Perez Halpern - English - January 2020

Help Your Kids Achieve More This Year WITH SIMPLE AND ACTIONABLE GOALS

With every new year comes an opportunity to reinvent ourselves or start down a new path toward self-improvement. Making resolutions is a big part of many families’ New Year’s traditions, and parents often have a desire for their kids to take part in that tradition when they’re old enough. Following through on resolutions is tough, especially for young children, but with your help, they can achieve their goals. PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH. You are your children’s role model for almost everything, including following through on New Year’s resolutions. So, ask yourself if you follow through on your own resolutions. When you proclaim that you will read more books or finally get a gym membership, do you actually try to do it? Your kids will assign as much importance to New Year’s resolutions as you do, so by sticking to your own commitments, you can help them stay on track too. KEEP THINGS SIMPLE AND ACHIEVABLE. When your kids are forming their resolutions, their first attempts will probably be very broad. Statements like “I want to be more kind” or “I will try to help more around the house” incorporate good values but don’t include any actionable steps. Help your kids More About Hugs Text As Meliha shared on the cover, while the occasion can differ depending on your own traditions and the situation, hugging plays an important part in showing loved ones we care. As it turns out, this show of affection also has many other benefits for our well-being. 1. HUGS CAN GIVE YOU A CONFIDENCE BOOST. The act of hugging gets your brain to produce dopamine, one of the chemicals responsible for motivation and feel-good emotions. At the University of North Carolina, researchers looked at how this TITLE

think of tangible ways to act on those goals. For example, if they want to be tidier, a good resolution might be for them to clean their room once a week or take responsibility for one household chore every day. DON’T DO ALL THE WORK FOR THEM. While it’s important for you to help your kids formulate their goals, be sure that you aren’t taking over. If they’re ultimately responsible for their resolutions, they’ll feel more compelled to keep them. Instead, suggest different goal areas they could improve, such as home, school, or sports, and let them elaborate.

When it comes to creating habits, nobody is perfect, so even if your kids falter on their goals in the middle of February, don’t worry. The important thing is that you continue to encourage them every step of the way.

3 FACTS TO HELP YOU EMBRACE NATIONAL HUGGING DAY

2. HUGGING IS HEALTHY. Research from the University of North Carolina also found that hugs ease blood flow and lower cortisol levels. When we hug, our pituitary gland releases oxytocin, leading to those lowered heart rates and, for our emotional center, feelings of contentment. Hugs are also shown to stimulate the thymus gland, a part of the body that regulates our production of white blood cells. 3. WE AREN’T THE ONLY SPECIES THAT HUGS. Monkeys do it, and koalas do it too (at least, they hug trees). Researchers at Florida International University studied hugging in the Colombian spider monkey, a species that, like us, lives in social groups. These monkeys have not one but two ways of embracing, and according to primatologist Filippo Aureli, they use hugging as a form of conflict management to defuse potentially combative situations. Oh, and when we talk about the benefits of hugging, it isn’t only human contact that produces these positive results — hugging your pets can have many of the same benefits! How cute is that?

played out on two groups of couples — one that participated in hugging and one that didn’t — and how they responded to a stressful situation. The couples who spent 20 seconds hugging before the stressful event had lower blood pressure and heart rates than those who had not hugged. The importance of this contact is especially true for children, who rely on physical contact to recognize their parents and carry that imprint through the rest of their lives.

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