These are just a few examples of difficulties children may have with separation. Separation concerns are an understandable challenge of childhood. As a child matures however, if a child or teen has trouble leaving the safety of home, it can be problematic. A child can display a wide range of symptoms, from stomach aches (which have no apparent physical basis), heart-racing, crying, pleading, anxiety, withdrawal, and fearful thoughts.

A blend of reassurance and firmness is often a good approach when encouraging age-appropriate separations. Sometimes this is not enough when a child feels threatened with leaving the security of home.

Your child may need to learn anti-worry separation skills to help. The Outsmart Your Worry Tool Kit for Kids is a powerful first line of defense against anxiety in children which can interfere with healthy separation from parents. Kids and teens worry is addressed head-on by learning to turn off their internal worry alarm. Nervous children and kids are shown how to think realistically when separation fears spike, stop worried thoughts from dominating their minds, use strong thoughts to calm fears, and make worry-blocking rules to control intense, scared feelings. The Tool Kit contains 20 easy to learn Outsmart Your Worry activities for children and teens which helps them feel stronger right away. See how this award-winning kit can help your child or teen get back on track.

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Before school begins, gently ask your child about any worries or concerns about the new school year. Is the child worried about making friends? Does the child worry about lunch or recess? Is the child scared about going to a new school or trying new subjects and activities? Are there any concerns about school being too hard or getting too much homework? If the child answers yes to any of these questions or volunteers a different worry, you can help your child get stronger and emotionally ready to handle the anxieties of transition back to school.

There are two important sets of emotional skills that help all kids in grades K-12 stay steady and strong, especially in the face of new situations, such as starting a new school year. These skills include improving self-confidence and learning to mange worry. Both of these skills can be learned quickly, so your child can walk into school with a boost in self-esteem and a plan to handle worry and anxiety.

Tool Kits for Kids has created a powerful, new way to help young people with their thoughts and feelings, encouraging them make the most of their new school experience. Kids tell us that our Tool Kits don’t feel like work, because the activities for children and teens are fun. Our award-winning Charge Up Your Confidence Tool Kit for Kids teaches the 20 best self-esteem building strategies available today. Among the child confidence activities are looking self-assured, recognizing strengths accurately, setting realistic goals, valuing one’s own ideas, applying effort, and handling mistakes, disappointments, and criticism. Our nationally-acclaimed Outsmart Your Worry Tool Kit for Kids is designed to stop anxiety in children from growing out of control. It teaches kids how to turn down the volume of worried back to school thoughts and replace them with competent and realistic thoughts.

You may have all the pens, pencils, markers, spiral notebooks, calculator, and book bag ready for your child’s new year at school. Prepare your child with the emotional tools needed for a happy and secure school year.

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Some parents believe that frequent rewards and continual positive feedback is the best way to improve children’s self-esteem. Of course it’s a good idea to take note of your child’s accomplishments, but that alone does not build confidence. Letting your child know how proud you are may be an effective strategy sometimes, but don’t overdose on it.

Self-confidence is a combination of external and internal positive rewards. When you say, Great job, Well done, or I’m so proud of you, you provide the external reward. The child’s beliefs about his or her capabilities, strengths, and efforts is what creates internal self-confidence.

Confidence skills can be learned. Examples of children’s confidence skills are recognizing their strengths, valuing their own opinion even if it is different from their peers, knowing that effort and trying really counts, looking self-assured, and using self-reward for a job well done. These skills all improve kids’ self-esteem and can be learned in a lasting, meaningful way.

Our nationally acclaimed Charge Up Your Confidence Tool Kit for Kids teaches children and teens in grades K-12 how to use these important confidence activities in the real world. The Confidence Tool Kit also provides clear strategies to deal with situations that can topple confidence, such as making errors, getting criticized, feeling embarrassed, and not being perfect.

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Grandparents play a vital role in many families. They are often perceived as the center of the family or “the rock”. Some grandchildren feel that their grandma or grandpa is especially wise. They may feel unconditional love and support from their grandparents. When that special person dies, grandchildren can feel their whole world is shaken. This can mirror how the rest of the family feels too.

After a grandparent dies, you may notice the child cries easily, is clingy, appears moody or angry, is worried about other family members, or maybe, shows no overt reaction at all. Some children may express their feelings openly, while others may keep their feelings hidden. But, every grandchild has his or her own reaction to the loss.

Grief and mourning are very hard on children. Resilience skills help in the process of emotional repair during this difficult time. Learning these important emotional skills can assist young people in dealing with the emotional trauma of the loss.

It may be comforting to know that resilience skills can be learned in an effective and lasting way. The nationally recognized Build Up Your Resilience Tool Kit for Kids helps children and teens in grades K-12 handle the pain, stress, and sorrow that often accompanies the death of a loved one. Young people learn strategies to deal with change and loss, remember that there are still meaningful people in their lives, prevent new fears from growing, stop replaying frightening images, and reduce the occurrence of bad dreams. All of these strategies are important when dealing with the childhood trauma of death of a grandparent. The Resilience Tool Kit also includes tools to deal with the myriad of emotions following a significant loss, including sadness, fear, guilt, and anger.

Resilience skills help parents and surviving grandparents too. You can learn and refresh your own resilience skills along with the grandchild.

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Nearly 85% of Americans who divorce will re-marry, half within three years, and a third in just one year. Half of children in the U.S. will experience a parent’s re-marriage before turning 18. Half of all re-marriages begin with cohabitation. About 60% of re-marriages end in re-divorce. Children coping with divorce have a lot to deal with rather quickly.

Regardless of what change your child is facing, it is still most important to protect the integrity of your relationship with the child. For example, your child may welcome a new step-parent or reject that person outright. Either way, a new love interest or blended family can feel threatening to the child. The child may be afraid of losing you. This feeling typically occurs if there is a new marriage, new baby, move to a new location, or visitation modification.

In addition to providing a secure and constant parental presence if you can, your child may benefit from developing resilience skills. Resilience helps children cope with change, which in turn assists them in managing emotional trauma. The Tool Kits for Kids Build Up Your Resilience Tool Kit was developed by experts who recognize that kids benefit from learning powerful emotional skills when dealing with conflict, childhood trauma, and crises – all common in post-divorce. The Tool Kit includes 20 comprehensive tools that help children and teens deal with change and loss, manage anger, handle anxious feelings, reduce negative thinking, and make hopeful and realistic plans for their future. All of these tools and more can be learned quickly in a way that makes sense to young people. Our Resilience Tool Kits are designed for kids in grades K-12 and have recently won two major parenting awards.

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Every year, over one million more children in the United States will be dealing with stress as a result of divorce. At least 40% of all children will be part of a divorcing family before turning 18. Many parents are concerned about the short-term and long-term effects of divorce on their children. Overall, research shows many emotional, social, and academic problems in the early stages of divorce. There are mixed results about long-term effects regarding children and divorce. Research consistently indicates that high-stress divorces, dealing with conflict and frequent legal maneuverings result in a poor outcome for children.

A key factor in determining children’s favorable adjustment during and after divorce is resilience. Resilience helps young people bounce back from the worst of times. Resilient children accommodate to change and handle overwhelming feelings of grief, guilt, and anger. Fortunately, resilience skills can be learned.

There is a new and effective method for teaching resilience skills to children and teenagers. The Build Up Your Resilience Tool Kit for Kids helps young people in grades K-12 develop thinking and behaving skills to cope with the many changes and childhood trauma associated with divorce. Kids learn tools to manage feelings of over-responsibility, sadness, and anger – all very common reactions in divorce. There are also tools to help kids coping with divorce feel hopeful and confident about their future. Children who learn these resilience skills are able to manage the emotional difficulties of divorce and have fewer behavior problems than children who are not resilient.

The Build Up Your Resilience Tool Kit comes in two editions, one for elementary school children ages 5 to 11, and the other for high school and middle school teens, ages 11 to 18. Give your children skills, which will strengthen their resilience and help them adjust before, during, and after divorce.

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Children can learn smart and effective ways to manage their worry, fear, and anxiety. And popcorn has something to do with the remedy. The Popcorn Tool developed by experts is our signature tool in the Outsmart Your Worry Tool Kit for Kids. All of the 20 anti-anxiety activities in our award-winning Tool Kit teach the strongest thinking and behaving strategies to stop worry and fear in their tracks.

Many kids in grades K-12 tell us that the Popcorn Tool is one of their favorites. This tool addresses the issue of probability. Worried children often keep thinking about situations that might happen, even when the chances of their worry actually occurring is very, very small. For instance, some children worry that their parents or other family members might become seriously ill, even though everyone is healthy. Other kids may worry about robberies in their home, even though they live in safe neighborhoods with safety precautions in place. Some kids and teens worry about failing in school, even though they try hard and generally do well. These worried thoughts can dominate a young person’s mind and interfere with learning, time with friends, sleeping, and having fun.

The Tool Kits for Kids Popcorn Tool is unforgettable. It squashes anxious thoughts about nearly impossible worries faster than eating a bag of popcorn!

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This kind of feedback can be a serious blow to a child as well as the parents. The camp’s decision is usually not an easy one to make. Sometimes the decision to remove a child from camp is in response to the child’s difficulty adjusting to camp or severe homesickness. Other times, the child is asked to leave because his or her behavior puts the child or other children in the bunk at risk. For example, a child may not follow directions, and leave activities unsupervised. Or a child may be verbally or physically threatening. Sometimes a child may be too sad or anxious, despite repeated attempts to provide emotional support.

When a child leaves camp prematurely, there can be a wide range of emotional responses. He or she may be sad, angry, regretful, relieved, or afraid of being in trouble with parents. The family first needs to get their bearings, and once the child is home safe and sound, talk about what happened in a calm, problem-solving manner.

Chances are that when asked to leave sleepaway camp, the child’s self-confidence may drop dramatically. You can help restore your kid’s self-esteem by helping to learn confidence skills. Confidence activities can help children face this rejection and remain steady and strong.

The Charge Up Your Confidence Tool Kit is a good place to start. Our award-winning Confidence Tool Kit teaches necessary tools to repair child confidence. The Tool Kit can also help you begin supportive and realistic conversations with your child about what went wrong. Despite the emotional wound of leaving camp early, a child needs to be able to face criticism calmly, learn from his or her mistakes, deal with self-criticism, survive embarrassment, and maintain a positive healthy self-image. All of these tools and many more are addressed in the Confidence Tool Kit, for children in grades K-12.

Some children may have been asked to leave camp due to anxiety or extreme homesickness. For these youngsters, try our nationally-recognized Outsmart Your Worry Tool Kit for Kids, which teaches children skills to master their anxiety about being away from home.

The emotional trauma of leaving sleepaway camp unfinished is hard for children. You can help turn it into a learning, growing experience. Practicing confidence tools and worry-fighting tools is a smart way to get children on the road to feeling better and can help prepare them for the next summer.

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Despite one’s best efforts, accidents happen.
Here are some important facts about childhood accidents in the U. S. Every year, the most common injuries are falls, accounting for more than 2 million emergency visits. Three and a half million children ages 14 and younger are treated for sports injuries. More than 775,000 of these youngsters are treated in the ER. Playground injuries hurt 200,000 children and 285,000 are treated for bicycle accidents. Car accidents account for 250,000 childhood injuries.

After the bone is set, stitches sewn, medication dispensed, medical tests completed, and reassuring words offered, the time for emotional healing begins. There may be physical pain associated with the accident, but the emotional pain is just as real and may take even longer to heal. After an accident, it is important to listen carefully and observe your child’s behavior. Do you notice any changes or concerns? For example, is your child crying more than usual? Is he or she afraid to participate in activities that were involved in the accident, such as driving in a car or playing on the playground?

If you do notice changes, your child will benefit from learning resilience skills. Resilience helps young people cope and recover from the emotional trauma of a physical injury. Our award-winning Build Up Your Resilience Tool Kit for Kids may provide the solution you and your child need at this difficult time. The Tool Kit teaches smart and reassuring strategies to conquer the spectrum of emotional responses when a child is injured. There are specific tools to deal with sadness, guilt, and anger – all common reactions when dealing with the stress of an accident. In addition, our Resilience Tool Kit includes activities for children and teens, to stop flashbacks, deal with bad dreams, think about their future in hopeful ways, and maintain a positive self-image.

The Resilience Tool Kit, developed by experts, comes in two editions, one for children 5-11, and the other for young people ages 11- 18. The childhood trauma of accidents can be eased by acquiring powerful coping strategies to help kids stay steady and strong.

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