Parent Network

Of course, it’s undeniable that by providing healthy foods and a nurturing environment, we can help to ensure our teenage kids are able to make responsible decisions regarding their diets and in so doing, lay the foundations for a healthy lifestyle.

The importance of adequate calorie consumption! While the recommended dietary allowance is between 2500 and 3000 calories for boys and 2200 calories for girls, one should remember that energy requirements can be vastly different from one teen to another. Furthermore, requirements are also aff3cted by factors such as stage of development and rate of growth.

The importance of Iron!
Both boys and girls need iron and while boys should ideally be on a diet which is high in iron in order to cater for muscle mass and an increase in blood volume, girls need to increase iron intake once they start menstruating.

Ideally, teens as well as adults should aim to get iron from foods such as fish, meat and poultry. Of course, while many other foods such as cereals, spinach and fortified soy products also contain iron, many also contain certain compounds which impair the absorption of iron. If these foods are used as a source of iron, then foods such as oranges, tomatoes, peppers and broccoli should be eaten alongside them.

The importance of Calcium!
Essentially, teenagers have far higher calcium requires than what adults do. Likewise, the ability to absorb and retain calcium is also more crucial at this stage than at any other stage of their life. In particular, studies suggest that a vast amount of teenage girls fail to consume an adequate amount of calcium in their diets even though calcium is readily available in foods such as milk, cheese, yogurt and soy products.  Read more... (663 words, 1 image, estimated 2:39 mins reading time)

Natural Nurturing: Parenting Prodigies

Prodigies are born, not made! Parents of prodigies have a very demanding role to play if their prodigious off springs are to make it big in life. Children who make dramatic entries disappear fast, as parents do precious little to handle their greatness. Pressure to perform and perform consistently, high expectations of an overambitious society can mar the greatness of the prodigies. They need to keep their feet firmly grounded. This article aims at analysing the role of parents from identifying prodigies to guiding their brilliant children towards higher achievements. This article elicits a select set of prodigies particularly from India to analyse the role of their parents in grooming them.

 Introduction

A child, usually lesser than 10 who shows the ability to perform at very high levels in the mode of a well trained adult in a field deemed extremely difficult and under very demanding circumstances is considered to be a prodigy. Prodigies are generally spotted in well structured disciplines that extract superior mental abilities like music and mathematics.

But that could also be the conventional view of identifying child prodigies. Nowadays, even in fields hitherto unheard of, we can identify them as in the field of sports – where the criterion or the definition for ascertaining a prodigy is not necessarily by age (within 10 years) but by performance that include the level and the opposition at a relatively young age. 

Somehow researchers have never been interested in a study of the prodigies. Dr Feldman and his colleagues attempted one in 1991, but not with much success. All that they could find was that child prodigies are more likely to belong to fields with concrete and established  rules such as music, math and  chess. Creative arts like painting, writing are comparatively rare perhaps because they demand greater experience.  There are however a few exceptions.