Cultivating Focus and Concentration:
Promoting Mindfulness:
Enhancing Communication and Non-Verbal Skills:
Encouraging Sportsmanship and Fair Play:
Building Resilience and Handling Failure:
Silent Ball may appear to be a simple game, but it holds immense value when it comes to engaging with children and imparting important life lessons. From fostering concentration and mindfulness to promoting communication and fair play, this game provides an avenue for children to learn and grow in various aspects of their lives. So, the next time you find yourself looking for an activity that combines fun, learning, and development, consider the magic of Silent Ball – you might be surprised by the profound impact it can have on the young minds it touches.
** Recommendation: Create a clear set of guidelines for your Silent Ball sessions and ensure their adherence. Here are some suggested rules I employ: remain seated throughout, refrain from pegging the ball while throwing, avoid disputing with the referee, maintain silence, maintain eye contact with the recipient when throwing, throw the ball directly to the person without requiring them to leave their seat, and exhibit good sportsmanship by refraining from crying or throwing temper tantrums upon elimination. Failure to comply with these rules may result in being eliminated from the current or subsequent games.
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Resilience is considered by many to be the most important quality one needs to lead a happy life and achieve one’s own set goals. Resilience is defined as “capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties”. There are 4 types of resilience. Psychological Resilience is having the ability to motivate yourself. Social Resilience is your ability to reach out to others for help. Physical resilience is the ability to overcome physical challenge. And lastly Emotional Resilience which refers to your ability to conjure positive emotions when going to a struggle or trying time. In this article we will be focusing on Emotional Resilience, so when resilience is mentioned, it is emotional resilience which is being referred to. Why do some have resilience and others do not? How can some develop resilience in childhood but others who are well into adulthood, have yet to develop this needed quality? Can one develop resilience in adulthood? Why do some children have resilience in some areas, but in other areas/tasks, they lack resilience. As a Public School Teacher I have studied students, these questions puzzled me and led to search for answers. See below articles I have found very useful in my search for knowledge, answers, and solutions to instill resilience in our children at very early ages.
I found that one can be resilient in specific tasks, and not resilient at different tasks. While others can be resilient in all tasks. In my observation in the classroom, I noticed that resilience is tied to an optimistic attitude. How one feels about themselves and their ability in a task or behavior, is directly tied to their resiliency. I observed that what a child believes they are capable of, will determine their resilience and their successfulness in eventually completing the task or achieving the goal. Their thoughts, about themselves and their internal self-talk, is a larger factor in their resiliency. If a child believes they can learn something, or complete a task or achieve a goal, they will be resilient. If a child believes they can not do something, that they are not good at something, that a task or goal is impossible, they will quit trying much earlier, and tell themselves that they are not good at it. This internal conversation is now setting the stage for them having low resilience; they are permanently quitting the task or goal, with the negative belief that it is impossible to achieve.
So, resiliency is tied to attitude. If one has a positive, optimistic attitude there is a better chance they will be resilient in all tasks. If one has a negative attitude, they will most likely not be resilient in all tasks. As parents we want our children to be resilient. We want them to be optimistic that they can achieve anything if they just keep trying if they just stay resilient. We want them to grow up believing that anything and everything is possible. We want them to deeply believe that they can achieve anything, if they stay focused, positive, and resilient.
Why is resilience in children important? Studies have shown that children with higher resilience have fewer mental health problems. Children with low resilience suffer more from stress, anxiety, and depression. Low resilience can make one more susceptible to stress, which in turn can lead to health problems such as exhaustion, lowered immunity, cognitive impairment, diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure. Children who are low in resilience often have low-self esteem and fall more easily to peer pressure because their need for belonging is greater. Children and adults with low resilience often report being unhappy and unsatisfied with themselves and their abilities; they exhibit less optimism compared to high resilience children and adults.
If you are a parent, who dreams of your child growing up and living a happy and fulfilled life; you need to raise their emotional resilience and create in them an optimistic mindset. If you want your children to set goals, and work towards those goals with a strong belief that they can achieve them, you need to raise their emotional resilience and create in them an optimistic mindset. If you want your child to live a better quality of life than you had, you need to raise their emotional resilience and create in them an optimistic mindset. If you want your child to avoid teenage problems such as alcohol, sex, and drugs, you need to raise their emotional resilience and create in them an optimistic mindset.
The easiest way to instill resilience and a positive mindset is to instill these qualities early in life. From birth to about 8 years old, children’s mindset and beliefs about themselves, their lives, and their family are just developing. They are absorbing information from all around them. Every experience they have, teaches them a lesson, and neural connections are being made. The more repeated the experience, or the more similar the experiences, or the more similar the lessons from the experiences, the more the thought will become a permanent mindset belief. Mindsets are not inherited. If children have a similar mindset to their parents, it is because parents exposed them to similar experiences that led them to grow to believe what their parents believe and react as their parents react. John Anderson says “We catch our Mindset from the sum total of our lived experiences”. So as parents, grandparents, and family members, we are helping our beloved children catch mindsets, by the things we say, the experiences we give them, and the reactions and words we use to respond to them. The more repeated, similar the experiences, the better chance the belief will become part of their mindset.
Some simple things we can do to raise our children to have high resilience:
https://www.metropediatrics.com/well-child-visits/resilience-in-child-development/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8870128/
https://www.firstfiveyears.org.au/child-development/why-childrens-mindset-matters
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/17/03/growth-mindset-and-childrens-health
https://www.betterup.com/blog/effects-of-low-resilience
https://mindfulbydesign.com/youre-not-born-with-a-mindset-you-catch-it/
]]>In 2006, psychologist Carol Dweck wrote a book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. In it she talked about how a person’s mindset effected how they learned, how they processed information, and what that meant to their success in school, business, and even life itself. It became a popular theory used by many schools and educators to inform how they teach students.
Dweck considered mindset to be a self-perception or “self-theory” that people, especially children, have about themselves. Often, a student will consider themself “intelligent” or “unintelligent” and learn or act based on that assumption. They may even have the mindset that they are a good or bad person. Dweck’s premise was that people may or may not be aware of their mindsets, but it can have a strong effect on how they learn or acquire skills, there personal relationships, and their professional success.
She wrote about the Fixed and the Growth Mindsets. When we have a fixed mindset, we have a belief or set of beliefs that stop us from succeeding at a specific set of tasks. For example, when a student believes they are no good at math, they don’t believe they can ever be good at it, and they stop trying. They don’t believe in the concept of…YET.
When they have a growth mindset, even if math doesn’t come easily to them, they say, I am not good at math…YET! But I can be.
When I created Wishing Pixies, I had the YET in mind. I saw that many parents, like myself, needed some help to teach their children about the YET. Sometimes, the parents themselves didn’t believe that there was a yet in some aspects of their own life. They had the wrong mindset and were frustrated when they could not convey simple principles to their children. Be kind. Be thoughtful. Be considerate of others, your siblings, grandparents, teachers, your own parents.
Believe in yourself.
Young children are pliable. They can be molded and taught to learn and grow. They can learn that they are limitless and that something they are not good at in the present moment can be worked on. Skills of every nature can improve.
Athletes know this fact. They train at their sport or skill every day. Musicians, artists, craftsman, learn to improve their skills. Education is on ongoing thing. No one is good at everything, but anyone can get better at just about everything.
Wishing Pixies gives parents a chance to instill good behavior, positivity, and a growth mindset in their children by teaching them these things from the point of view of a Pixie Doll, a friend they love, trust, and learn to nurture. The Pixies need the children. They learn kindness and responsibility. Parents learn to communicate with their children in a different and fun way. It could be as simple as brush your teeth or eat your broccoli to as complicated as learning that every failure makes room for a learning lesson, that grit and determination gets you through things, and that there is always a YET.
No one is perfect. Not parents, not children. And everyone has many “yets” in their lives. We can all improve every day. We can learn new things. We can grow more confident, smarter, kinder, better at tasks, even happier.
Sometimes we just need a little Pixie Dust.
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Today’s children are often considered to be more pampered than in the past. Schools encourage teachers to make every child feel successful. Gold stars all the way around. Encouragement is great, but not every student can be an honors student. Not everyone gets a part in the school play or makes the sports team. Children need to learn that life will have disappointments, but you can move past those little losses and even the big ones. It requires resilience and grit to work harder for the A in math, the position on the team, the first chair in the orchestra.
The world is moving fast. Technology, medicine, so many factors are making life easier for all of us, our kids included. There are tons of new methods for learning self-awareness, mindfulness, and self-care that are being introduced in schools and in the home. Yet, today’s children seem to have less and less tolerance for basic life issues and are more and more negative, often suffering anxiety and depression. Teen suicide rates are continually on the rise. It seems with all this positive reinforcement our culture is somehow discouraging resilience.
The world has gotten smaller in a sense. Social media and the news show us all the terrible things that are happening making the world seem scary and daunting. This overload of negativity is creating the false belief inside children that the world is evil. Over time, their young, formidable minds are being wired towards negativity and hopelessness, victimhood.
Today’s children, and even adults, are told that if something does not feel comfortable or nice, it must be bad. We are supposed to constantly be happy, and our lives should be always perfect. This sets unrealistic expectations for children. When the slightest thing doesn’t go their way, they are confused and have difficulty coping.
We give too much power to feelings of:
These ideas lead to people who grow up unable to experience and survive any kind of hardship, tragedy, or pain without anxiety and stress. It lends to the belief that we are powerless; we grow a victim mentality and develop a mental file full of excuses.
We need to learn that our feelings derive from our thoughts. If we can learn to control our thoughts, choose our thoughts, and become the master of our thoughts, we will no longer experience those feelings. We will become powerful over the only thing in life we can control, our thoughts, and our feelings.
Young people need to learn to believe in themselves, in their innate ability to weather the storms life brings with their own natural resilience. Human beings have a certain amount of resilience built into their DNA. We have the fight or flight instincts we were born with and also the will to live and survive in nearly all of us. Young people need to learn that failures are opportunities to learn and grow, and solutions are everywhere, if we are looking for them.
When we don’t teach resilience, we open our children up to a resistance to life’s hardships, unable to withstand ups and downs, and without the internal resources to cope with life.
So, how do we, as parents, correct this behavior?
We start by teaching children that uncomfortable feelings don’t have to be scary or bad, that in time, all things pass, and healing happens. Bad experiences, failures, and disappointments teach us things. Teach them skills that can help them reduce the feelings of unhappiness, anxiety, and stress; skills like practicing gratitude throughout the day, meditation, and yoga. These new activities will benefit your children in many ways. For building resilience, practicing gratitude will wire their minds to focus on the good things in life, and meditation and yoga will help them develop thought focus and self-control.
When your children are suffering a disappointment or difficulty, here are some things you can say:
Practice your responses. Be prepared. To help parents like yourself, I created Wishing Pixies. Parents find it much easier to talk to their children through the app as if they are the Pixie Doll. It makes communication easier for the parent, and more fun for the child. Wishing Pixies removes the awkwardness and discomfort a lot of parents of young children feel when trying to steer the behaviors and beliefs of their offspring.
Wishing Pixies is the only Mobile App that is accompanied by a physical doll. We combine technology with the real world and help parents teach good behavior and form good habits that can sustain through childhood into adulthood. It’s easy and fun.
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