Pizza Hut® and Donna Erickson of Donna's Day have teamed to give you simple ideas for spending more time together as a family. These FIVE “New School Year Resolutions” are everyday activities that you can share with your kids and bring your family together.

Posted by Susan at 1/25/2005 09:14:22 AM | Link

 
I like the way William R Mattox Jr., USA Today, said it: " This New Year, I've resolved to go on a diet that allows me to pull up to the family dinner table instead of requiring me to pull away from it. . . . The main purpose of my diet isn't to cut calories, carbs or fat. It's to trim the activities tat many families with children overindulge in on evenings and weekends."

Some people can diet successfuly simply by eating less at every meal. Most of us however, need to think a little deeper, make a plan and strategize what will work best for our personality, in order to be successful long term. Check out our Family Activity Planner. It has questions for you to ponder, and a chart to list each family members activities, the time involved, and how it impacts the family. "Extracurricular activities are a lot like the foods found in the four basic food groups. Each is good for you up to a point - but overindulgence in any (or every) area tends to throw everything out of balance."

Maddox says, "So, I'm going on an "activities diet" in 2005. Sure, I still plan on coaching my youngest son's Little League team and teaching a class at church. But I'm taking a break from traveling sports teams. I've already got our family vacation dates on the August calendar. And I'm seeing to it that our family eats many more evening meals together in 2005.

I'm sure it won't be easy to keep this New Year's resolution. But I'm going to give it a good try. Because even though I don't particularly like going on a crash diet, it sure beats letting our home become merely a place where people crash at night.

And even if going on an "activities diet" never becomes the latest fad, I'm convinced that it will help me become a better dad." !!!!!

Posted by Susan at 1/18/2005 08:41:36 AM | Link

 
Something to think about. . . . Why are we allowing our children to participate in so many activities? For most parents the answers are:

• To develop character
• To find out what they are good at and then to excel in it
• It will eventually help for college admissions

Marilee Jones, dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a rare message in the world of elite universities: High school students should enjoy themselves more, and colleges should help them do so.

"They are just doing, doing, doing, and they don't have three minutes to think about what they are doing and why they are doing it," she said. "I feel sad that they don't have the kind of freedom my generation had." MIT applicants now average 12 extracurricular activities in high school while parents have assumed a new and modern role in their children's lives: parent-as-manager.

The Boston Globe article, What's your pleasure? says more:
Jones said her heart goes out to the unhappy high school students she meets who respond with blank stares when she asks "What do you dream about?" She also worries about a sharp rise in the number of high school students admitted to MIT whose grades plummet at the end of their senior year in high school, suggesting either an extreme release of pressure or a spiraling burden of extracurricular obligations.

To discourage students from overloading their lives, MIT's admissions office last year reduced the number of spaces on the form to list extracurricular activities from 10 to six. Many students still attach an extra page to catalog all their activities, but Jones didn't want them to feel as if they had to. This year, Jones removed the column designated for applicants to list the distinctions they earned in each activity.


For more on this subject, read another article:
Quick! Is Johnny signed up for Daydreaming?

Posted by Susan at 1/13/2005 10:03:15 AM | Link

 
Putting Family First has promoted January as Family Decision Month because it is a natural time for families and individuals to make resolutions. It is also the time for spring and summer athletic sign ups, camp brochures begin arriving in the mail, and families discuss reunions or vacations. Most of the summers schedule is planned in that order - kids activities make it to the calendar first. What's leftover, determines if and when the family goes on vacation.

Take time this month to evaluate your families needs and prioritize them. Sometimes we allow our lives to be run by the clock, rather than the compass.

Posted by Susan at 1/12/2005 02:11:37 PM | Link

 
We've now added RSS to this weblog. What's RSS?

It's a radio signal for a website, most commonly used for weblogs. More technically: "Rich Site Summary (RSS) is a lightweight XML format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content. Think of it as a distributable "What's New" for your site." See Intro to RSS for more info.

The Newspaper Association of America site has an informative article titled Syndication Made Simple. "Just as free e-mail newsletters enable publishers to directly reach readers and promote online and in-paper content, RSS "pushes" headlines and succinct, one-sentence article descriptions to those who subscribe to the no-cost feeds."

The other side of syndication is aggregation. Here's an article from Wired News that explains why aggregators are all the rage: Aggregators Attack Info Overload.


This icon is the cue that we're RSS capable. So train your aggregator to grab content from PFF's syndicated weblog.

Posted by Griff at 1/01/2005 10:07:33 AM | Link