3 Ways to Mentally Prepare Your Kids for the School Year
It may not feel like it yet, but summer is coming to a close, and summer break is ending along with it. Soon, the kids will be back to early-morning breakfasts before the school bus arrives and late-night study sessions. Thankfully, there are some steps your family can take during these closing weeks of summer to ensure your kids hit the ground running this school year. Set an Early Bedtime For many kids, summer schedules are flexible. They may have become accustomed to sleeping in and staying up late without any obligations. Getting back into the rhythm of the school year can take some getting used to. In fact, according to psychologist Cherie Valeithian, it can take upward of two weeks to properly adjust to a new sleep-wake cycle. So why not give your kids a head start and ensure they begin the school year bright-eyed and bushy-tailed? Outline a Homework Schedule Resuming a homework regimen can be a difficult transition for some kids. Late summer, when they don’t have assignments to worry about yet, can be a great opportunity to help them muscles, increasing blood flow and accelerating the healing process while loosening them up. In addition, we can spur a process called cavitation, in which small gas bubbles around key tissues rapidly expand and contract, leading to a speeding up of cellular processes that spur faster healing. Electrical stimulation might sound a little scary, but it’s actually a painless, powerful treatment for muscle spasms and pain. By attaching electrodes to your skin, we can encourage specific muscles to contract, building muscle tone in atrophying muscles and reducing chronic pain over time. Iontophoresis is a specific type of electrical stimulation that uses repellent charges to “push” medicine directly into your injured tissues. This can be used for a wide variety of issues, especially when other modalities don’t work. Each of these are tools in our toolbox — options we can utilize whenever needed to provide a comprehensive plan of treatment for our patients. If you’re curious how these modalities, coupled with an exercise and treatment plan tailored just for you, can help eliminate injury and get you back to doing what you love, call the experts at Achieve PT at (978) 263-0007 today!
prepare a study schedule. Ask the following questions to help them get started: “Do you want to dive right into homework when you get home? Do you need to accommodate for a sport or extracurricular activity? Do you work best when doing your assignments in one large chunk, or would you prefer taking breaks in between assignments?” Your kids may find that last year’s schedule doesn’t work for them this year. Emphasize that this is okay; part of growing up is learning how and when you work most effectively. Don’t be afraid to help them switch things up as the school year progresses. Ask Your Kids How They Feel Maybe your kids are excited about the school year. Maybe they are anxious, or perhaps they’re just disappointed to see summer vacation come to an end. Starting a dialogue about the aspects of school your kids are looking forward to and those they’re dreading can help you dispel myths and identify problem areas. More than anything else, this can help your kids feel at ease about the coming year.
At Achieve PT, we use every technique we have available to steer our patients to success and get them back to playing the sport they love. Aside from flexibility- and strength-building exercises, we employ a number of therapeutic modalities to achieve the best results possible. In moist heat therapy, we apply heat packs directly to damaged areas of the body to relax muscles and provide instant pain relief. The soothing, moist heat allows us to reduce tension in problematic areas and begin treatment the right way. Cold packs , of course, are a trusty tool for treating injuries everywhere. By applying cold to inflamed areas, we force the blood vessels to constrict, reducing the amount of blood that is able to leave the bloodstream, thereby reducing swelling. Therapeutic ultrasound is a modality with a couple of different applications. By emitting ultrasonic frequencies directly to damaged tissues, we can provide deep heating to ligaments and
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