As soon as school is back and hockey season starts the focus for your child may turn to hockey, over their schooling. My guess is they enjoy school, at least playing, while they are at school, and the focus on conversation, even in their friends group is about hockey. Hockey is far more fun than school. Of course it is, and that creates a problem when you need them to be focused on their school work. Getting that education is important. They may not realize that yet though. Here are five tips to try to get them to focus on doing their homework. Make it a challenge You have no doubt seen your c ..read more

Life just got ten times busier than it was because hockey season has started up again. Do you love watching your child play hockey? Absolutely. Do you look forward to hockey season being over, at least for a little while? Absolutely. We all know that once the season starts up again life gets filled up with so many extra things to do that it’s hard to feel like you have time available for you. The family always seems to come first. Here are some ways you can use hockey season to have Mom time. There is no reason why you can’t have both. And maybe it’s a matter of taking a different look at how ..read more

I have been reading posts in some forums and wanted to talk about those in this post. The scenario is that your child’s hockey team is losing, badly and others watching the game are still cheering for the winning team as if it’s the finals and this win is a big deal. You wish that they would stop as you think it’s hurting your child’s team and doesn’t look good, from a fairness perspective. This is a really interesting situation. One team is clearly more skilled at hockey, notice I didn’t say “better” because that is a label that is overused in my book. One team is clearly more skilled at hock ..read more

The straight up answer to this question is No! And let’s dive into why that is the answer to this question. Forcing doesn’t help the child in any way Send yourself back to your childhood and find a time when your parents, mother or father made you do something you didn’t want to do. How did you feel? I’m going to image you said resentful, angry, unhappy and put down. And I am using the word ‘put down’ deliberately because it is about feeling as though I don’t have a voice. If you had a conversation with your child about going to camp and their response was “I don’t want to go” then listen to y ..read more

In an earlier article ‘The Inside Scoop on Bullying’ I walked through what causes bullying. Let’s talk some more about this topic as it may be something happening in your child’s team. The Stop Bullying website lists these Peer factors in youth that cause bullying: To attain or maintain social power or to elevate their status in their peer group. To show their allegiance to and fit in with their peer group. To exclude others from their peer group, to show who is and is not part of the group. To control the behavior of their peers. One thing that happens with youth hockey teams is that new te ..read more

Losing is never a fun thing and especially not when you are a young hockey player. Children give there all usually and have a natural competitive instinct. That is what makes losing so much harder for them. Are they winning for the team or for you? Strange things can happen in a child’s mind. They may think they need to win in order to stay a part of the team. For them playing and being a part of the team is all about being good enough and so if the team lose, they may think to themselves that it was their fault. In that they may also think that it means they aren’t good enough to be part of t ..read more

In her book ‘Be Bold! And discover the power of praise’ Susan Mitchell explains that “focusing on what you are good at builds confidence.”  It is one of those strange things that happens because often what we try and do is learn new things we want to get better at. We do that, and feel bad because we fail at achieving them. So here are four things you can do to help your child build up their confidence: Help them focus on what they are good at. As Susan says this is the key to helping your young hockey player build their confidence. It takes 10,000 hours to truly master something. An ..read more