5 Thoughtful Blog Messages to keep for the New Year!

By Anna M.*

So here we are almost in the end of the year. I would like to celebrate 2015 with you sharing a selection of thoughts, quotes and posts that made part of our blog's half year of life. Better Family Conversations had a great start in June and we are hoping that many of our contributions will help to build more relationships in 2016 ! Happy new year!

Transformation
Lim's inaugural writing about how she conceived POVI is one of our top posts. My favorite quote is about how she candidly shares how she had to leave her Asian Mom person behind and build everything from scratch again: "However, when my son was in his 6th grade, my perfect life fell apart. I was called in to meet with his school counselor. She looked into my eyes and said: "Your child is very smart but he is not happy". How painful could that be? I couldn't stop asking myself why I failed. I worked so hard to be the best mom ever. What mistakes had I made in the process?". This, for me is the fracture, the moment when she decides that a new mom is on the rise.

Self- Esteem:
"Supporting children’s self-esteem and self-concept also promotes the development of specific emotions that are critical in helping the child have positive interactions with others.", wrote Daphna Ram, Ph.D Psychology Cornell, who utilizes her Developmental Psychology expertise on Povi Family Connectapp. On her post she shares good strategies and understanding to help parents to raise caring, confident and secure children. Very good reading!

Resilience
"To encourage a growth mindset, or to raise children who will get up every time they are knocked down, we need to praise the process, not the outcome. By praising the effort needed, or steps taken, to achieve the outcome, we can help our children understand that it is the effort that results in success." wrote Trish Schaefer, a very special collaborator to our blog. On her article, How to Raise a Resilient Child, she brings knowledge with great enthusiasm, on a very helpful tone. I always go back to it when I come across challenging issues with my sons.

Interaction
"It's when motherhood kidnaps the best from me and transforms me into a monster mom and even a yelling woman on the verge of a neurotic breakdown. I am sure I am not alone. When I talk to other moms at school they all agree it's a tough time to be a parent.". The post 5 Tips to Be a Better Parent before 8 AM helped me to identify the source of my struggle, and also how to develop ways to solve it. But the reason I chose it is deeper: my 8 year-old son illustrated it, and for that he had to read the article. Since that day he understood how their behavior affected me, and both boys are behaving so much better. One more sign that communication and emotional skills are important and can be shared.

Connection
Yes, I believe that any kind of tool _ including interactive, screen and even other types of digital entertainment can help parents to understand their children and build up a dialogue including the electronics. For that reason I recommend the following posts: Tired of Asking your Kids How was School? , The Big Connection and, of course, the non-brainer hug, on this candid post about how important it is to hug, for both parents and kids.

Thanks for reading our blog, and we all hope that 2016 brings lots of love and good feelings to our big family of parents and educators.

I would love to give you a heads-up that we will be running a Kickstarter campaign on Tue, May 24, 2016. We would greatly appreciate your help to be one of our early backers to make Povi a reality.

You can choose to back our project for your family, a school, your team members at work or even non-profits.

We would greatly appreciate you also sharing this important message with whom you know will benefit from joining our community!

Thank you very much! Do email me at seowlim@povi.me to catch up anytime!

Reading List 2016: 9 Emotional Intelligence Books

By Seow Lim*

If you had asked me 2 years ago, do you read parenting books? I would have told you, yes, I read What to Expect the First Year and had 'memorized' it when my first child was born, and then memorized it again when my 2nd child was born six years later. I needed to know every details, when exactly do you babies start opening their eyes, when do they sit, how much milk should they drink, what should they eat at every stage etc. 

The book was recommended to me by a very nice co-worker years ago, and I am forever grateful to her. In the early 2000, you couldn't 'google' or 'facebook' for parenting information, hence, I had to read the book multiple times in order to have the information at the 'finger tip', i.e. my brain.I love reading. I have a habit of reading for 30 minutes before I fall asleep every night. It is such a strong habit that if I don't read, I can't sleep. I tend to read novels. They calm me down. 

After that, I had been very busy parenting my children that I didn't have time to read any more parenting books, nor I thought needed it. However, 2 years ago, after I realized that my parenting hadn't develop my first child into a 'happy' boy (read about my transformation here), I had to find resources to help me be a better parent. I realized that I put too much stress in academics, so the first book I bought I searched for keyword 'Well balanced child' and that led me to 'The Well Balanced Child' by Sally Goddard Blythe. I like the book because it discussed how movement, physical activities help our kids with brain development. It made me realize that 'Wow, I didn't think that I had to take neuroscience into consideration when I am parenting. This is so interesting.'

Out of curiosity, I then went to search for Amazon parenting best sellers. I picked up a few other books, that I now can recommend as very good for anybody interested on EQ:

•  The Whole Brain Child by Daniel J Siegel M.D. and Tina Payne Bryson, PhD
• Nurture Shock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
• Mindset, by Carol S Dweck, PhD
• How Children Succeed - Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough
• How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids will Talk, by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

I was concerned about my kid spending too much screen time and I was putting too much stress on him. So I also bought:

•  Alone Together, by Sherry Turkle
• The Big DIsconnect, by Catherine Steiner-Adair, EdD
• The Learning Habit, by Donaldson-Pressman, Rebecca Jackson and Dr Robert M Pressman

With these books, I was introduced to the world of 'Emotional Intelligence' , 'Character Skills' and the power of parent-child conversation. Children develops better when they learn to manage their emotions, establish positive relationships, develop caring and concern for others, make responsible decisions and constructively handle challenging situations.These are my keywords to what I was searching for - the wholesome, well-balanced, happy and healthy child. 

I had since found a lot of other online resources, such as the Heckman Equation, The Character Lab, The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning. and many others that drive the research and values of emotional learning.

Although there are many different words and ways that people describe social emotional skills, like character skills, emotional intelligence, EQ, executive function etc, they mostly mean help kids develop skills such as motivation, self esteem, perserverance, resilience, empathy, perspective taking, emotional sharing, emotion recognition etc. And these are critical skills that balance their brain, how they deal with life.

And the most important finding or realization for me personally was that such skills can be taught, and they can be taught by teachers and even by parents; and best taught through play, conversation and quality time together. With these skills, I want to raise my kids to be caring, confident and capable.

*Lim is CEO of POVI.

I would love to give you a heads-up that we will be running a Kickstarter campaign on Tue, May 24, 2016. We would greatly appreciate your help to be one of our early backers to make Povi a reality.

You can choose to back our project for your family, a school, your team members at work or even non-profits.

We would greatly appreciate you also sharing this important message with whom you know will benefit from joining our community!

Thank you very much! Do email me at seowlim@povi.me to catch up anytime!

Survey Result Redefines Parents and Children Quality Time

By Mallika Sankaran*

These are the results from our “100 Moms” Survey on Quality-time, Conversation and EQ.
The good news: moms and kids are playing and talking, a lot! Half of the moms surveyed tell us that they spend 2 or more  hours of quality time with their kids every day! Despite the fact that over two-thirds of our sample are moms employed outside the home.

These were parents (mainly moms) from across Facebook’s diverse parenting groups, including our discussion group Emotional Intelligence for Kids, where we asked them questions to help us understand how parents are thinking about developing their childrens’ emotional intelligence. We’ll share the rest of the results with you over the next few weeks.
Moms’ top three choices for ‘quality time’:

• Playing together – 93%
• Chatting with their kids – 87%
• Reading together – 83%

I was very surprised by the amount of quality time reported. 2 or more hours a day, when parents are are busy and stretched, that’s a lot of time. My kids are older now but I tried to think back to when they were younger and how I spent time with them. Our favorite activities were: going to the park (we checked out a lot of parks for the novelty of their play structures!) and reading at bedtime (our favorites were Bernstein Bears, Rainbow Fish and Teddy Bears Picnic.  By the way, the first two were great books for our discussing social-emotional issues. We also did a lot of building together activities. like Lego, race cars and tracks and trains.

For me now, quality time with my 15 year old is mainly chatting in the car, eating dinner or watching TV together. I count TV time as quality-time because we take turns picking the shows and chat while we watch – right now we are watching Season 2 of Gilmore Girls.

Please share with us what you do for quality time, how much quality-time you manage to average per day and give us your suggestions of books and products. More next time!

*Mom, researcher and community builder

I would love to give you a heads-up that we will be running a Kickstarter campaign on Tue, May 24, 2016. We would greatly appreciate your help to be one of our early backers to make Povi a reality.

You can choose to back our project for your family, a school, your team members at work or even non-profits.

We would greatly appreciate you also sharing this important message with whom you know will benefit from joining our community!

Thank you very much! Do email me at mallika@povi.me to catch up anytime!

How Hugging My Kid Helps me to Be Healthier and Happier

Clay art by Lim's Son

By Seow Lim*


Every evening, when I pick up my kid from his after school, he runs towards me, and gives me a big tight hug. “Mommy, I missed you so much.”, he says. It feels so good. It fees like the entire day of tiredness drains away from me, and I have this little guy who is so attached to me. Scientifically, I have learnt that hugging helps release oxytocin (also known as the cuddle hormone), the chemical that’s linked to social bonding, promoting devotion, trust and bonding.

Our hug usually re-energizes me. Instead of drifting back to my problems at work and the tasks I need to complete, I make sure that I focus my thoughts on my boy, making sure that we use our 15-20 minutes ride home as high quality time together. It is usually not easy to tear your mind away from all those complex problems or addictive emails that need to be answered right away, but holding my son’s hands help me focus on him and my conversation with him.

After the big hug, I hold his hand while we walk back to the car. I ask him about his school and his friends. He loves to share his day with me. I also try to find an opportunity to ask him a different question each day, about his thoughts and feelings.  Questions like:
_  “Is there someone in your class whom you see trying hard to do something that seems hard for him/her?”
_ “If you could invent something today, what would you make?”
_ “Have you been left out in any games at school?”

Being 7, he sometimes returns my question: “I don’t know. What do you think?”. That gives me the opportunity to share with him my daily experience and feelings too, letting him see that sometimes things are hard for me as well, and how I also need to try hard to learn or ask for help to solve my problems.

He is a very sweet and empathetic boy. There was once a time when I told him about a difficulty I had met with and that I didn’t know how to solve. He actually said: “Mommy, it’s ok. I am sure you will find a solution. Just keep trying.” After we got out of the car, he gave me another big hug. I had tears in my eyes. My stress level had gone down at that point.

Was it the effect of the hug that activated the Pacinian pressure receptors on my skin, and that sent signals to my vagus nerve, the area of my brain that’s responsible for lowering my blood pressure? Or was it the empathy I had received from this young child of mine? We deliver positive and encouraging messages to our kids, and how nice it is for them to have learnt that and deliver them back to us when we need them the most?

Every night, at bed time routine, my boy holds his hands up and says, “Mommy, you haven’t hugged me yet!” We then hug each other tightly for 30 seconds and he always says, “Mommy, I love you so much.” And I say, “I love you too.” I can always see the big grin he has on his face when he hears me say that, and that’s true happiness!

Once I asked him why he wanted me to hug him every night.“I don’t know, but I think I feel safer if you do.”, he replied. According to research results, children who are frequently hugged grow up to display fewer stress symptoms as adults. That’s a similar effect to kids hugging teddy bears or other plush toys to sooth their fears sometimes.

Our connection continues after the hugs. I often read with him, and I’ve also made a habit of asking him more in-depth questions related to the stories we read. I’ve found out that just reading to him is not enough, I need to encourage him to discuss the perspective of the characters that we read about. That helps him to see the perspective of others, and definitely helps him with expressing and communicating his thoughts more coherently.

For example, when we read a story about a child being left out of a game, I followed-up with questions such as:
“How would you feel if you were that child?” which is  ‘perspective taking’
“What would you do to ask to be included in the game?” which is  ‘problem solving’
“If you were to design a game, what type of game would you design?” which is ‘creativity’.

With my older child, I read many books and focused on reading to increase his vocabulary. Yes, I was a first time mom, a Tiger mom.  However, I’ve learnt that using reading time to connect, communicate, understand each other; and have your child express his feelings and opinions is a lot more important than just building vocabulary. I know now that how I’ve used reading time and bedtime routines differently with my two sons, might have effected their development. They are both great boys, just different.

*Seow Lim is the creator and CEO of Povi. She is also the starter and admin of Emotional Intelligence for Kids Facebook Group.

I would love to give you a heads-up that we will be running a Kickstarter campaign on Tue, May 24, 2016. We would greatly appreciate your help to be one of our early backers to make Povi a reality.

You can choose to back our project for your family, a school, your team members at work or even non-profits.

We would greatly appreciate you also sharing this important message with whom you know will benefit from joining our community!

Thank you very much! Do email me at seowlim@povi.me to catch up anytime!