Quick and Dirty Tips

NaNoWriMo Bonus Excerpts: "Never Say You Can't Survive'
10 Tips for Parenting Kids with ADHD
How To Make a Long-Distance Relationship Work

NaNoWriMo Bonus Excerpts: "Never Say You Can't Survive'

Posted: 01 Nov 2021 07:00 AM PDT

From award-winning author, Charlie Jane Anders, Never Say You Can't Survive is one of the most practical guides to storytelling that you will ever hear.

Things are scary right now. We're all being swept along by a tidal wave of history, and it's easy to feel helpless. But we're not helpless: we have minds, and imaginations, and the ability to visualize other worlds and valiant struggles. And writing can be an act of resistance that reminds us that other futures and other ways of living are possible.

Full of memoir, personal anecdote, and insight about how to flourish during the present emergency, Never Say You Can't Survive is the perfect manual for creativity in unprecedented times.

A Macmillan Audio production from Tordotcom.

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10 Tips for Parenting Kids with ADHD

Posted: 31 Oct 2021 11:52 PM PDT

Parenting kids with ADHD can be a challenge, but your role as a parent is crucial for your child's success as an adult. In his book Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It, Dr. Gabor Mate describes how the quality of the parent-child relationship can be used to help promote the emotional and cognitive skills that are underdeveloped in a child with ADHD.

A diagnosis of ADHD requires two of the following three features: deficient attention skills, poor impulse control, and hyperactivity. Your child may be easily distracted unless engaged in activities that they are highly motivated for or interested in. And then, when they're involved in these high-interest activities, they might hyperfocus to the extent that they are completely unaware of the environment around them.

Your child may also have great difficulty inhibiting their speech or behavior. They might chronically interrupt others or have a hard time waiting for a turn. Regardless of negative consequences, they act impulsively and without forethought.

Your child's reactions are influenced by your reactions to them.

If your child is also hyperactive—not all kids with attention deficits are—they may also have trouble being physically or mentally "still." This might look like constant fidgeting, nail biting, and excessive talking and explaining. Other symptoms might be low motivation, poor memory, and social problems. People with ADHD also tend to have high emotional sensitivity, which can make for unpredictable and outsized mood swings and angry outbursts when interrupted or thwarted.

Parenting a child with ADHD can be anxiety provoking and frustrating, but reacting with your own impulsiveness, verbal and/or physical aggression, or helplessness will only escalate the situation in a vicious cycle. By the time families receive a diagnosis, this cycle has usually been in place for a while. Before embarking on any plan to help your child learn missing skills, it's important to work toward stabilizing your relationship with your child by doubling down on emotional connection. The closer you and your child feel to each other, the easier it will be to work together toward positive change.

Here are 10 tips for parenting ADHD kids

1. Be conscious of your own emotional regulation

As the person with the fully developed brain in the parent-child relationship, your moods set the emotional atmosphere in your home. Your child's reactions are influenced by your reactions to them.

Model taking responsibility for...

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How To Make a Long-Distance Relationship Work

Posted: 31 Oct 2021 11:50 PM PDT

I met my husband when I was a freshman in college. We sat across from each other in our computer science lab during the first week of class. We started dating officially a few months later and spent the rest of the school year practically inseparable. Like a lot of freshmen, I struggled greatly to effectively acclimate to college, and perhaps not like a lot of freshmen, wound up being dismissed for poor academic performance over the next summer. I was faced with a decision about my relationship at that moment—moving home to attend community college would mean I would be 9 hours away from him.

It wasn't really even a question for us that we would stay together, and I don't recall ever having an explicit conversation with him about what we would do. I traveled to my old college town to see him maybe once a semester, and then we visited each other when he was home on breaks from school. We video chatted every night and texted as often as we could throughout the day. That year, I applied to transfer back to a four-year school and ultimately made the decision to attend a university only three hours away from my then-boyfriend. We were able to see each other more frequently during that time, but it was still another three years until we lived in the same place. So, for those doing the math, we were long-distance for about four years.

I often get asked about how to make long-distance relationships work. The truth is, it won't always work—long-distance relationships are notoriously difficult for some people. The reality is that long-distance relationships typically stem from necessity, such as military deployment, going away to college, or work availability constraints. The stress of transitioning to long-distance can be difficult to overcome.

To understand your long-distance relationship, we should first talk about how we make our relationships work when we live in the same place.

What is relationship maintenance?

The things that we do to keep our relationship in "good repair" are called relationship maintenance behaviors. What behaviors qualify as relationship maintenance? Research...

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Food And Recipe Fusion

Monday, November 1, 2021