, really don't care.
[Edit: It's all positive reinforcement, mind. I'm not yelling or beating the kid, or anything like that. The objection is to a mental association between the child and an animal. My wife initially had the same.
