Showing posts with label Quality Fathering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Quality Fathering. Show all posts

Monday, May 17, 2010

Dad: YOU Can Keep Your Teen From Smoking

Quality fathering kept teens from smoking

Everyone says establish your relationship with the kids when they're little if you want to have an easier time managing them when they're older, right?

Well here's a new study from England's Cardiff University School of Medicine that documents an example.

According to this three year study, it was their father's influence (or lack thereof), more than any other factor, that tipped the scales toward smoking or non-smoking for teenagers.

Communicative Fathers Help Reduce Teenage Smoking...

Monday, May 10, 2010

It's Cinnamon Toast Time!

Cinnamon sugar recipe
Cinnamon sugar sprinkled on toast is a fantastic way to sugar-up the kids' morning (yours too)!

All you need is refined sugar and loads of cinnamon.

Place the sugar in your container.  Dump in a lot of cinnamon - really - you'll need quite a bit, but don't go totally overboard because too much and it'll taste too "spicy". 

Use a small whisk or spoon to stir the b'jesus out of it.

Add the concoction to buttered toast.  The cinnamon/sugar will absorb the butter and turn dark. 

The cinnamon/sugar/butter blend will also stiffen the toast a bit and make it easier to use your .

Yum!



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Monday, May 3, 2010

Dad Is Primarily Responsible For Child's Confidence Building Exploratory Behavior


Here's a new study from the University of Montreal that examines 'activation theory' as a complement to the well known 'attachment theory'.

Activation theory examines parental influence on a child's exploratory behavior and defines an optimally stimulated child as one that is exploratory yet respective of rules.  According to the theory, optimally stimulated children are more self confident.

The author of the study suggests that fathers are largely responsible for activating a child's exploratory behavior while mothers are usually greater contributors to a child's feeling of attachment and that both of these phenomenon complement one another in a well developed child.

Monday, April 12, 2010

New Study: Negative Short Term Video Game Effect on Children

Video games have negative effect, says study
New study out last month about the short term effects of video games on children's writing, reading and learning skills.

The study examined a group of 6-9 year-olds both before, and then 4-months after, receiving a video game device and three age appropriate games.

According to the author of which appeared in a journal of the Association for Psychological Science,

"boys who received the video-game system at the beginning of the study had significantly lower reading and writing scores four months later compared with the boys [who did not]. Although there were no differences in parent-reported behavioral problems between the two groups of kids, the boys who received the video-game system immediately had greater teacher-reported learning problems."

Monday, March 29, 2010

Balance Important For Your Child's Mental Health

balancing skill important for your child's mental health
Yes it's true.... sillyDaddy fractured his toe recently while running from the children on top of the couches in the family room....

While my balance may be in question, eM and I have encouraged the kids' balancing skills to build their coordination, strength and esteem - and all our friends just thought we were careless parents.

We've let them climb and move through their home, let them problem solve about how to get around or over obstacles and even allowed them to stumble occasionally in our safe, child proofed environment.

So far they've come through in much better shape than I have.

I reached back into my sillyDaddy archive to find this article that made an impression on me from early last year.  Published in Research and Developmental Disabilities journal, the study found that "all [children] with balance problems do exhibit symptoms of anxiety, pointing to a link between the two conditions."

According to the research, children in the study, five to seven year olds with an anxiety diagnosis, went through a 12-week sensory-motor intervention in which, "the children use equipment to experience their environment and move in space."  Their balance improved, anxiety was reduced to normal levels and their self-esteem increased.
Improve Balance, Relieve Childhood Anxiety

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Quality Fathering Boosts Your Child's IQ

While I was posting about the research released last week concerning , I was reminded of another article in the sillyDaddy archive.Boost your child's IQ simply by doing your fatherly duty

The research (pasted below) released at the end of 2008 found that an involved dad boosts a child's IQ in a significant way!

The author, a psychologist at the University of Newcastle (where they also happen to make a lovely brown ale....bada bing) writes, "This is not half a point, this is a few points of IQ, on average."

The research was based on surveys of more than 10,000 children completed over more than 50 years and was published in the journal of Evolution and Human Behavior.

 Time with dad is time well spent
   by Ewen Callaway

When picking out that perfect Father's Day gift next year, sons and daughters might want to look to their own accomplishments before deciding between a gaudy polyester tie or splurging on a new set of golf clubs.

The more effort a father invests in his children, the smarter they are as kids and more successful as adults, new research shows. And highly educated fathers make even more of a difference than less educated dads, all things being equal.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

You Are The Main Factor That Influence's Your Child's Pursuit Of A Tech Career!

Encourage your girl geek
Interesting study results out of Michigan State earlier this week about factors that lead children to pursue science or technology careers.

Key findings from this study, which followed 6000 students from middle school to college, include:
  1. The main contributor to a child's decision to pursue science/tech is parental influence.
  2. Success in math classes turns out to be more significant a factor than success in science classes.
  3. Sons are encouraged to pursue math classes more than daughters, which reinforces my previous call for all dad's to encourage their .
Parents Still Major Influence on Child’s Decision to Pursue Science Careers

Monday, February 22, 2010

DIY Teddy Bear and Deranged Kitty Birthday Cakes

DIY teddy bear birthday cake
sillyDaddy loves to build interesting cakes. I don't so much like the baking of them but I surely do like the building of them.

eM and I teamed up to make teddy bear cakes for a combined bday party for J and D.  She did the baking and I did the building.

This one was, well, a piece of cake compared to the I wrote about earlier and a cool dragon cake I made but haven't posted yet.

One major lesson learned from those past experiences is that applying icing to a cut cake is really tough. This time around I picked up a mini cupcake pan and small round cake pans at the local craft store to avoid icing over cut cake as much as possible.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Snow Carvings

Vitamin D production extremely important to your child's health
Before we lose all of this glorious snow, be sure to carve a few runs for the kids!

And while you're designing your fortress, keep vitamin D production in mind.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

An Approach To Managing Behavior

This piece from the sillyDaddy archive was written by a pediatrician and published in the opinion pages of the NY Times last year.Children, and those who interact with them, suffer if they're not taught social skills

The author describes the approach as respectful of a child's "intellectual and emotional privacy" and writes,  "I’m not telling you to like your teacher; I’m telling you to treat her with courtesy. I’m not telling you that you can’t hate Tommy; I’m telling you that you can’t hit Tommy. Your feelings are your own private business; your behavior is public."

Making Room for Miss Manners Is a Parenting Basic

By PERRI KLASS, M.D.
Published: January 12, 2009
NY Times


For years, I took care of a very rude child. When he was 3, I called him rambunctious — and I talked to his mother about “setting limits.” At 4, I called him “demanding.” At 5, he was still screaming at his mother if she didn’t do what he wanted, he still swatted me whenever I tried to examine him, and his mother asked me worriedly if I thought he was ready for kindergarten.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

DIY Pine Cone Bird Feeders!

DIY Pine cone bird feeders
Ahhhh the classic pine cone bird feeder.

Four simple ingredients, pine cones, peanut butter, bird seed and twine.

This one's messy so have the paper towels ready.

First, tie the twine good and tight around the pine cone.

Next, slather peanut butter all over.

Finally, hand off the buttered pine cones to your helpers so they can roll them in birdseed.

DIY Pine cone bird feedersDIY Pine cone bird feeders

Interestingly, our smaller birds didn't seem to know what to do with these but our neighborhood woodpeckers showed up right away (click on either image to see a female downy woodpecker)

And as expected, the squirrels took several of them right away -


SQUIIIIIIIIIRRELS!



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Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Fight The Female-Teacher-Effect!

Dads, work now to counteract the newly documented female-teacher-effect so that your geek girl can flourish.

A University of Chicago study released today (pasted below), follows other research released earlier this month that found .

The author of the earlier Villanova study says,  "Girls are likely to perform as well as boys when they are encouraged to succeed."

If you're able to successfully counterbalance the math-challenged sisterhood teaching her, then you're also going to need these .

Believing Stereotype Undermines Girls' Math Performance: Elementary School Women Teachers Transfer Their Fear of Doing Math to Girls, Study Finds

ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2010) — Female elementary school teachers who are anxious about math pass on to female students the stereotype that boys, not girls, are good at math. Girls who endorse this belief then do worse at math, research at the University of Chicago shows.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Use Cookie Cutters For Toast, Pizza!

Use cookie cutters for morning toast

TIP: Use your holiday cookie cutters for toast and pizza!  In fact, I use non-seasonal cutters all year round!

The best selection of non-seasonal cutters can be found at AC Moore.  Last time I checked, Target had a limited selection and Michael's had squat.

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Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Communication and Discipline

Create a plan for communication and discipline with your children
J & D are really good kids.  And eM and I recognize that a lot of that comes from them.  But we do however give ourselves credit for planning the ways in which we communicate with them and discipline them.

So it's probably no surprise that we're fans of the show Super Nanny.  I found an article on the show's official site that really captured our current communication/discipline processes and gave us a few new ideas.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Children and Marital Happiness

Children and marital happiness
This op-ed piece points to research that challenges both the conventional wisdom that marital satisfaction increases after children arrive and the research that suggests that all marriages experience a decline in happiness after children arrive.   I've highlighted some of the key points.

What are your thoughts?  Please add them to the comments.

By STEPHANIE COONTZ, NY Times
Olympia, Wash.

HALF a century ago, the conventional wisdom was that having a child was the surest way to build a happy marriage. Women’s magazines of that era promised that almost any marital problem could be resolved by embarking on parenthood. Once a child arrives, “we don’t worry about this couple any more,” an editor at Better Homes and Gardens enthused in 1944. “There are three in that family now. ... Perhaps there is not much more needed in a recipe for happiness.”

Over the past two decades, however, many researchers have concluded that three’s a crowd when it comes to marital satisfaction. More than 25 separate studies have established that marital quality drops, often quite steeply, after the transition to parenthood. And forget the “empty nest” syndrome: when the children leave home, couples report an increase in marital happiness.

But does the arrival of children doom couples to a less satisfying marriage? Not necessarily. Two researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, Philip and Carolyn Cowan, report in a forthcoming briefing paper for the Council on Contemporary Families that most studies finding a large drop in marital quality after childbirth do not consider the very different routes that couples travel toward parenthood.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Make DIY Mummy Dogs The Next Time You Pull Dinner Duty

DIY mummy hot dogs
Ariel the Mermaid and her brother
at her preschool Halloween parade


I made these MILF's (Mummies I'd Like to Feast upon) for J and D's Halloween dinner.  Everyone was pretty pleased and so I've definitely added them to the small but popular sillyDaddy dinner repertoire!

DIY mummy hot dogs
Here's what you'll need to make your very own mummy dogs:
  • Pillsbury Crescent Dough
  • Pack of hotdogs
  • Mustard
  • Cheese
  • Rolling pin and flour (for the rolling pin and your rolling surface)

Monday, October 26, 2009

Carve A Cool Jack-O-Lantern This Year - It's easier than you think!

DIY Jack-O-Lanterns
I always wanted to have a go at making a jack-o-lantern with a fancy pattern.  J was old enough to enjoy it this year so we gave it a try.  Turned out pretty well (see pic above), it wasn't as tough as I thought it would be and there’s still time for you to do the same this year!

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Introduce The Kids To Classical Music With These High Energy Baroque Tunes!

sillyDaddy loves him some Baroque!

J and D throw a nightly dance party in the living room and they love to bust out moves to either classic rock, childrens' tunes or, you guessed it, fast paced Baroque.

DIY Classical music for kids
Early Baroque Hottie
In sillyDaddy's humble opinion the Baroque and Classical are two of the most enjoyable of all the .  Sure, they all have good stuff to offer but generally I find the Renaissance/Medieval periods and earlier to be a bit too druid; the Romantic and later - a bit too schmaltzy.

Listening to baroque even produces a documented .  Granted, you have to occasionally suffer a little harpsichord but hey, it's all good.

Tip: choose "allegro" movements which have lots of energy if you want your kids to dig it.

Don't know where to start?  sillyDaddy can help...

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Do Your Children Push The Boundaries? It May Be A Sign Of Future Leadership Abilities

Children pushing boundaries a sign of future leadership skill
Your last nerve.
Kids plucking your last nerve?

Considering the "I have to run down to the 7-11 for cigarettes" ploy, never to return, even though you don't smoke?

Well check out this article published today in ScienceDaily - your little envelope pusher may be the!




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Monday, September 28, 2009

Make A Batch Of Bugs!

I'll show you how to make a cool batch of lady bugs and butterflies – and I’ll tell you the secret that the pastry chef fascists don’t want you to know!  (what…too much?)

DIY cupcake bugs