יום שני, ז׳ תמוז תשפ״וMonday, June 22, 2026
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An acclaimed educator and social skills specialist, Mrs. Rifka Schonfeld has served the Jewish community for close to thirty years. She founded and directs the widely acclaimed educational program, SOS, servicing all grade levels in secular as well as Hebrew studies. A kriah and reading specialist, she has given dynamic workshops and has set up reading labs in many schools. In addition, she offers evaluations G.E.D. preparation, social skills training and shidduch coaching, focusing on building self-esteem and self-awareness. She can be reached at 718-382-5437 or at rifkaschonfeld@gmail.com.
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Doing something that she is good at can boost her self-esteem tremendously and provide her with an opportunity to make like-minded friends.
Parents should avoid discussing their child’s worries in front of him. Hearing about his own problems can often cause more anxiety and result in seeing his problems as larger than they are.
Dysgraphia is not simply a motor problem, but also involves information processing skills (transferring thoughts from the mind through the hand onto the paper).
Your child’s fears are very real and should not be ignored. That would only make them grow. However, bedtime is not the time to address those fears in a genuine matter.
When people feel unfulfilled or discontented with their jobs or their lives, they might turn to food to suppress those feelings. Food becomes a focus instead of the boredom or the discontentment.
It’s hard to believe that bullying can occur in our schools, but unfortunately, bullying is a widespread problem that affects children of all religions, races, and ethnicities.
Temper tantrums are normal for toddlers, but once children are after kindergarten, we expect the number of tantrums to be significantly reduced.
Sometimes it is hard to name what you are feeling. Suddenly, you feel hot. You feel a bit of a burning session in your chest and on your neck. You can open a window to cool off, but you might not actually be addressing where that physical manifestation is coming from.
If confidence comes after action, what allows action to happen in the first place? The answer is self-trust.
What does working with parenting look like? Kohn recommends collaboration over control, and love and reason over power.
If your child is having trouble with a friend or cannot figure out a math question, talk to him about the ways he can approach the problem. Ask him to suggest multiple paths to get to a plausible conclusion. This will give him confidence when he encounters a similar problem in the future.
Children who struggle with social skills are less likely to participate in class, less likely to ask important questions when they don’t understand something, and more likely to fall between the cracks.
Their difficulties manifest in different ways and have different consequences, yet the core of the issue is a lack of social skills that impede friendship and relationships.
Chanie hung her head but the damage was done. Her mother tried to pull things back on course by introducing a new game. The girls’ feeble response, however, signaled the party was all but over.
Our rational side, or rider, knows that we want to stop eating because we are full or get up early in order to be prepared for the day. On the other hand, our emotional side, or elephant, likes the way the food makes us feel and wants to stay cuddled under warm covers on a dark morning.
Anxiety becomes something serious when your child is unable to function or takes an inordinate amount of time to perform normal every day activities.
Do you live like that? Constantly imagining danger around the corner? Are you suffering from low-grade anxiety on a constant basis?
A lot of this unique and personal language that you develop with your child happens until around the time your child starts sixth or seventh grade.
The advantage of identifying this behavior, and labeling it is that the child can now get help. The disadvantage is that the label can become an excuse, a crutch which will then continue to allow this behavior rather than devise means of dealing with the challenge.
Almost all anxiety is normal. It’s what you do with anxiety that makes it normal or not normal. In reality, everyone is going to become anxious about changes, new experiences, and risks, but the way different people deal with those anxieties is key.
Once your child’s playdate arrives, don’t just leave the room. Instead, suggest some activities that will get things going. Taking out puzzles, musical instruments, or blocks are great ways to break the ice. Once the children begin to play together, take a backseat, but be available in case they need you.
Be truthful even if it is painful. In such tenuous situations, children sense gaps in the story or can begin to mistrust their parents if they find out later that information has been concealed or distorted.
Oppositional defiant disorder is the diagnosis often given to kids who tantrum a lot, often refuse to do what they’re told, and do not follow rules and requests. While the diagnosis refers to specific behaviors, it does not provide any information about the problems and lagging skills that are causing those behaviors.
When they are young, children simply want to please their parents and will do their best to live up to even the highest expectations. However, repeated failure to meet inflated hopes can injure children’s self-esteem.
When is bullying an isolated incident and when is it considered a more serious situation in that parents and teachers should become involved?
In our community, with its many large families, very often a rebbe or a teacher will be privileged to teach several siblings of one family. If big brother is a super-achiever, most likely his younger brothers have heard the refrain Why can’t you be more like your brother? Parents must avoid the impulse to do the same thing.
Because birth order can affect most children in the same ways, there are ways that you can help your children overcome weaknesses that birth order has thrown their way.
While at different points there is negative press surrounding the use of time outs, many psychologists and educators believe that when used correctly, a time out can be effective and valuable.
A child who struggles to read, follow directions, or write quickly may feel embarrassed in front of peers. This is especially true as children grow older and school becomes more publicly performative through reading aloud, presenting projects, or participating in class.
Fear sees a threat. Anxiety imagines one. Fear screams, Get out! Anxiety ponders, What if?” While fear results in running away or fighting, anxiety inspires gloom and doom.
Children who struggle with social skills are less likely to participate in class, less likely to ask important questions when they don’t understand something, and more likely to fall between the cracks.
It’s all about when and how you say no.
When we help children develop an emotional vocabulary, we can transform raw feelings into a tangible thing. This is the first step in learning to control those very raw emotions.
Reporting on other’s positive actions can inspire the reporter to emulate those good deeds.
Like social skills, street smarts can be picked up naturally or they can be learned through explicit instruction.
Stubbornness brings lots of benefits, but what about the negative consequences when raising a child? Is there a way to alleviate them?
Your child is always watching you, even if you don’t notice. If you model gratitude, by saying “thank you” to the clerk in the grocery store and the car service driver, you are teaching him the proper way to act.
Changing your children’s negative behavior will probably require you to change yourself.
How is character built? According to Tough, character is created by encountering and overcoming failure.
Parents of younger children can play matching games which will help with making connections. Parents of older children can talk about math when in the supermarket or famous artists when drawing at home.
Unexpressed anger can lead to other problems, such as feeling perpetually hostile and cynical.
We all deal with anger once in a while. But, during the teenage years, anger is something that can take over both teenagers’ and parents’ lives. This anger can feed that bad wolf and make him grow out of proportion.
ear is part of our survival instincts. When we are faced with danger, our body goes into what scientists call fight or flight mode.
Who doesn’t love to procrastinate? It’s much easier to do something fun than to sit down and do what you’ve got to do. But establishing what our priorities are can then help us fight that procrastination and accomplish our goals.
While remediation focuses on the past, acceleration focuses on the present. What are the students learning this week?
For those who are introverted, being with people often feels like it is sapping their energy – even if they themselves have great social skills. Because of this perceived depletion of energy, after a party or meeting, they will need time alone in order to recharge.
Pesach is a time of freedom – not just from physical bondage but also from limitations that hold us back. Just as Bnei Yisrael prepared for their journey from Mitzrayim by refining themselves, we too can use this time for self-improvement.
It’s true that your daughter might have trouble relating to children her own age, but as she gets older, she will be comfortable in all sorts of situations. Once she enters high school, her peers will have caught up with her and she will do equally well at interacting with her classmates as well as adults.
What is separation anxiety? Most people think that separation anxiety is something our six-month-old infants develop and our toddlers grow out of. Separation anxiety before a child is two years old is completely normal and helps children learn how to master their environment.
Psychologists and educators agree on one point; the single most important criterion in raising truthful children is to expose them consistently to a home and school environment where integrity is not only preached but scrupulously practiced. Even when it involves sacrifice.
What are the causes behind output failure? Are we discussing actual dysfunctions of the brain – or does the term merely whitewash certain flaws in character?
Short-term emotions are in the moment emotions that can cloud our decision-making process. Short-term emotions can make you replay conversations over and over again until you can’t think straight – even if nothing has changed since you first starting thinking about it.
Suddenly, it may start to feel like your like child does not want to speak to you at all. And this is especially difficult at this age since you may feel an even more pressing need to support and protect them as they gain independence.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University discovered that children tend to lose approximately two and half months worth of material over the summer. That is, rather than retaining the material they have mastered during the school year, student who do not flex their academic muscles over the summer revert back to the skills they had in April as opposed to June. Researchers call this phenomenon summer brain drain.
We don’t often think about children at such a young age having social skills, but did you know that you begin to develop social skills from birth?
People who are emotional eaters use food to make themselves feel better. In other words, they eat to fill emotional needs, rather than to fill their stomachs.
Asperger's Syndrome was first described in the 1940s by an Austrian pediatrician, Hans Asperger, who noticed that he had many patients with deficient social and communicative skills even though they had normal language development and cognitive abilities.
Sometimes it is hard to name what you are feeling. Suddenly, you feel hot. You feel a bit of a burning session in your chest and on your neck. You can open a window to cool off, but you might not actually be addressing where that physical manifestation is coming from.
Feeling like you are different can affect your self-esteem. And self-esteem is essential for forming healthy relationships.
Rather than attempting to modify behaviors right away, Dr. Greene advocates for solving the underlying problems. That means that the challenging behaviors that we might want to change are symptoms of a larger issue that we should focus on rather than those specific challenging behaviors.
If resilience were a trait, something you had or didn’t have, there would be little we could do to foster it in our children. Part of what is so exciting – and important – about the work of youth development is that children’s resilience is largely determined by how parents and communities raise them.
Women have a particularly difficult time with shame because there are different (often stricter) societal expectations for women as mothers, fashion figures, and careerists. Therefore, it’s really important to recognize the negative effects of shame on your life and to transform yourself in an effort to control it.
As your child grows and learns more about the world, it is natural for him to be hesitant or fearful of new circumstances. In some ways, it is good your child is afraid – it will make him more cautious and careful.
Our experiences quite literally shape us – and more specifically – shape our brains. That means that we will each see the world in a unique way because of the way that our previous experiences have shaped our brains.
A perfect case of a child who was twice exceptional is Albert Einstein. Even though Einstein was brilliant when it came to visual and spatial reasoning, as a child he had behavioral problem, was a terrible speller, and had trouble verbally expressing himself.
Use graphic organizers. Graphic organizers can use key words, pictures, or icons. These mental images can help arrange the information in a coherent and streamlined manner.
Children and teens often face significant challenges that make school life difficult. Whether it’s the anxiety of meeting new people, the fear of rejection, or the complexities that come with learning differences like ADHD, these struggles can hinder their ability to form meaningful relationships.
The first way that sensory processing disorders affects academics is simply in the child’s ability (or inability) to sit still when there is a plethora of sensory information in a classroom.
Many people confuse the concepts of self-esteem and ego, assuming that if you believe in yourself you are automatically egoistic and arrogant.
It makes sense that your daughter’s teachers would not have picked up on this in preschool because children are not often forced to speak in the learning process.
The prevalent attitude that frowns on parents for exercising authority over their kids creates confusion even in parents who believe in discipline. Children sense the ambivalence and use it to their advantage.
Expecting children in whom these skills are delayed to behave rationally when upset, and to penalize them for not doing so, is unrealistic, Greene argues. These children do not choose to behave badly any more than a child would choose to have a reading disability.
A certain amount of anxiety as we go about our daily lives is normal. Most adults can navigate their way through the nagging concerns that dog their thoughts without getting derailed by them. Children, however, have a much harder time handling anxiety.
Nechama is one of countless singles whose shidduch prospects are being limited by a lack of social skills. Such skills run the gamut from communication skills and grooming to anger management and stress control. And while social skills issues plague people of all ages, they are particularly damaging to singles on the shidduch scene.
Many of us remember our parents telling us that if people called us names or hurt our feelings, we should simply tell ourselves, Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never harm me. Unfortunately, that logic does not hold true.
Temper tantrums or fits are common for terrible twos and children entering adolescence. Interestingly, the reasons behind the tantrums and the effective ways to deal with these tantrums are the same regardless of age.
In reality, we are not born with street smarts or social skills. Some children pick up on social cues from birth, while others need to be taught these skills explicitly.
There was a time, not too long ago, when being a good parent was the most valued achievement in our community... Today, we pay a great deal of lip service to this concept, but in practice, we allow many other priorities, such as succeeding in our careers, social obligations and self-fulfillment, to compete with the one we profess to cherish most.
It is crucial for parents to think clearly and stay calm – not an easy thing to do when a child is in the midst of a full blown tantrum, complete with kicking, screaming, and breaking things. Parents should also avoid turning the episode into a power struggle.
What is the nature of these social disabilities and what, if anything, can parents do to help their children and adolescents fit in?
Now, watching her daughter’s forlorn profile through the window, Miriam thought, Riki was once a good, happy kid. I don’t know what’s going on but I’m going to find a way back to that place. There has to be a way.
In retrospect, I never was able to get my act together. My childhood was marked by disorganization and clumsiness. I never had pens or loose leaf paper, my briefcase was always a mess, and I was a chronic latecomer. I remember several particularly painful episodes.
It doesn’t matter how good a parent you are, your kids will at some point feel that a sibling got more attention, more gifts, or more cake than they did.
The problem arises when the peers are not all you would have liked them to be, and your child is facing some strong pressure to conform to standards that he knows are not acceptable or, at best, can be found in the murky ‘grey area.’
I present you with this research data not because it’s interesting or cute, but so that you will fully appreciate the significance of the power of peer pressure.
The New York Times explains that in order to be diagnosed with ADHD, children should have at least six attention symptoms or six activity and impulsivity symptoms – to a degree beyond what would be expected for children their age.
Research has indicated that children with learning disabilities often fail to pick up social skills and experience more difficulty making and keeping friends than young people without these problems. Yet, quite often children who academically are well within the mainstream, suffer from these disadvantages as well.
Picture yourself as a child, feeling unable to wait your turn or restrain yourself from blurting out comments as your teacher or parent is speaking. Even though you know full well the negative consequences you will suffer from your behavior, you easily become oppositional and answer back to authority.
It’s true that Executive Function Disorder is becoming a hot topic in education these days. Of course, that is not because more children and adults are dealing with it, but rather because experts have given it a name and have devised ways to deal with its accompanying difficulties.
What are the causes behind output failure? Are we discussing actual dysfunctions of the brain – or does the term merely whitewash certain flaws in character?
What Exactly Is ADD? ADD is a neurological disorder characterized by inappropriate levels of inattention, over-activity, and impulsivity. Symptoms arise in early childhood but are not always identified correctly.
Sometimes parents may not know if their child is being bullied. Some children are intimidated into secrecy. They may also keep quiet because they feel ashamed that they have allowed this to happen. They may fear that the parents will either criticize them or will intervene in a way that will make everything worse.
While children who are extremely socially awkward will often be ostracized by their peers in elementary school, middle school is when a child’s social development becomes more apparent.
Even though Leah was the most popular girl in class, the other girls didn’t really like her. In fact, they were a little bit scared of getting on her bad side.
Another by-product of the unattended classroom is the friendship crisis a great many children suffer. While most children eagerly await recess and lunchtime as cherished opportunities for fun with playmates, there are some children who experience loneliness and rejection during these unstructured periods.
Children with experiential insatiability, are extremely hard to satisfy. School-related routines such as processing information and producing written work do not quell their appetites for intense experiences.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a common behavioral disorder that affects between 8-10% of school age children. Boys are three times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with ADHD.
Social competence enables us to know what to say, how to make good choices, and how to behave in diverse situations. The extent to which children and adolescents possess good social skills, say experts, can heavily influence their academic performance, social and family relationships, and later, their success on the job.
Many people believe that practice and a positive role model will solve all social issues, but what they do not understand is that sometimes people simply lack social intelligence when it comes to finding favor with others.
June 21, 2026 
