Making Family Time

I Go to Pieces Activity for an individual child Age group: 18-40 months Duration of activity: 45 minutes Materials: Photograph of your child, enlarged to 8" x 10" or larger Poster board cut to same size as photo Clear contact paper Scissors Whit...

Draw all of your family and lots of your friends in this printable picture gallery. ...

The Importance of Rules in Games It's in the Cards A set of rules is a prescribed guide for conduct, telling you how to proceed with your next course of action.Rules, rules, rules! A game is only as good as its rules, and how well we play the ga...

Family Meetings: Spelling Out House Rules and Obligations Household rules—and the consequences of breaking them—should be spelled out clearly. ( Family meetings may be the ideal time to do this.) Writing them out and posting them will avoid ...

10 Things to Avoid When Starting a Craft Project Sometimes the best ways to ensure success is to know the pitfalls beforehand so they can be avoided. Before I tell you some sure-fire ways to make crafting with your kids a joy, let's look at the ...

Making Time for Arts & CraftsYou may be wondering when you're going to do all these arts & crafts when you're running to soccer games, trying to get the laundry done, rushing to finish a project for your boss on time, and struggling to get a mea...

What Should We Play? No matter what game you play, some kids are just not going to get into it. The trick is to start them young and keep the games alive. Try setting up tournaments and championships. Once you get them hooked, they'll come back ...

What Shall We Play? This might be the trickiest part of family game night—unless you've been playing for a while and have established the family favorites. The conflicts will arise if some family members prefer one game to another. There are a...

Start Playing Games at a Young Age The trick to avoiding difficulty with teenagers is to start playing games with them when they are little kids. Keep the lines of communication with them open. Talk and listen when they are little, and never sto...

Be a Winner! There's nothing worse than a sore loser. Sore losers are considered whiners and bad sports. The worst kind of sore loser is one who goes around accusing everyone of cheating because he or she can't face the fact that they might not ...

Living far from family is hard, especially during the holiday season. We may live in locations that are far from where we grew up for various reasons: job opportunities, lifestyle choices, proximity to our partner’s family, or financial reason...

Dare to Play Fair When children play games, squabbles arise over the rules all the time. Depending on the age group, many kids are not likely to read the rules before starting the game. And there's nothing worse than having to break up a fistfig...

Finding Time for Family Fun Finding the time is always hard to do now that families spend so many hours at work or involved with some kind of extracurricular activity. Anyone with a teenager and a phone bill knows that kids that age want to hang...

The Value of Family Routines One of the most valuable things you can do is to provide your children with a stable, nurturing environment. Children like security, and one of the ways they feel secure is to have things they can count on. It's not...

This is a normal, healthy stage in adolescent development, where the child seeks to pull away from her parents. ...

Build Family Ties Through Family Meals Your family identity is enhanced the more you eat meals together. Civilization was built around the dinner table. Breaking bread together, a symbolic international peace-making gesture, has more than just a...

Build Family Identity Through Family Time In Spend Special Time with Your Child, you learned about the importance of special time—one-on-one sessions with each of your kids. It's also vital to spend time together as an entire family to cemen...

Family Meetings How does all this happen? You're leading busy lives—what family isn't? Few of us are used to sitting down together and working on lists of values, rules, and goals. First, don't try to do it all at once! Schedule a few sessions...