Q: Parents, what do you resolve to do in 2011?
Parent resolutions: Put the iPhone down whenever my children are talking to me. Time listening and talking with them is so much more precious than e-mail and Facebook.
-Dawn Lantero
Whatever we eat for dinner, they eat!
—Janet Oak
Back off, butt out and not hover! My relationships with these very wonderful young men mean so much to me, and I am happy to be their mom.
—Marie Grass Amenta
Be more in the moment with my children and less rushing them on to the next activity I have planned for them.
—Colleen Knupp
Expert advice: Remember to have more faith in your child than s/he has. Remember to teach your children that it’s not what you have and what you do, but who you are and how you love that ultimately matters. Remember that children are more likely to grow and change for the better if they know that they’ll be loved and accepted even if they stay the same.
—Brad Sachs, founder and director of The Father Center and author of “Emptying the Nest: Launching Your Young Adult Toward Success and Self-Reliance” (Palgrave Macmillan, $16)
Make the resolution to make time every day to play with your child.
—Erika Carpenter Rich, Los Angeles-based clinical psychologist who runs social-skills workshops for children
There is exactly one thing about which all parents lie: the amount of TV their kids watch. Why? Shame, mostly. When administered properly and in appropriate doses — when you want to bathe, chill, stare at the wall — television can be an ideal youth-distraction tool. And “educational” or not, if you’re even marginally careful about your selection, it’s certainly not going to do any harm. Also, it’s impossible to be in control of something — or teach your kids to be in control of something — with which you have a fraught connection founded on guilt and fabrication. So start the new year right: Make some media consumption rules, stick to them and stop feeling bad about it.
—Brett Berk, early childhood expert who works with the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau on media literacy education programs
Resolve to teach your child to manage frustration more effectively — whether it’s teaching them to sleep through the night without you needing to run in every hour or to be able to deal with a “no” without kicking and screaming, share a toy without having a meltdown, or accept your limits on TV, computer and video games. It may be difficult to enforce limits and boundaries now, but you will be thankful you did when you have a well-behaved, grateful and hardworking teenager and young adult! —Susan S. Bartell, child psychologist and author of “The Top 50 Questions Kids Ask” (Sourcebooks, $10.99)
Resolve to use literacy as one of the ways that you connect with your children during the coming year. That would include parents reading to their children and listening to their kids read, talking to their kids over meals about books, getting the kids to open up about what they are reading. It would include books as gifts for birthdays and holidays. … It would mean occasional special events built around literacy, like trips to the library or a bookstore or setting up a treasure hunt that requires a child to follow the directions to get to the treasure; or maybe a movie or video night to see a film of a book that has been read together. If more parents connected with their kids through literacy, teachers would find it much easier to motivate these kids to read.
—Tim Shanahan, literacy expert and former president of the International Reading Association
