ACA Counseling Corner Blog

Do you volunteer? It might be through your church, your children's sports teams, a local hospital, or an almost limitless number of other opportunities to give a bit of your time and talents to help others. A lot of us do volunteer to help in various ways. And a lot more of us don't. We may have a variety of excuses as to why we don't participate in volunteering, but what we're really passing up are not just chances to help others, but also the opportunity to derive a number of personal benefits.

Kids often complain about school. Usually such complaints are about minor things -- disagreements with friends, a test that they weren't prepared for, or a subject they just don't like or understand very well. And while it's easy for parents to ignore most such complaints as just being a natural reaction that most kids have, there may be times when there is something real and meaningful behind the complaining, a time when it's important to pay attention.

Stress can sneak into our lives through our jobs, families, personal relationships or a wide variety of other causes. Regardless of the source, stress is never a pleasant experience and so we often try to find ways to eliminate or minimize the stress we are experiencing. A common stress reducer is to turn to our favorite foods, the ones that make us feel better. Unfortunately such action can also add extra pounds and end up being another form of stress in our lives.

There are probably lots of people whose lives turn out just the way they imagined they would, or possibly even better than they ever dreamed. But there are also plenty of us who find our current lives aren't quite living up to our earlier expectations and are possibly missing those goals by a great deal. With some simple steps and determination it's not that hard to make changes toward getting the life you really want.

Communication between parents and teens is often difficult. Teens are often convinced that their parents don't understand them, don't trust them and refuse to recognize their growing maturity. While it may not be possible to always overcome such feelings, parents can often have a much better relationship with their teens by taking a few simple, but important, steps to build a parent - teen friendship.

It can be difficult to change the actions of others even after trying to tell that other person repeatedly that what they're doing or saying is personally troubling to you. It can happen with our kids, our spouses, or other close relatives. Often the problem is that the words simply aren't being heard. What that can mean is that it may be time to take action instead.

Stress is very much a part of our modern world. Whether it's the pressures of family responsibilities, personal obligations or the requirements of our jobs, there are ample opportunities for most of us to feel stressed and anxious a great deal of the time. To handle such stress successfully it sometimes helps to be able to escape from it, to put whatever is bothering us, out of our thoughts, even if for just a little bit. And nature can help us do just that.

It is often difficult for parents to accept that sometimes it's a good thing for their children to take risks. That doesn't mean that a child ought to constantly be putting themselves in danger -- that's never a good thing. But it does mean that our kids need to stretch their boundaries at times and try things that they may possibly fail at, but that help them build the confidence and character they need to mature successfully.

Cold weather hits and for many of us that means forgetting all about our promises to ourselves to stay more active. Instead we huddle up in our warm house and ignore the way our weight starts increasing, or the fact that we really don't feel as good as when we're staying active. No, cooler temperatures are not an excuse to become a sloth.

This is about the time of the new year when too many of us give up on those New Year's resolutions that we made just a few weeks before. We shouldn't. In most cases our decisions to change certain things were probably a good idea. The problem, many times, is that we've gone about it wrong. Now is a great time to take a new approach and reach the results we desire.