Don’t Give Up—How to Get Your Kids to Do Chores

7 March 20204 March 2020 patmcgLeave a comment

I have to admit, I’ve been slacking on giving my kids chores. It’s just basics – mostly cleaning up after themselves, emphasizing individual responsibility.

Without responsibilities, how will our kids grow up?

But this great article from Let Grow has me thinking about chores — reframed as “responsibilities” — as part of helping the family and growing your kid’s sense of community and self-confidence.

👉 Don’t Give Up—How to Get Your Kids to Do Chores

This article explains the benefits to your kids having ~~chores~~ responsibilities to do around the house. It also has practical tips for making these responsibilities work for everyone.

I’ve never been so inspired about chores! 😀

You

The Artist’s Hierarchy of Needs

5 March 202022 March 2020 patmcg2 Comments

I’ve been taking on some creative projects lately (music and writing) and found this idea of an artist’s needs really helpful. I makes me want to create!

👉 The Artist’s Hierarchy of Needs

(I’m not sure this is technically a “hierarchy”, but still it’s a good list.)

Cheat sheet: creative physical space, creative imaginative space, creative peers / community, creative fuel (filling the well), being active / taking care of your body, creative edge / challenge, faith and belief in yourself and your work, having your work responded to, certainty (confidence?), and time.

Here’s just one of the ten artist’s needs that I really liked: The need for your creative edge:

Solving problems, pushing boundaries, developing something new is at the heart of the creative process. Rather than despair about how difficult it is, embrace the challenge of your craft.

Practical

Mentimeter

5 March 202025 February 2020 patmcgLeave a comment

Bookmarking this nice tool for presentations. Among other things, it lets the audience add comments, answer questions, and take polls in realtime using their phones. This made the long class I was in more engaging. 🤷🏻‍♂️

👉 Mentimeter

Software Dev

MVC: Many View Controllers

5 March 20204 March 2020 patmcgLeave a comment

Another counterpoint in the iOS architecture wars, saying basically that MVC is actually pretty sound as long as you use it wisely.

This post breaks controllers down into a few types: Containers, Generic controllers, View controllers, Flow controllers to help reframe things.

One of my favorite points here is that not everything has to be a model, a view, or a controller. You can — and should — create other kinds of code! No wonder your controllers are messy if you limit yourself like that. 🤷🏻‍♂️

This issue happens when the developer thinks they must fit everything into either M, V or C, forgetting that they are allowed to create other types of constructs.

👉 MVC: Many View Controllers

Via iOS Dev Weekly.

Parenting · You

Let’s Stop Telling Our Kids to Be Careful All the Time

4 March 20205 March 2020 patmcg1 Comment

I love this post from Let Grow. It’s calling out how pointless and even damaging it is to just say “Be careful!” to your kids all the time. It’s a really interesting read.

👉 Let’s Stop Telling Our Kids to Be Careful All the Time

Of course we all want our kids to be safe. But the point here is that we should teach them specifically how to identify and deal with risk instead of a hand waving “Be careful!”, which only indices fear and is mainly meant to make the parents feel better.

As parents, we should be guiding our kids through risk. Our job is to make them strong, independent, smart people. That means helping our kids recognize, evaluate, and manage different kinds of risk. 💪🏻 How about empowering them by asking them, “What’s your exit strategy?” instead of vaguely scaring them with “Be careful!”.

Using phrases that empower our confident kids to manage risk on their own not only gives them important information about their environment, but it also teaches them that they’re capable of doing it.

They even have a poster of things to say instead of “Be careful!”.