Parenting Tips: Here Are Five ‘Secret’ Tips That You’ll Love To Hear

Even though you may have read many blogs, magazines, and books that are overloaded with parenting tips and advice, here are five parenting tips that you more than likely did not see or fully understand at first glance.

Studies have proven that later school start times can effectively boost performance most teenage students. However, elementary school students need to have the same provision as well.

One study from the University of Kentucky shows that later elementary school start times successfully led to a percentage increase in overall grade retention rates — 0.2 percent for every minute later that the school day started. Based on that calculation, a half-an-hour delay would lead to a six percent increase. Even though you might strive to wake your kids up as early as possible in order for them to be fully prepared for the school day, allowing them to prepare at night and sleep in each morning might actually be more beneficial for them.

Studies show that parents can effectively predict their child’s intelligence just by studying their preschool doodles and drawings – regardless of how awkward they might seem at first. One study conducted at the King’s College London showed that these drawings for children as young as 4-years-old can actually provide clues about their later intelligence.

Although your toddler drawing on the walls might drive you absolutely crazy, you should take a few moments to closely examine the drawings before you work hard at erasing them in order to see what you can find out.

When they were offered a relatively small financial reward as an incentive, 80 percent of American students were eager to eat their vegetables. When it comes to the large number of school lunch programs that are basically wasting money on grease-heavy menus, adding vegetables into the equation that the students will actually eat can pay off in several different ways. Schools can even fund the incentives on their own — especially when they take into consideration the amount of money that is being wasted on vegetables that are being thrown away or not even eaten in the first place.

Even though using technology (such as smartphones and tablets) has been proven to be an effective tool for educating your children, you should never underestimate the power of your presence either. Your child needs to have that physical interaction and communication with an experienced and knowledgeable instructor in order to truly benefit on an academic level. Using technology can prove to be a big help, but you should never consider smartphones and mobile devices as a replacement for that physical interaction.

With expectations that are progressively increased based on the child’s abilities and overall performance, you can successfully raise them to become overachievers personally and also professionally. Keep in mind the keyword “progressively” and how it was used in the previous sentence. The last thing that you want to do is to raise your bar of expectations for your child too high too fast. Doing so may actually garner the exact opposite reaction.

What do you think about these parenting tips?