Should You Cyber-Spy On Your Kids?

Cyber spying is when you read the emails your children send and the emails they receive, when you check their browsing history and, in extreme cases, record every keystroke they type.

The case in favour of cyber-spying: "If your child refuses to talk to you, yet you sense something is going wrong in their life, it’s OK to read their emails and check what sites they’ve been visiting (making bombs, depression clinics, suicide pack pages), just as it’s OK to read their diary, their poems, their school essays, their blog, their Facebook updates. What they write can be a warning or a cry for help. If you read it in time, you can prevent disaster."

The case against: "School essays, Facebook and blogs are meant for public viewing. If your child writes something alarming in one of those, it’s because they want help, or perhaps just need to get your attention. Emails and texts, though, are private conversations, particularly for tween-agers and teens. The diary is like the child’s personal psychotherapist, and therefore strictly confidential."

Whichever option you choose, here are a few indicators that your child may spend too much time on the computer:

• Their learning style shows a preference for tactile and visual learning.
• Their learning style shows a non-preference for mobility when concentrating on something difficult.
• They prefer studying alone.

What is your child's learning style? Find out today.

Why A Students Work For C Students

"Why A Students Work For C Students" is a book by Robert T. Kiyosaki, the author of "Rich Dad Poor Dad" (see the video here). It's full of fascinating ideas, such as:

• getting good grated at school, going to university and getting a good job is just one of four ways of earning money;
• getting good grated at school, going to university and getting a good job will not make you rich;
• getting good grated at school, going to university and getting a good job will put you into the rat race.

The author advocates becoming a business person, starting another Apple or Facebook, or at least owning a lot of property like rental homes and hotels. He admits not everybody is a born entrepreneur, though, and he recognises not only different personality types, but also different Learning Styles.

If you have children, read the book to discover how to further their financial education. If you're stuck in the rat race, get the book for yourself.

Do you have the Working Style of an entrepreneur? Is your Learning Style integrated, your preferred social group friends and peers, your communication style talking and listening and doing?

Find out.

Motivation and Learning Styles

A friend of mine has recently taught me a valuable lesson about motivation: you can incentivize people to take action, but the result may not necessarily be what you expect. 

He used the example of his daughter and hockey. In order to motivate his daughter to try harder, he promised her an expensive reward if she scored a goal (she hadn't scored at all that season). The very next game, she scored a goal in the first five minutes, gave him a thumbs up... and stopped applying herself to the game. After all, she'd already achieved her goal of obtaining the expensive gift, so why bother?

Therein lies the danger of motivating our children, our employees, or even ourselves with external "carrots": the person we're trying to motivate with usually focus on the wrong goal.

Of course, some people are more externally motivated than others. Which one are you? Your Working Style Analysis will tell you.

Your Music Learning Style

Dr Yvonne Eve Walus talks to Barbara Prashnig, Director of the Creative Learning Centre in Auckland about the different styles of learning.

What are learning styles and why is it important for parents to know about them?

·         If you ask a child who needs movement to sit still and memorise a times table, you’re unlikely to get good results. You would do far better if you allowed them to walk around or play hopscotch on a makeshift map of times-tables.

·         Tactile children, would love to use Koosh balls and learn better by using self-correcting learning tools and other hands-on activities. 

·         Auditory children benefit from making tapes of their lessons (either recording their teachers in class, or reading the material themselves out loud). 

·         Kinesthetic children may make schoolwork more interesting by miming the lesson or staging a production.

Your Learning Style helps you answer the following questions:

·         Do you like working alone or with a friend?

·         Do you like doing your homework at the desk or on the sofa?

·         Can you solve problems better in the morning or in the evening?

Case Study     

Tanya is eight. She loves reading and completing jigsaw puzzles.  Her teacher says she has a lot of potential, but she simply doesn’t want to learn.  In class, she’s forever looking down, cracking her knuckles or folding the corners of her books, or doodling on the margins. The teacher says this proves she’s not listening. In fact, Tanya is listening.  She’s trying to listen so intently, she has to keep her hands busy to help her along. In LS terminology, we would say that Tanya is a visual (words-based) and tactile learner, with a non-preference for auditory input. But that’s only a small portion of Tanya’s Learning Style: we don’t yet know whether she has analytic or holistic tendencies, what her environmental preferences are, whether she needs bright or dim light, likes to learn alone or in a group, what motivates her, what her persistence is like, and so on.

A child’s greatest asset is their sense of self-worth.  It comes from ‘being good at’ things. To analyse your child’s Learning Style click here.

Easter Week

It's almost Easter! How do you celebrate it in your country? Do you get time off work? Do you cook a feast, paint egg shells, hide chocolate eggs? Or do you do something even more surprising?

In Poland, for example, people celebrate Easter Monday by pouring water onto one another... often in sub-zero temperatures. Girls who get drenched, folklore tells you, are the ones who'll get married within the year.

In Finland, children dress up as witches, carry broomsticks and build bonfires.

In Greece, people throw pots and pans out of the window.

In one French town, the inhabitants cook up a gigantic omelet using over 4,000 eggs.

Norwegians book publishers love the season so much, they release special “Easter Thrillers” around Easter time.

Technology and Working Styles

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

Remember when Flash Drives were the latest cool gadget? Thanks to Cloud Computing, they may soon become obsolete, as more and more data becomes available online via the Internet. (A flash drive is the stick you insert into the side of your computer, or, to quote the movie Date Night, it’s a computer sticky thing.)

Technology progresses at an impressive rate, with the amount of new information doubling every two years. Blink, and you’re left behind. Take a year off work to have a baby and when you come back they are using different software. Become a stay-at-home mum and, before you know it, your child’s school project involves technology you’ve only ever heard of.

Just as an example, a project my 8-year old did at school had the option to present the research in Power Point form or as a phone app. And while some colleges ban mobile phones, others (Albany Senior High) embrace them as a fun learning tool. Well done, those schools, for keeping up with leading-edge technology, but I can’t help wondering: what’s next? Roll-up computers? Internet implants?

We can’t predict the future. What we can do, is keep up with the present. Hoe well you do it depends on your working style. Are you good at playing catch-up with technology? Find out.

Success, holidays and working styles

We don't need researches to tell us that taking a holiday will improve our work performance. We don't need researches to tell us how it takes a week to shift gears and stop thinking about work, and therefore it's imperative to make your holidays at least 10 days long in order to reap the benefits. We do need researches to tell us whether we're the type of person who can successfully enjoy a holiday, and why.

Enter Working Styles and the Working Style Analysis tool (WSA). The WSA report will tell you almost 50 things you may not have realised about yourself. Among others, it'll predict whether you're the type of person who truly enjoys a holiday.

Although it may be difficult to understand, some people get stressed at a prospect of going away on holiday. Typically, those are the people who have a non-preference in the Variety element of the WSA pyramid. Those with a preference for responsibility might also worry about the work and domestic tasks they're leaving behind. Those with a preference for structure may fear unstructured days ahead.

Are you someone who can truly relax when away on holiday? Find out.