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If there’s one thing we learned from COVID, it’s that having staff work from home is a viable option for many businesses, and many employees find themselves navigating a new way of working for the long term. But working at home, whether it’s temporary or permanent, comes with its own set of challenges. Here are some tips to help balance work and home life when you are a work-at-home parent of young children.Working with ToddlersWorking at home seems like a dream. However, add a couple of …

What are you waiting for? It feels like we are waiting for a lot these days. Yet maybe “waiting” isn’t the right term. Maybe we aren’t waiting for the weekend or for the next paycheck or for summer. Maybe we are looking at it the wrong way.  What if instead of waiting, we are living? There are still things going on as we wait for something. When we wait with kids, we try to get them to notice the moment—to sing a song, play a game, be active. Sometimes we …

For over 150 years, the phrase “20/20 vision” has been used to reference visual clarity or acuity. That’s from where the commonly used phrase, “Hindsight is 20/20” comes. And here we are winding down the year 2020, when so much is up in the air, it’s hard to look at this past year and think of anything as particularly clear. But if we look hard enough, we can see that 2020 has provided us with the opportunity to look clearly upon our own lives and self-reflect on things for which we sho …

The world-wide pandemic changed many things in our lives. One of those big changes was school closures which thrust parents into a new role as educator and therapist. This may seem scary and you may want to react in a big way. When you stop to think about it, as a parent you are one of the best possible teachers for your children. Not only do you know them so well but you spend many more hours a day with them. Instead of just thirty minutes of language or social skills practice, with …

When I was 11, I walked over to the corner store to buy a soda. I paid with a twenty-dollar bill, and the guy mistakenly gave me back some ones and a fifty instead of a ten. I ran up to my dad and said, “Guess what? I just got paid to buy a pop! It’s my lucky day!” My dad looked at me surprisingly and said, “You’re keeping it?” I replied, “Heck yeah! He’ll never know.” Then he said, “But you will know. You’ll know today, and tomorrow, and forever. You just sold out your integrity for forty …

It’s heartbreaking to learn your child has been the victim of bullying. No matter how you learned this information, be thankful you have it. We sat down with school counselor Jennifer Licate, author of the new easy-read chapter book He’s Not Just Teasing! and the Navigating Friendships book series, for steps parents can follow when they find out their child is being bullied.Q: After the initial shock of finding out your child is being bullied, what do you suggest a parent sho …

Though the world of education always remains vigilant to the negative effects of bullying on our students, the month of October brings with it a renewed focus on awareness, action, and advocacy. October is National Bullying Prevention Month, a month devoted to prevention, intervention, and spreading awareness. Great strides have been made in our crusade against bullying in schools in recent years, but we still have progress to make. The National Center for Educational Statistics reported i …

When our son was toddler we owned a set of Sesame Street board books. Each one featured a letter of the alphabet, with several verses of a catchy poem highlighting words that began with the featured letter. They were quick, fun reads, and he wanted to read them together. ALL. THE. TIME.What we weren’t consciously aware of at the time, was just how much he was comprehending from the stories. That is until we were hanging out with some friends who had two children a bit older than our then-18 …

As we enter into the 2020-2021 school year, a sense of unease, of uncertainty, hangs above students, parents, and educators alike. For most educators and support staff, it is like their first year all over again. There are new rules, new procedures, and new methods of delivery. It is an altogether new normal, if it can be called that at all. With all of these changes comes anxiety, not only from the rapid acquisition of new methods of instruction, but from the floating fear of the unkno …

Our ability to socialize and work with others in a group to accomplish common goals and succeed together is one of the best abilities we have as a community. But at times, our social nature works against us, and we confuse the suggestions of others for things we need to do to fit in or feel accepted. Peer pressure seems to plague every generation. Why do kids try to influence each other to do things that might negatively impact them? Why do kids listen to their peers instead of th …