May 16th, 2012 by Gal Baras
As you probably know by now, life does not always work the way you expect it to. As a parent, you also know that your kids do not always do what you expect them to. Sure, it is tough sometimes, but it is the same for everybody. No matter how hard we try, we sometimes face situations we do not like. The main difference between people who succeed in life and those who do not is what they do next. This is also the difference between parents who raise happy and successful kids and those who do not. While I was thinking about this topic, I remembered a quote by an American president about taking action. When I looked it up, it turned out to be by Theodore Roosevelt, who is also quoted as saying many other highly appropriate things. I will include these within this post for your enjoyment and your (kids’) benefit. Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering - Theodore Roosevelt Stopping progress The best way to keep yourself right...
Read moreYou may want to read
Posted in Parenting, Personal Development | No comments
May 14th, 2012 by Ronit Baras
Happiness is a very important treasure that all humans seek. Gal and I have been researching and teaching happiness for a long time. As a happiness coach, I can tell you that one of the greatest difficulties of finding this treasure is that most people do not really know how it looks, feels or sounds. They spend most of their life searching for an idea that they do not understand very clearly. I have read hundreds of books about happiness, motivation and success and written many articles, lesson plans and presentations about happiness and in all of them, I get to the same point: happiness is not absolute and does not follow the “one size fits all” rule. Therefore, I cannot teach happiness. All I can teach people is how to find it inside. Most of my clients are very surprised when I tell them I do not have a happiness formula for them. Many people would like a formula or a pill that will fix their life and make them happy quickly and easily. When they come to coaching,...
Read moreYou may want to read
Posted in Personal Development | No comments
May 11th, 2012 by Ronit Baras
In the last three weeks, I gave you a sneak peek into teenagers’ minds. Many parents say to me, “If I only knew what’s happening in their mind…” and I think they have only forgotten what was on their mind when they were teens, or maybe they have forgotten the struggles their friends had during the toughest periods of their life – adolescence. Here are the last 5 typical teenager thoughts and tips to prevent or eliminate them. I prefer to be alone “Thank God they are going away this weekend. I can have the house to myself. I can watch TV as much as I like, play the computer as much as I like and eat whatever I want. Freedom at last!” What parents can do When kids reach the teen years, they loves to be on their own sometimes and it is normal and healthy for them to be on their own. Even bringing a babysitter to stay with them (to take care of the other kids, of course) can give them that sense of freedom and it is not a sign of your...
Read moreYou may want to read
Posted in Parenting, Teens / Teenagers | No comments
May 9th, 2012 by Ronit Baras
Mother’s Day is just around the corner and many things happened to me in the last month that made me wonder about the hardest thing I have ever done, the most important thing and the best thing of all. I have done a lot in my life. Luckily, although some things were incredibly challenging, my life has been very rewarding overall. I am the kind of person who goes to work and it does not feel like a work, more like serving a purpose. I am an educator in every cell of my body. I teach parents how to be the best they can be and how to raise happy kids by being happy themselves and I have changed the lives of thousands of children. Still, the best of all my talent, I have given to my own children: Eden, Tsoof and Noff. Being their mother always seems to bring out the best in me. All this wondering started when one of my clients had a daughter. She had given up her career and the search for a partner and with her mother’s help, she had gone through the journey of having a...
Read moreYou may want to read
Posted in Parenting | No comments
May 4th, 2012 by Ronit Baras
This series is meant to help parents of teens and parents of kids who are turning into teens understand what teenagers think and what they go through as part of this tough period of their life. Each “twisted” thought is followed by something parents can do to help their teenagers and everyone else involved. As in previous chapters, here are 5 things teens think and feel that scare them and make them act weird, and what you can do about them. I hope it will help you find alternative ways to address the issues and prevent them from keeping those thoughts any longer. My parents are cruel and weak “I think my parents are cruel. They hate me. They scream, shout and always tell me I’m wrong. They brought me into the world to torture me. They are weak. How can I trust them when I need help if they are so weak?” What parents can do When children are upset, they may think that you are behaving the way you do with the ultimate purpose of hurting them. Many...
Read moreYou may want to read
Posted in Parenting, Teens / Teenagers | No comments
May 2nd, 2012 by Gal Baras
The essence of parenting is preparing children for adulthood. Parents must therefore protect their kids, feed them, keep them healthy and teach them the skills they will need during their independent adult life. But which skills are those? What do we want our kids to achieve with the skills we teach them anyway? Most parents, given enough time to ponder this question, agree that the answer is “Happiness”. When offered the choice from success, money, love, fame and other things people desire, parents overwhelmingly choose happiness. The problem is that most of our daily parenting ends up being about other things, like academic success, winning competitions, behaving politely, earning money and so on. Children’s future happiness is only used as an assumption, as in “If you do well at school, you’ll have more options in life and be happier” or “If you learn how to keep a job and save money, you’ll be able to afford the things that will...
Read moreYou may want to read
Posted in Parenting, Personal Development | 2 comments
April 30th, 2012 by Ronit Baras
I love tattoos. As a visual person, I find a lot of beauty in tattoos. I think tattoos are a form of art. I can find many justifications for having a tattoo. Much like most women (and some men) use makeup to make themselves look pretty, I can understand having a tattoo to look pretty. Although today, I will not get any piercing to damage my body, I can still remember that when I was younger, I decided to have a second piercing in one of my ears (my ears had each been pierced once by our neighbor when I was about 7 or 8 years old). Still, I have to say it scares me to think of my kids getting a tattoo. I imagine their soft skin that I bathed and touched being damaged and it really frightens me to think that people damage their skin to look pretty. When Eden was a baby, I wrote her a life diary with her photo album and wrote her a long, long, book-size letter with a huge message. I knew that in-between the words, I needed to write the biggest message of all. My message was,...
Read moreYou may want to read
Posted in Parenting | No comments
April 27th, 2012 by Ronit Baras
Being a teenager is not easy. Being a parent of teenagers is not easy either, but there are ways for parents to help make life easier for both. Here is a list of 5 more thoughts that teens have, which your behavior and attitude as a parent can change to make the teen years much nicer. I must be adopted “Maybe I was adopted. That explains the way they treat me. I’ve heard them saying I looked like Mom, but I look at my photos as a baby and I don’t look like either one of my parents or even like myself today. They could have adopted me when I was just a baby. That makes sense. I think this is why they love my brother more than they love me.” What parents can do Every child has this horrible thought at some stage. It is very natural to question your parents’ behavior as that of adoptive parents. There is no real way to prevent this thought from getting into kids’ mind, but there are good ways to make sure it will go away quickly, before it creates...
Read moreYou may want to read
Posted in Parenting, Teens / Teenagers | 1 comment
April 23rd, 2012 by Ronit Baras
Raising kids with confidence has been my goal ever since I started studying education. It was funny to discover along the way that teaching my kids knowledge was not going to make them successful and happy in life. At first, I was a bit disappointed to discover this, but as I have chosen to focus on the role of the most important agents – parents and teachers – in raising happy, confident, successful, healthy and friendly kids, I kept searching for ways that work. I have 3 kids of my own and they are everything a parent can dream of. They are “the full package”. One of my friends told me that if she did not know them, she would think I was making them up. Almost every person who meets my kids asks us, “How did you do it?” Modestly, we say we were lucky, and we were. I am convinced that some things were just lucky, but no one wants to know about your luck, because luck is not something you can bring into your life. So these people say, “Come...
Read moreYou may want to read
Posted in Parenting | 1 comment
April 20th, 2012 by Ronit Baras
In the past, people thought that teens’ behavior during the teenage years was directly connected to physical changes they start to experience at the age of 12, which makes them feel strange with their body changes and confuses them. Today, the approach is that adolescence is a more gradual process that starts with the first time children want to try doing things on their own, sometime as early as the age of 3. If teenagers seem confused to you, it is mainly because they have reached a point in their life when they need to define who they are, what they think, what they like or hate, what their beliefs are and what they wants to be later on in life. These thoughts are tough. I know many adults who have not reached that self-definition yet, so this is not easy for a 12-year-old to do, although they are expected to have some clue about it. One of the problems parents have with their kids is that they do not really understand what is so confusing about life. It is mainly...
Read moreYou may want to read
Posted in Parenting, Teens / Teenagers | 1 comment
Family Matters
