Is a family business right for you special needs teen

Should your teen get a job? Perhaps. If you have the perfect situation and your teen is excited about the opportunity, then go for it. You know your child better than anyone, and many special needs teens do very well working for others.

However, if you are uneasy about sending your teen off to a job, then have you considered the possibility of starting a home business with your teen?

Think about it. You and your teen can work together. You can help him or her to learn about responsibility, customer service, sales, marketing and book keeping.

Here are some ideas to consider:

1. Pet Sitting or Grooming. If your teen loves animals (and doesn’t have allergies), pet sitting can be the perfect way for your teen to make money and build self-esteem in the process. The only critical thing here is that you have to make sure they are meeting their appointments. Depending on your teen’s level of responsibility, you may be driving and, possibly going with them. An alternative, of course, is to bring the pet to your home, if that’s an option.

2. Yard work. Raking, weeding, spreading mulch. All of these things can pay quite well for a teen. In fact, your teen could easily make more money per hour than many of his classmates who have regular hourly jobs.

3. Pooper scooper. Yes, you read that right. Yards get messy. People are busy. It’s a perfect fit. It’s not the most pleasant work, but, it is work that you can do on your own schedule. It’s flexible and it pays well.

4. Elderly care. Stop by once a day, to bring in their paper, take out their garbage, and check in.

These are just a few of the many ways you and your teen can build a business together. Please, if your teen can not function in a fast paced job like McDonalds or a Movie Theater, then don’t force it. There are ways to help your child to learn the skills needed to become an entrepreneur instead.

When your child is old enough to be sleeping through the night

All The Sleeping Mistakes I’ve Made with My Children…

I have three children, so I’ve made pretty much every mistake known to Mommies, except the fatal ones, as luckily, all three of mine are alive and well. But the biggest mistakes I’ve made have been in my daughter’s sleeping, or lack thereof, habits. So, let me tell you my story, and hopefully you won’t be destined to make the same mistakes I have.

First, when she was very tiny, I let her fall asleep in bed with my husband and me. I was nursing at first, and it was just easier to nurse her lying down and let her fall asleep. Then I would move her to her bassinet. Later in the night, when I nursed her again, sometimes I would fall asleep so quickly after nursing her, that I wouldn’t even move her back to the bassinet. She would just sleep with us for the rest of the night.

Later, when I had moved her into her crib in the nursery, I would still let her fall asleep in our bed first. I did this because I enjoyed it, it was convenient, and because she didn’t fall asleep easily in her room. And, I managed, in the process, to teach my daughter that she needed to be in the room with someone in order to fall asleep. So, guess what happened when she woke up in the middle of the night? She wanted to come back to our bed to fall asleep. And, worse, we gave in. Then we found that she was sometimes willing to go back to sleep in her bed if we gave her a cup of milk, so she began to require a cup of milk every morning at 3:00 am, long after she should have been sleeping through the night. She is now 2 Ѕ and only in the last month have we managed to go from 9:00 pm until 6:00am with our daughter in her own bed with no milk.

So, why didn’t I make any of these mistakes with the other children? Well, they were just different. They were sleepers, and my daughter is not. Both of my boys can fall asleep within five minutes of climbing in bed, and could sleep through and explosion. My six year old used to ask to take a nap. My daughter, on the other hand, doesn’t need as much sleep, and doesn’t sleep as soundly. So, I had more trouble getting her to sleep, and gave in to any tactic that worked. With the boys, all I had to do was put them in bed.

Now, I’ve told you this story to point out that we all make mistakes with our children, and to point out how important it is to start your child out with the right sleeping habits. I didn’t sleep through the night for almost 2 Ѕ years, and I have no one to blame but myself. So, take it from someone who has learned the hard way. Put your baby to sleep in her own bed, and teach her to fall asleep all by herself. You’ll be glad you did. And, you’ll be rested.

Meet the twixters

There is a new stage of development for parents to consider.

The stages of development are roughly the following: children move from infancy, to early childhood and onwards to middle childhood. These stages take roughly the first ten or so years of life. Our children then move into a long stage known as adolescence (with a number three sub-stages) that is a transition phase into adulthood. That’s it, right?

No, it seems that we have another phase that links adolescence with adulthood. The twenty-first birthday used to signify a move into adulthood and all its accompanying privileges and responsibilities. Now the years from 18 until 25 and beyond seem to have become a distinct stage of life, where young people seem to have lodged for a while, staving off the responsibilities of full adulthood. This phase has been dubbed the Twixter stage.

This group has been on the radar for some years but it seems only now that they are reaching significant status of a sub-culture. They have been variously dubbed ‘permakids’, ‘boomerang kids’ and ‘adultescence’. Their babyboomer parents don’t want to grow old – they don’t want to grow up.

Twixters have put many of the traditional markers of adulthood on hold – home ownership, marriage and children, if they have them, have been delayed until well into their 30’s. Entering the workforce later than previous generations and knowing they will live into their eighties this group has plenty of time to play.

This group can afford to take their time to grow up as they have the luxury of having relatively affluent, cashed-up parents who act as a safety net or a financial back-up in times of need. Oh, and a large number of them still live at home.

It is not as if living at home presents any significant hardship to Twixters. Both parents and twixters hold each other in high regard and maybe both groups gain significant benefits from living with each other longer, rather than having young people flee the nest at the first opportunity.

A recent US Gallup poll found that 90 per cent of young people report being very close to their parents, which contrasts with 40 per cent of babyboomers in 1974 who said that they would be better off without their parents. Twixters and their parents get on with each other.

If young people are delaying partnering and beginning their own families then they are seeking and support networks elsewhere. This is where friends and family of origin play an important role.

Twixters have a special gift for friendships and their culture revolves around strong friendship groups. The American sitcom Friends and its Australian counterpart The Secret Life of Us! showed how friends are a type of surrogate family for twentysomethings – where you go to for emotional support and acceptance.

The point is Twixters will not go away. Biologically, it seems that the human brain is still developing well into the 20’s so a young person’s neurological development at 18 is still a many years from being complete.

There is little doubt that adulthood is delayed in a communal sense. One survey recently found that most people believe that the transition to adulthood should be completed by the age of 26, on average and the number is going up.

So, if your eldest is a toddler then you had better make sure you get on because he or she will be around for a couple of decades yet. It may be a scary thought! It certainly challenges us all to rethink the way we parent young people, rethink the notion of adolescence itself and its transitions and rethink how we organise our personal lives to accommodate the demands of these Peter Pans.

For more great ideas from Michael Grose to help you raise confident kids and resilient young people subscribe to Happy Kids, his fortnightly email newsletter. Just visit parentingideas. com. au and subscribe. Receive a free report on Seven ways to beat sibling rivalry in your email box when you subscribe

Michael Grose © parentingideas. com. au

Helping parents keep kids safe on the internet

Are your kids safe online? If you think they are, you may want to think again.

Recent studies reveal some shocking statistics. One in five young Internet users received an online sexual solicitation during a one-year period; and almost one in three gave out their home address.

Like most parents, you probably want to protect your children, but feel you lack the technical savvy to take action.

Fortunately, a group of companies and organizations has joined forces to form the Internet Keep Safe Coalition and a website, iKeepSafe. org.

At iKeepSafe. org, parents can access a free tool that guides them through the 10 technical actions they must take to protect their children online.

Developed in partnership with Internet security leader Symantec, the tutorial covers everything from filters and fraud, to safe surfing and searching, as well as how to track and monitor a child's Internet usage.

The iKeepSafe. org website includes a list of safety tips for kids, plus animated videos and games with safety information.

It also offers these helpful tips for parents:

• Keep the computer in a common room in the house and position the monitor so it's available for public viewing.

• Establish rules for using the Internet and teach children important safety guidelines.

• Use blocking software or filtering programs, but don't rely on them as your only line of defense.

• Teach children that people online are not always who they say they are.

• Frequently check the Internet history to see which sites your children are visiting.

• Monitor your children's e-mail account. Let them know you're doing it and why.

• Spend time with your children online. Have them show you their favorite sites.

• If you see anything suspicious or think your child may be a victim of Internet exploitation, call the police, the FBI or the National Center for Missing Children at (800) 843-5678.

Back when i was a kid

We must eliminate from our minds a few phrases when we are making decisions about how we will be raising our kids. They are the sayings like: "When I was a kid..." and "If I had done that when I was a kid, my dad would have..." or "Back when we were in school they used to..."

Now, this may sound odd to you coming on the heels of our last article where we took the stand that as a nation, we need to "recapture the sound of our kids among us just like we used to up at old Fairview Hall." There is an important distinction here. As parents we must never allow ourselves to fall into the trap of using "because it was done before," or "it has always been that way," or "that was the way my parents did it," as the sole justification for our actions with our kids. It is imperative that we have a sound behavioral, moral, spiritual, ethical, or legal justifications for the actions we are teaching to or demanding of our children. We must be able to explain to our kids in a very logical way, why we are asking them to behave in a particular manner. In essence, we must not only decide: 1) WHAT it is that we want our kids to do but we must also decide, 2) WHY we want them to do it! "Because it was done to me," is never a good enough reason to repeat it with our children.

There have been a ton of mistakes made in the past and we are doomed to repeat them if we are not careful to think long and hard about the justification for duplicating those actions with our kids. Following are a couple examples to demonstrate what we are talking about.

Two historical events demonstrate the obvious problems with doing what has always been done before. Slavery was common in early America. We certainly would not advocate the continuation of that practice today simply because it was done before. Neither would we teach our children that women should

be second-class citizens in the United States even though they were not even legally recognized under the Constitution until the 19th Amendment was adopted in the early 20th century. Simply saying that women should not vote only because they never had in the past was a ludicrous idea.

Likewise, it is foolish for us to tell our children that they should wear certain types of clothing simply because that has been an appropriate style in the past. The same goes for hairstyles and many other standards and customs for behavior. Let's look at establishing dress codes for kids.

We are not proposing abandoning all standards of dress for young people but rather, we are saying that we ought to make the standards logical and explainable in a reasoned sort of way and not just on the "If I had dressed that way my Dad would have killed me," sort of an explanation.

We can have dress codes... but why do we have them is the critical question. Nobody, in their right mind would say that we scrap any sense of awareness of how our kids dress themselves. However, dressing in a certain way because a previous generation did is rather silly to impose upon our kids (unless, of course, we would like to go back and begin dressing like our forefathers who wrote that Constitution did, simply because "that's the way they used to do it in this country.") Hey, let's get a few pictures of ourselves as teens and we can readily see that even we had some rather strange ways of dressing by today's standards.

The issue is "why?" Why are we asking our kids to dress in certain ways?

Here is a possible discussion:

"But Dad, why can't I dye my hair blue (wear spandex shorts to church, wear this provocative Jennifer Lopez top, use four letter words at the mall like the other kids, etc.)?"

"Well, my child, you probably could do that and in a perfect world it really wouldn't matter. But, we do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world that has a few flaws: one of them being that most people in this world make a ton of snap judgments based upon some rather narrow preconceived ideas. It is a fact that most of the people you meet will not be able to see beyond the blue hair (or loud dress, etc.) to get to know you. Many of those same people are in a position to control the circumstances of your life or pass judgments about you that have a huge impact upon your life. For the same reason that it would be a bad idea to wear a ball cap to a funeral, it is a bad idea to dye your hair blue... most people would interpret it wrongly. A ball cap at a funeral would be viewed by most as being extremely disrespectful of the person being honored by the funeral. Blue hair would likewise be interpreted by most people as a sign of disrespect for others."

"But dad, that's just the point, I'm trying to show my individuality. I don't want to just be like everyone else."

"Great son, I am all in favor of you being a one-of-a-kind individual, but anyone can dye their hair. Why not distinguish yourself by being truly excellent at something? Or why not try to undo some terrible wrong done by society? Why not distinguish yourself by making the world a better place? I'd love to help you. What is the cause that you would like to choose? If the only way that you can come up with to make yourself different is dying your hair, I would be disappointed in you because you are such a unique person with so much to offer."

Let us, as parents, become their teachers and give them some good solid reasons to choose to adjust their behavior in positive and productive ways simply because it makes sense to them.