Family Time and Academic Success may require Making Family, too! What?

Family time builds skills needed for life, including those needed for academic excellence. Time spent sharing values and ideas with your children and other relatives is time well spent. Whether you watch a Friday night TV show (like wrestling) and laugh while you discuss it, or write letters back-and-forth between Auntie and niece, whether you bake brownies or chocolate chip cookies, whether it having a coke with a foster mom, or a talk with Granddad, read Alice in Wonderland with a cousin, whether you have a game night, go bike riding or hiking together and/or go worship together, spending family time conveys values that help build necessary skills like listening, being attentive, self-confidence and self-direction. Plus it is fun. Children of families that spend such time together usually do well at school. And, they have someone show up or call on parent-teacher night.

Conversely, children who lack that, "family time," often struggle to do well. The ones that do, it seems to me, make their own family time. They find a mentor at a store they frequent, or at a church, temple, or mosque, or at 4-H, Scouts or The Boys and Girls Club, in the Police Athletic League, or an after-school program, sport, or other youth activity. They typically make family to have family time with. They succeed because they make their own way. They create their own enrichment, visit the zoo and museums and botanic gardens. They do their homework without being told. They make and are their own "family." They stay focused and succeed. It can be done.

(c)2007 J. S. Shipman