• General irritability
• Headaches, neck or back pain
• Stomachaches, nausea, diarrhea
• Tooth-grinding or jaw-clenching
• Frequent crying and whining
• Aggressive behavior
• Trouble sleeping
• Feeling nervous or jittery
• Complaints of a fast heartbeat or shakiness

If your child is experiencing some or many of these symptoms, stress might be to blame. (To be sure, take him to the pediatrician to rule out health problems before assuming that it’s stress.) Teaching your child to handle stress well now will serve him throughout his entire life.

Try some of these tips:

- Evaluate whether all of the activities that your child participates in are necessary or beneficial. If your child is exhausted from going from school to various practices and rehearsals every weekday afternoon, consider cutting something out. Also, if your child hates a certain activity, talk to him about dropping it. As adults, we know that at some point, we can’t keep taking on new obligations; this is a valuable lesson to teach your child as well.

- Make sure he has plenty of unstructured time. After a long day at school, give your child a break before he jumps into tackling homework, soccer practice, music lessons and chores. Send him outside to play, or let him watch a silly cartoon. Even better, give him a snack and just spend time sitting together, chatting.

- Help him prioritize and create a routine. I know that I feel less stressed-out when I have a workable routine, and so do my kids! Be flexible, but in general, stick to a plan. It might be school, snack, homework, sports practice, dinner, relaxation time, bath, bed. Or, your afternoons may look like this: school, after school care, dinner, dance class, homework, bed. This gives your child a sense of consistency and can help him remain calm, even when he has a lot to do.

- Encourage your child to find an outlet for stress. Teach him to take a breather when he feels his stress levels rising. He could go for a walk, listen to music, call a friend or simply lay down for a few minutes. Set a good example by doing the same yourself: if your blood pressure is rising and your heart is pumping, take a break!

- Foster a healthy lifestyle. Make sure your child is eating well, sleeping regularly and getting plenty of exercise. This will boost his physical health, as well as his emotional health and the way he is able to deal with stress. Get the whole family involved, as focusing on health is beneficial to everyone!

- Don’t be afraid to seek help. If your child’s symptoms of stress are unmanageable or seem to get worse, talk to his teacher, pediatrician or a counselor for tips and suggestions. This will not only help your child now, but will also allow him to feel good about asking for help as an adult, which is a lesson that many of us, particularly moms, need to work on!

How do you help your child deal with stress?

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• Day camp or sleep away camp? The first step in narrowing down the search for the right summer program for your child is to decide whether you want to use a day camp, where the child attends only during specific hours of the day, or a sleep away camp, where the child will stay and sleep at the camp for a number of days or weeks. They each have their advantages: Day camps are generally more affordable and may be a better fit for a younger child or one who simply isn’t ready to be away from home for more than a day or two, whereas sleep away camps may provide a more intensive experience and allow campers to build stronger friendship bonds.

• What do you – and your child – hope to get out of the camp experience? Is your child an avid athlete? There are camps that are devoted to helping kids improve their abilities in a specific team or individual sport, like baseball or gymnastics. If your child is more the creative type, there are drama, art, and music camps available. Looking for a new and exciting experience? Consider camps that feature activities like waterskiing or hiking. Academically minded youngsters might enjoy a camp that offers science or foreign language programs. There is something out there to fit nearly every possible interest.

• Safety. Any time your kids are away from home, it’s important for you to know they will be safe and cared for. Once you’ve determined which type of camp you’re looking for, it’s time to research individual programs. Consider the location of the camp, the camper to staff ratio, the qualifications of staff members, the facilities available at the camp as well as nearby and the camp’s policies and procedures for handling emergencies or any particular special needs your child might have. You might also ask for references from families whose children have previously attended the camp that you’re interested in.

Remember, summer is a vacation for your child, so it’s important to let her have input into how she spends that time. The most important thing is to choose a camp program that she’ll find engaging and rewarding, as well as a camp that makes you feel comfortable that she’ll be well cared for.

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• Keep up with your routine. Although the sun is setting late into the evening hours, don’t let time get away from you. Insist that your kids go to bed at the same time that you’ve enforced all year long. Once summer vacation starts, you can relax that a little bit, but don’t give them the impression that they don’t actually have to follow the rules for the rest of the year. Keep mealtimes and homework time relatively consistent, as well.

• Have a conference with your child’s teacher before school ends to find out what he needs to work on for next year. If math is not his strong suit, for example, find out what topics you can help him with over the summer so that he’ll be on grade level when school starts back up in the fall.

• Continue checking your child’s homework each night. This is the time of year when kids start slacking off; don’t let yours get away with it. Whether you have a first grader or a high schooler make sure your child knows that his continued success is expected through the entire school year.

• Start planning for an educational and fun summer. Look into the programs offered in your community, and make decisions based on what your child wants and needs. Your local library is likely planning their summer programs; find out if you can help or when you can sign your child up for reading incentives, camps and other fun activities. This will help you alleviate parental panic centered on what on earth you will be doing with the children once summer vacation begins!

• Take advantage of the time after the season finales of your child’s favorite television shows. Once reruns start playing, it’s time to fill that time with something else, preferably something more educational than more television! Try board games, catching fireflies, read-alouds or springtime sports: anything to keep the brain moving!

• Start making plans for the next school year. Will your child switch schools? Do you already know who his teacher will be? Are you planning a move across town? Before school ends this year, take care of any last-minute housekeeping, such as meeting his new teacher, updating registration forms or finding out the specifics about a new schedule.

Although the school year is winding to a close, don’t give up on the race just yet… set a good example by prodding your kids through the final weeks and making plans to keep their brains and bodies active through the long summer. You can do it!

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Being a mom is hard, emotional work, and it makes sense that every mother is attached to her way of doing things. After all, if she didn’t think that fill-in-the-blank was the best way to handle baby-feeding/sleeping/diapering/child-rearing for her family, then presumably she wouldn’t be doing it that way! And when someone comes along and says “your way is not right; my way is better,” that brings up all sorts of defensive feelings! On mommy message boards and social media sites, there are currently debates, sparked by the magazine cover, revolving around whether it’s appropriate to nurse an older toddler/preschooler, whether breastfeeding moms are more worthy, and whether moms who choose not to or who are unable to nurse are bonding as well with their children. There are moms in an absolute tizzy over this.

This is precisely the goal of those at TIME Magazine, of course! The point is to garner a larger readership, and in this case, placing a controversial photo on the front achieved that goal — at least in the short run! They want people to ask, am I “mom enough?” after seeing that cover, and buy the magazine to find out.

Are you mom enough? Do they have a safe place to sleep at night, whether that is in a crib or in your family bed? Are they fed and healthy? Does it matter if they’re fed from a bottle or from a breast, and whether you stopped nursing after four weeks or after four years? Will it even matter in a year or in five years?

If you find yourself getting worked up over the implication that you’re not “mom enough” if you are not nursing your preschooler or following other attachment parenting techniques, then take a step back and breathe. If you’re rethinking your parenting methods because something isn’t working, then kudos to you for taking action. If, however, you’re feeling threatened because you’re afraid that you’re not “good enough,” whatever that means, then don’t worry about it. If your kids are happy and as healthy as possible, then you’re “mom enough.”

When I was a kid, I loved climbing the big maple tree in our backyard and reading a book for hours on end. It was cool up there, and usually my brothers didn’t even see me; I was safe from being annoyed by them! If your kids aren’t into hiding in trees, try some of these suggestions:

• Water Balloons

Even if you don’t have a pool, your kids can still get their water fix and spend some time running off some energy in the fresh air. Fill a laundry basket with water balloons and let them have a war! If you want the game to last longer than approximately three minutes, have them play a game of catch, instead, encouraging them to take a step back each time they successfully catch the balloon. I’ve found that this works best on the driveway or, if you live on a quiet street, in the road. It’s hard to pick up all of the tiny pieces of broken balloons from the grass, but gathering them from a flat concrete area is easy.

• Set Up Tents

If you can keep the kids out of the hot sun, they’ll feel cooler and may stay outside longer. Set up tents, either the type you would use for camping or the type you’d use to cover the eating area at a cookout, and see where their imaginations take them! My younger brothers would take their action figures into a tent and play for hours, and my daughter often brings craft supplies to the park, where she works on them with her friends in the covered seating area.

• Cool Them Down From the Inside

It doesn’t feel as hot out if you’re eating popsicles, ice cream or other cold (and potentially messy!) snacks. Keep the freezer stocked with cold confections that your kids love. If you’re concerned about excess sugar consumption, try freezing berries or grapes (for kids older than six only, to prevent choking!) or buying organic tubes of yogurt to place in the freezer. Put a pitcher of ice water or ice-cold lemonade on an outside table, and they won’t have to come in every time they get thirsty.

• Send Them Out After Dinner

At some point during the summer, it really is uncomfortable during the late morning and afternoon. If this is the case, let them lounge around inside during the day, but send them out to ride their bikes and play in the backyard in the hours between dinnertime and bedtime. Since the sun sets so much later in the summer, they may have several hours of daylight left after the dinner dishes have been washed. One caveat: plan on using insect repellent, since when the sun starts to go down, the mosquitoes come out.

What are some of your kids’ favorite hot-weather outdoor activities?