Getting Kids to Eat Healthy

A family came into my office this week excited to share their plan to get their child to eat new foods and increase his intake of fruits and vegetables.  They have created J’s Taste Kitchen which stars their youngest son who currently lives mostly on chicken fingers and pancakes.  The Taste Kitchen will be a special event weekly during which the child will taste and review one new food.  The family plans to make a video of the tasting each week in the spirit of popular cooking and food programs. J’s parents will work with J to choose each week’s tasting.  Foods he likes will be added to the family dinner rotation.  J will earn points for every food he tastes which he will cash in for a variety of rewards including extra screen time, 10 extra minutes of staying up before bedtime and extra bedtime stories.

What I love about this plan is that it is fun, incorporates technology, involves the whole family and can be kept within the family food budget. It also puts J in charge of some of the decisions about the food he eats which is likely to cut down on family feuds.

Getting children involved in cooking and shopping for food is a wonderful way to expand their interest in healthy eating.  There are a number of television shows cropping up that feature young chefs and bakers to inspire your picky eater.  Cookbooks with bright pictures and simple to follow instructions can help you involve your child in the weekly meal prep and cooking utensils designed especially for young people can help you feel comfortable turning your child loose in the kitchen.  A quick internet search can lead you to many recipes that substitute or add in fruits and vegetables to current family favorites.  Planting and growing vegetables can help you and your family feel more involved with the food you put on the table.

The following resources are just a tiny sample of what’s available to help you in your effort to inspire healthy eating.  Involving the family in fun and easy options might just end the dinner-time wars.  I’m sure hoping that happens for J!

Kid Cookbooks

Chop Chop: The Kids’ Guide to Cooking Real Food with Your Family ; Chop Chop also publishes a magazine and website featuring child cooks and recipes.

My A to Z Recipe Box: An Alphabet of Recipes for Kids: includes brightly colored and easy to follow recipes on cards that can be taken to the grocery to pick out ingredients.

Kid Cooking Supplies

www.GrowingCooks.com offers many kid-friendly utensils and kitchen items made for small hands.

www.CuriousChef.com offers recipes, blogs and utensils including safe cooking knives for small chefs at affordable prices.

Websites and Apps

www.thesneakychef.com includes recipes and products for adding fruits and vegetables in your family’s diet.

Nicolas’ Garden is a mobile app developed by 8 year old Nicholas that can be used by children and adults to find, plan and save healthy recipes and share them with others.

 

Please add to this list by posting some of your favorite ways to encourage children to eat healthy and check out our two-part course How to Get Children to Eat Healthy

Capture

The Cure for the Difficult Supervisor

 

stress_ballAn unhealthy work environment can take its toll quickly. And while you may have wanted to kill your ‘bad boss’ on at least one occasion, it is actually you who is at greater risk.  Working with a difficult boss often means increased stress which can impact your health.

New research out of Ohio State University suggests that your work environment could literally be killing you.  Researchers found that chronic stress affects the immune cells in our bodies, changing them so that they are, in effect, primed to fight infections where none are present.  This constant state of readiness leads to inflammation in the body, which has been shown to be associated with heart disease and diabetes, among others.

So what to do if you think your difficult boss is making you sick? The following tips can help you avoid stressful interactions and possibly transform your work relationship.

  1. Diagnose the Situation: Step back and consider the situation. Are you seeing new behavior in this supervisor?  What stressors are you aware of that might be contributing to the recent change?  Perhaps the behavior happens only in specific situations.  If so, see how you can help.  If the problems are consistent and not tied to any specific event or task, you may truly have a difficult boss on your hands.
  1. Inoculate Yourself: Pay attention to and manage your own emotions so you don’t sabotage yourself. Beware of using sarcasm, shutting down or launching counter attacks. This is a good time to try to take the high road and act like the boss you wish yours were.  People will notice and people like to work with others who take ownership of their experience and resist blame.
  1. Describe Your Experience: When it’s time to share your concerns, be certain to speak from your own perspective and use I statements.  Comments that blame or focus on your boss’s actions can make him/her feel defensive.  Speaking for a group (Everyone is saying…) weakens your position.  Instead of “You keep changing the deadline and everyone is going crazy.”, try “I’m having a hard time knowing how to organize my workload, can you confirm the final deadline?”
  1. Stay Aware: Pay attention to your defensiveness and notice when it is keeping you from remaining open to feedback and meaningful criticism. Model the type of interactions you wish to have in spite of how you are being addressed. Remember that tension goes either in or out, so don’t hold things in too long.
  1. Keep Good Records: Document difficult exchanges with your boss or supervisor and be certain to follow up meetings with an email to confirm any decisions made and document any unfinished decisions. This isn’t about protecting yourself so much as keeping organized.
  1. Take Charge of the Situation by Managing Up: Try and think of your admin not as your boss, but as a challenging student, one you need to understand better to reach. Find ways to focus on your supervisor’s strengths and work around his/her limitations. If your supervisor is energetic and makes meetings interesting, but has difficulty keeping track of decisions made, offer to take notes and email them out to the team.

Sometimes the only solution is to move on.  If you do decide you need to find a new boss, be sure to take some time to identify the characteristics that were most difficult in your current situation.  In your next interviews, ask questions about the culture of the workplace – how is decision making shared; how often and what kind of feedback is provided; and other issues that make the difference in your happiness and satisfaction at work.

For more in depth help, consider one of our courses on Dealing with Difficult Administrators.

 

The Grades are In

grades“You are FAILING the sixth grade!!!” It wasn’t just hyperbole, my son’s progress report this week does show four Fs and getting him to complete and turn in work has been a struggle since the fall.  I was angry.  I was frustrated.  I expected more from him.  But the truth is, I was afraid. I was afraid he’d be tracked as a poor student, I even worried that his sixth grade transcript would keep him from college.  And as he cried and told me about class changes, block schedules, losing things in his locker and work getting lost in his backpack, I thought about the family not far from us who would never again get to be exasperated with their son or reprimand him about his work.  Their 13 year old boy took his life after receiving an email from his school about a failing grade.

Suicide is currently the leading cause of death among kids my son’s age, killing more young people than cancer.  This frightens me. Stress, anger, frustration and depression are all common in children who consider suicide. They are also necessary and normal feelings of teens  as they figure out who they are, what their goals are and how they decide they measure up. A 2011 (Hansen, B., & Lang, M) study of suicide rates in students found that suicides increase during the school year but dramatically decrease during the summer and school holidays.  The researchers controlled for seasons and weather and differences in ethnicity, race, gender and income.  In all groups, the trend remained; suicide rates increase when school is in session. Let that sink in for a moment. Suicide rates go up when our kids go back to school.

We are creating environments where our children feel unvalued, uncared for, and incapable of managing stress and disappointment.  We are narrowing the definition of success to discrete, measurable outputs, and forgetting to consider all that is gained through building relationships with peers and teachers and through trial and error.

My lovely boy is funny, creative and kind.  He is a talented singer and artist, he stands up for others when they are being treated unfairly.  He can cook.  He can design costumes and build machines out of paper and cardboard. He makes me laugh daily and for a little while, I forgot that those are grades I care about most and that is the curriculum I’ve been using to raise him.

 

 

 

The Proof is in the Pudding: But what if the pudding is rancid?

Evidence-based teaching, evidence-based decisions, instruction and school improvement –terms driving the school reform movement as we seek to identify how to make our nation’s students competitive with the world.  Standardized curricula and assessments purport to be the silver bullets that will help students achieve meaningful outcomes and tout data gathered from research as evidence of their effectiveness.

It is no doubt that teaching strategies and educational theories with little evidence to support them, and even those that have been disputed as invalid, continue to be passed along through tradition or myths. New teachers often rely on mentors and more experienced colleagues to find what works with students, perpetuating methods that may or may not lead to student improvement.  Strategies promising research-backed evidence of success, therefor, can look very attractive, especially to those outside the education system who may lack the knowledge and expertise for running a successful classroom or school.

But what if this evidence is based on bad science?

CaptureChallenges of prescribed curricula: Let’s start with the assumption that any one practice or set of practices will be adequate to meet the needs of diverse student populations in this country.  These practices can lead to the failure of students who may need alternate or multiple approaches. Teachers who are trained to cover a curriculum rather than find the best ways to reach individual students may adapt a kind of a learned helplessness as they are discouraged from finding innovative and creative solutions.

What are we measuring? Educational outcomes aren’t always as clear-cut as curriculum developers may have us believe.  Scientific research involves randomization and the isolation of variables that might confound results.  How can researchers separate issues of poverty, health, welfare, family structures and other social influencers from the impact of the tested ‘treatment’ in such a way that any of the studies could be replicated?  Current measurements seem to be missing data on how students persist when challenged and what strategies students use to try to gain deeper understanding.  This information would provide parents, students and teachers with a much deeper knowledge of how children learn.

Who are we measuring? When evaluating a researched curriculum, it is important to know where it was tested.  Often curricula are promoted for use with groups on which they have never been tested. Phonics curricula aimed at struggling readers may then be used in classrooms with children who learn quickly, with no evidence to support that this method is also beneficial to them or may not actually discourage their learning.  Affluent schools with fewer social problems, if used as a test site, may skew results as their students may already be able to perform better on measurement tests created out of a pedagogy relevant to their culture. School culture may also dictate how well certain methods can be delivered, results that may not translate to poorly funded or managed schools.

How are we measuring? The external validity (the extent to which you can generalize a study’s results to other situations) is another critical feature of sound research.  Often the teaching used to test a curriculum is done by researchers or research educators and may not resemble the kind of teaching that goes on in actual classrooms or school buildings.  Additionally, when classroom teachers who are inadequately prepared to deliver the a new curriculum are part of the test group, this validity is again threatened.

The pitfalls of basing teaching on data: Since the explosion of standardized testing, educators may have access to a plethora of data, so much so that it can be impossible to act on all of it in a thoughtful and analytical way.  Data collection and processing requires a tremendous amount of expertise and resources that schools and local education agencies simply don’t have, leaving them in the position of accepting presented results as ‘facts’ and answers devoid of critical analysis. And, in the face of so much data, it is possible that other critical data about school problems is ignored if there is not an offered ‘solution’ tied to it, leaving the problem unaddressed and unstudied.

Teachers are the experts in what makes learning work: Data-driven decisions about instruction doesn’t have to leave teachers behind.  In fact, this movement may provide teachers with the opportunity to regain control of their profession from those who know very little about the complexities of the student/teacher relationship. Professional development focused on how to evaluate education research, and the creation of learning communities within schools can offer teachers the opportunity and knowledge to discuss emerging research and modify accepted techniques in ways that work best for their students.

Great teachers combine personal experiences and intuition with thoughtful and well-researched evidence and, if given the proper support, can make data work for schools and for student success.

Other Resources:

http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/one-size-fits-education-doesnt-work/

http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/b/ben%20goldacre%20paper.pdf

http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/rt/9-03_column/