Category: Tips for Parents

Those pre-teen or “tween” years when your child hits double digits in age and suddenly wants nothing to do with you can be tough for caregivers. They’re busy testing limits and developing independence, and it’s a challenge to keep a strong bond with your child. The Child Mind Institute has ten tips to help you parent your tween … Continue reading 10 Tips for Parenting Your Tween

To say the past year has been a challenge for families, schools, and students is an understatement. With the school year coming to a close, our friends at Learning Heroes have new resources to help families and students get a Summer REcharge. The Summer REcharge helps your family partner with your child’s teacher to develop a simple plan … Continue reading Give Your Kid a Summer REcharge from Learning Heroes

Perhaps you have a child leaving the nest this coming fall and heading off to college, or perhaps you have one not leaving for a few years. In either case, an academic advisor from the University of Vermont has 12 things college parents should know about how to support their child when they head off, … Continue reading 12 Things College Parents Should Know

Siblings are sometimes described as best friends and best enemies. Given that they live together and spend a lot of their free time together, it’s understandable that they’ll get on each other’s nerves once in a while. And the pandemic, with all of us spending much more time at home, hasn’t made things any easier. … Continue reading What to Do When Your Kids Are Fighting

Learning Heroes, in partnership with National PTA, Univision, and Remake Learning Days Across America, has launched Paths to Success, a research-based bilingual resource aimed at helping parents of middle school and high school students prepare their child for success in high school and beyond—whether that path leads to a four-year college, technical program, or a job. … Continue reading Make Sure Your Child is on the Path to Success

As classes start back up after the holidays, many of our children are quickly closing in on a year of online learning. Like many adults working remotely, they may be finding it difficult to continue to be engaged. The Child Mind Institute, whose resources we’ve highlighted before in supporting learning at home and modifying your child’s IEP or 504 … Continue reading Helping Your Child Stay Engaged in Remote Learning

A new law that took effect with the 2020-2021 school year requires every Illinois public high school senior to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in order to graduate. With students struggling with remote education and family finances perhaps stretched by the pandemic, college plans may seem more up in the air than … Continue reading Illinois Student Assistance Commission’s Free FAFSA Help

We at Illinois PTA are big fans of National Public Radio’s (NPR) Life Kit podcasts and articles, especially the parenting-focused ones. Now, as we head into an uncertain back-to-school time, they have released a 15-minute podcast and article on 20 Questions to Help Decide What’s Best for Your Kids (and You) This School Year. Whether … Continue reading 20 Questions to Help You with Back-to-School Choices

Of all the things parents have struggled with during the shift to online learning, helping their child with math probably ranks close to the top. Edutopia spoke with hundreds of teachers and sorted through over 500 comments to find the math tools that they found most useful this past spring. The result was a list … Continue reading Teacher-Recommended Math Apps and Online Tools

As Illinois heads towards back-to-school time, families are again facing the possibility of their children either starting the year with online classes or perhaps moving to online classes later should cases of COVID-19 increase in their area. After the sudden shift to online learning this spring, some parents and caregivers may be concerned about how … Continue reading Supporting Learning at Home

Parenthood comes with a lot of difficult conversations that you need to have with your child. For some of those conversations, you might be comfortable with the information, but struggle with talking with your child about it. For others, you might feel you don’t know enough to even start the conversation. With the protests following … Continue reading How to Talk to Your Kids About Racism

We’ve talked about the “summer slide” before, and with this year’s shift to online learning due to the pandemic, many are concerned that the “COVID slide” could put students behind where they were at the start of the school year last fall. Longtime National PTA partners Learning Heroes has resources to help you determine what … Continue reading Make Sure Your Child Doesn’t Have a “COVID Slide”