APtly Said – Page 51

A sign of affection

My beautiful 3 year old, like most I would presume, is a rather emotional breed.

Juliette knows not only what she wants but can also quite effectively articulate why she wants it and why we should appease her wishes. Sometimes I joke that she is a lawyer in the making. She is clever, intelligent, determined and oh so independent.

While these qualities are all incredibly wonderful and make her the amazing kid that she is, they also tend to be what causes us to get into battles of the will.

I have learned long ago that arguing with a child leads to frustration, hurt feelings and even more conflict. Finding ways to communicate effectively with my strong-willed daughter when we have a difference in view can be trying but, when done well, is incredibly rewarding.

The other morning Daddy was getting ready to leave for work. We were sitting down to a quick breakfast together at the breakfast bar to spend a few minutes of family time before he rushed out the door, just as we do every morning.

Juliette decided that she wanted her second cartoon — she gets to watch two each morning — prior to eating breakfast. We calmly explained that while we could not force her to come eat breakfast as a family, we would greatly appreciate if she would come spend some time with Daddy before he had to leave.

She quickly switched into defensive mode and began to argue why we should see her point of view: “Breakfast will be there after my cartoon…” “I have only watched one…” “You and Daddy can come sit with me…”

We explained once again that if she did not wish to come sit with us, that was fine, and placed her plate on the counter for when she was ready. We also explained that she would still need to wait until we were done with breakfast for us to put another cartoon on.

A tantrum ensued. The best insults a 3 year old can muster were hurled at us like bullets, tiny clenched fists full of frustration flew into the couch cushions and tears of anger began to flow.

Rather than getting angry or letting the intensity of our emotions match that of our daughter’s, my husband and I sat calmly at the breakfast bar drinking our coffee. This is not the norm for our morning routine, so we didn’t think much of it. I let her release her frustration for a few minutes.

Rather than getting upset or doling out an unnecessary punishment, we waited until our daughter was receptive and offered a simple, affectionate gesture to let her know that we were here when she was ready. When she had calmed down and made eye contact with me, I signed “I Love You.”

Ever since my daughter was an infant, Juliette has been fond of the use of sign language to communicate. We have graduated from simple baby signing to occasional sign-language classes, ASL videos and countless ASL books and flash cards. It is not uncommon for her to speak in full sentences and use accompanying signs simultaneously.

My simple act — a “sign” of affection — brought my daughter back to a calm state of mind. Without a word she climbed off the couch, walked over to us and laid her head on my lap. “I’m sorry. I love you, too, Momma,” she said.

My heart melted. This was definitely one of those moments you treasure and hold dear in your heart.

She climbed up on her stool, and we finished our breakfast together. When Daddy had kissed his girls goodbye, Juliette and I snuggled on the couch for her second morning cartoon. All was well. Peace had been restored.

Strong-willed kids have strong emotions and strong reactions to situations that they either don’t understand or don’t feel are fair. I have found that when we meet these emotions and reactions with support, love and patience, rather than anger, frustration and punishment, we are far more likely to diffuse the negativity rather than exacerbate it.

While I am sure we will have many more battles of the will, this is one that I am actually quite thankful for. That moment of connection with my daughter was like magic, and I will treasure it dearly.

Tantrums

My 2-year-old son was standing in his bedroom doorway with little sobs, tears rolling down his cheeks. All because he was so tired and it was bedtime, but he wanted to keep playing with his trains.

My heart was breaking.

He wanted me to take him back downstairs, but I was nursing his half-asleep baby sister, and his older brother was already in bed and ready for me to sing his bedtime songs.

I felt like I was doing everything I was supposed to do during a tantrum. I had stayed calm. I had talked to him about how I knew he was sad, how I knew he didn’t want to stop playing but that it was time for bed. I had tried to hug and comfort him, which he refused, so I had stayed nearby.

I didn’t know what else to try, and seeing him like that was more than I could take at that moment. I felt like I was going to start crying, too, just from seeing him so upset and from me feeling so helpless.

Then I remembered a creative suggestion I’d read recently for handling tantrums. I pulled out the nearest book, one I knew he loved. I opened it and started reading. I didn’t make a big deal out of it. I didn’t tell him to come over and didn’t read directly to him.

His tears stopped almost immediately. Soon after he was sitting beside me, giggling as we all looked at the book together. The trains were forgotten about, and once the book was finished, he climbed into bed with no more protesting.

It was the best strategy I’ve found yet for dealing with tantrums, and it’s worked for us several times now. A similar concept also worked when he had a tantrum in the car, and I turned on music and started singing to myself.

However, what I’ve found is that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to a child’s tantrums. What works in one situation won’t necessarily work in another.

Sometimes, the reading idea will only work as a temporary fix, and right after the book is done, he’s back to crying for what he wants and can’t have. Sometimes, he just needs me to sit beside him while he cries, to offer to hold him in my lap, to comfort him.

This was the case recently when my son wanted to leave the house and go to the park, which was not something I could say yes to at that time. To him, it was so unfair. He didn’t understand why we couldn’t go right then. I tried to empathize with him and acknowledge his feelings, but there was nothing I could say to make it better. We sat on the garage stairs together for several minutes, my arm around him as he cried. Suddenly, he stopped crying, stood up, turned off the garage light, and went back into the house.

There’s a lot of trial and error in finding the right method of handling a tantrum, but I hope my son knows that I’m there for him and trying my best to figure out what he needs in that moment. It’s still a struggle for all of us when tantrums happen, but little by little, we’re finding new ways to help him deal with those big emotions.

Giving our children presence…at work!

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Oct. 9, 2008, and in the past 7 years since, workplaces are increasingly becoming more family friendly, including allowing employees to bring their babies to work with them.

By Carla Moquin, president of the Parenting in the Workplace Institute

For many working parents, their desire to be present for their children is at its most visceral when they return to work weeks or months after their baby’s birth and leave their baby in the care of others for dozens of hours each week. Our society — and many others — assumes that this separation is a necessity of our modern world. After all, the workplace is “for business,” and the home is where we “should” care for our children — not to mention that most people assume that babies would cry all the time if their parents actually tried to bring them to work.

But more than 100 baby-friendly organizations around the country — and more than 1,300 babies — are proving these assumptions wrong. And at the same time, they are illustrating how socially sensitive babies are and how much they crave being part of our communal interactions.

By nature, we are highly social beings, even from birth. Babies prefer nothing more than looking at and interacting with other people. They want to be part of a community, to feel involved in our activities and to know that they are loved, safe and secure. When we meet those needs, healthy babies have no reason to cry: They have everything they need to be content.

Baby-friendly companies have seen this dynamic firsthand. Numerous managers and coworkers in these companies have commented that they were amazed at how happy babies at work have been — and that these babies could spend hours contentedly watching other people in the workplace.

Most of these companies explicitly tell parents that their babies’ needs come first while at work, and most parents instinctively respond quickly to their babies simply out of the practical need to avoid disturbing coworkers. This dynamic greatly contributes to the happiness and calm of babies at work.

And since babies of highly-responsive parents cry less, these parents have more available time and focus to get their jobs done in spite of having their baby with them.

An unexpected effect of these programs is the “village parenting” effect that has developed in all of them. In every baby-friendly company, many coworkers end up developing bonds with the babies in their vicinity, and they welcome the opportunity to hold or play with a baby for brief periods. This includes many people who were resistant to the idea of a baby program in the first place.

Babies at work don’t just have the presence and support of their parents. They actually end up with a social network of many caring adults who feel invested in their well-being. Babies seem to bring out our nurturing instincts, which makes sense given the communal nature of our species. For most of human history, we lived in integrated social groups in which many community members shared the efforts and rewards of child rearing and in which work and family were one and the same. Our species is actually hard-wired to respond positively to babies. Research has found that simply seeing a baby’s face — as opposed to the faces of older children or adults — triggers a “sense of reward and good feeling” in just 1/7th of a second.

Baby-friendly companies have learned firsthand that babies — and older children — thrive when we integrate them into our day-to-day world. They illustrate that we as a community benefit when we are present for our children and, perhaps most significantly, when we give our children the chance to be present with us.

Lying and trust

We catch children hiding the truth from the time they are quite young. It might be a child who has just scribbled on the wall, who says “no” when you ask her if she did it. It might be a child who points to his brother and says, “He did it!” when you ask him if he spilled the juice. It might be a child who denies taking money from your wallet when you know he helped himself to the $10 that was there. Children will tell you they finished their homework, cleaned their room or brushed their teeth when in fact they did not.

Lying or keeping secrets is a defensive instinct that protects the child from too much vulnerability. Since a child’s greatest need is to maintain closeness and connection with his parents, he has to avoid anything that would create separation.

Separation does not only involve being physically apart, but also having a sense of being different, being less pleasing or significant, not belonging, being unloved or being misunderstood. Sometimes telling the truth sets you up for all of these different experiences of separation, and not only children but adults, too, instinctively avoid these experiences.

Potentially, when children reach the age of approximately 6, they want their parents to know and understand them. This need for psychological intimacy drives them to share their thoughts, feelings and secrets with their parents, making it difficult for them to hide the truth. Without even knowing why, children instinctively come to their parents to tell them what’s on their minds and in their hearts. This includes telling their parents about the trouble they got into!

However, long before this age, this instinct can become skewed.

Children are very vulnerable, and sometimes this vulnerability can become too overwhelming. If a child feels that telling the truth or sharing his secret with his parents might hurt him, then he will have to make the sacrifice of not allowing the relationship to deepen. The vulnerable feelings of embarrassment, shame or guilt will prevent him from spontaneously blurting out the truth.

If a child senses his value will be reduced in the eyes of his parents — that they will be angry, disappointed or ashamed of him, or that he is too difficult or too much to handle — he will have to hide aspects of himself from them.

In order to stay inside the relationship, the child is driven to keep secrets to prevent these painful experiences of separation. The thought process that follows: “What my parents don’t know can’t hurt me.”

We need to make it safe for our children to tell us the truth. We need to extend a generous invitation to them to bring all of who they are into the relationship. They need to feel safe to tell us what they are thinking, feeling and experiencing. They need to see that we can handle these things without losing our temper or reacting in a way that alarms or shames them.

We want to make it easy for our children to be dependent on us, so that in any situation, they naturally turn to us to seek our help and guidance. When we see a child is not truthful, it’s our job to convey that we know the truth and we are here to help him make amends.

By trusting in our children’s good intentions, we can be on their side and draw out their mixed feelings about a given situation. We need to make it safe for them to tell their side of the story and then identify the right moment to draw forth other sides of the story and lead them to the appropriate outcome.

Children want to tell us the truth. They want to be good and do the right thing. It’s our role to create the right context in which they can sense that what we know about them can’t hurt them, and that nothing can divide us.

A nod to my husband

Often times it seems — at least to me — that dads don’t get a lot of recognition, especially when their kids are babies. So in honor of my husband’s milestone birthday this month, I thought I’d take a moment to tell the world why he is so invaluable to my children and me:

To my children, he’s their whole world.

He’s their confidante, their tickle monster, their tent builder.

He’s the one they watch for out the window, unable to contain their excitement that he’s home from work.

He’s the strongest role model they could have, providing a constant example of the type of person we should all strive to be.

In his arms, they can find solace unlike any other.

Because of him, they will have a childhood filled with snowball fights and dance parties, board games and movie nights. But more importantly, they will have a childhood filled with unconditional love and security, a childhood that teaches them that all their dreams can become realities.

To me, he’s my best friend.

He’s the one who always takes care of me after I’ve spent the day taking care of the kids.

He’s the one who can make me laugh — really laugh — no matter what.

He provides constant support and encouragement in everything I do, whether it’s Attachment Parenting or pursuing writing.

He’s the provider that gives me the privilege of staying home with our children.

He’s my partner, in life and in love, as we raise our family.

The truth about dads and Attachment Parenting

Like many bedsharing parents, I’ve had conversations where I let people assume my daughter sleeps in a crib.

While I love our family bed, sometimes I just don’t want to get into the details of why I’m not afraid of suffocating my child and when and where I have sex. So I smile and nod when strangers refer to a crib that does not exist.

My husband doesn’t do this. Anyone who assumes our daughter sleeps in her own room gets immediately corrected and, if they question our choice, engaged in a lively debate.

I love this about him. It’s dads like him who break down misconceptions about Attachment Parenting (AP) and gender.

One of the most common criticisms of Attachment Parenting is that it undermines women’s place in society by demanding too much of mothers, forcing them to abandon any interests and identity outside of motherhood. But women who self-identify as feminists are more likely to practice Attachment Parenting than women who identify as non-feminist. The disconnect between criticism and reality comes from critics’ own assumptions about AP families: They assume Mom is doing it all.

Enter the AP Dad.

Maybe he is feeding the baby a bottle of pumped breast milk, with love and respect of course, while mom is at work. Maybe he’s running errands with an infant cuddled up to him in a sling. Or maybe he’s snuggling up with a toddler in bed at the end of the day.

When Mom is out of the house, he’s not “babysitting” — he’s parenting.

The assumption that he’s not, hurts all of us. This misconception about Attachment Parenting leads families away from a parenting approach that may be better for their children. It places undue pressure on mothers through a societal assumption that they are doing all the parenting. And it’s disrespectful to dads who take on their fair share of parenting responsibilities.

Even those of us in families where fathers pull their own parenting weight expect other people to assume that they’re not. As an API Leader, the most common question I’m asked is, if dads are allowed at API Support Groups. Dads need parenting support, too, but the societal expectation that Mom is doing all the parenting is so strong that we hear “parenting support group” and think “mothers’ support group.”

It is within this zeitgeist that my husband is brave for being a proud bedsharing dad. When people hear a man sleeps in a family bed, there’s often an assumption that his wife made him do it, that he was against it and that he’s never going to have sex again.

They discount the possibility that a father-to-be would research parenting options, discuss them with his partner and together they would make a decision on the sleep arrangements that they feel are best for their family.

In reality, this is how almost every family I know operates. The more apparent it becomes that a couple operates as a team, the less Attachment Parenting appears to put an undue burden on mothers.

So be proud, AP Dad! You’ll be helping out AP families everywhere. Plus, you get to end your day with snuggles.

Parent-child conflict resolution

By Elisa Llamido, a producer, actress and writer and the creator of “The Perfect Pregnancy Workout vol. 3: The Ancient Art of Belly Dance for Labor,” living in Orlando, Florida, USA, with her husband, 19-year-old stepson, 5-year-old son and four frogs

My 5-year-old son and I were on our way in to the grocery store when I suddenly realized that he wasn’t beside me. I turned back to see him standing on the sidewalk transfixed, staring at the scene unfolding before him.

A mother had been calling to her toddler to come out of the store, but he didn’t want to come. There was a large scale inside of the door, and he liked climbing on it and seeing the numbers move. There was clearly a difference in priorities here.

What caught my son’s attention was her closing gambit: “You’re not coming? OK, BYE!” She turned and walked out without him. The little boy quickly dropped what he was doing and ran after her, terrified of losing her.

My son, Jason, couldn’t take his eyes off of the scene. His horrified expression made his face a frozen mask.

“Why did she say, ‘Bye!’?” he asked.

I tried to explain it away. “She probably has somewhere that she needs to go and she doesn’t want to wait anymore,” I told him.

I realized that this me-centric explanation wouldn’t be enough for my kid. “She doesn’t really want to leave him, but she said this because she wants him to come now,” I said. Since one of the things that we work on in our house is not doing things to try to manipulate others, that sounded even worse. I grasped wildly for an explanation that would mollify my son, but I came up with nothing. We both stood, watching and waiting for the rest of the drama to unfold.

We didn’t have to wait long. The boy ran out of the store to the sidewalk, where his mother grabbed him by the upper arm and attempted to pull him so he would walk to the car faster. The toddler promptly sat down on the ground, in a last effort of defiance. Now the mother pulled harder, yanking him to his feet and dragging him, stumbling to the car.

I heard crying. It wasn’t coming from the stumbling boy. There was another witness to the scene, another towheaded moppet who was watching as the pair made its way through the parking lot. I glanced from Jason to the previously unseen witness. Wow, they’re really upset.

After they walked away, Jason suddenly reanimated and started walking into the store again, but this time he had a million questions. Why did she say that? Why did she do that? Did she hurt him? Why was she so mean to him? Was she his Mommy?

I realized that to Jason, and likely to the other little witness, this scene made absolutely no sense. They put themselves in the other boy’s shoes and couldn’t see any reason why the person who was supposed to love and care for him suddenly turned mean.

I confess that I could easily relate to why the mother did what she did. It had probably been a long day, she had probably run into the store for one forgotten item that she needed to make dinner and she just didn’t have time to wait for lollygagging. Add that to any sleep deprivation that many parents experience, and I think any adult could understand what she was feeling.

But not the kids.

Little children are gifted with the joy of living completely in the moment. They don’t understand deadlines and schedules, and their birthday or winter holiday is an eternity away. Time doesn’t mean anything. So when passing by a scale, there’s really no reason why they shouldn’t climb on it. They’re here, and there’s a scale that has a hand that moves up and down when you jump on the plate. If you asked them, they’d tell you that they couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t stop to check it out, even though you have to get home to make dinner. They may never get the chance to play on this scale again.

It’s a question of priorities.

When I’m able to adopt my son’s outlook, I feel much happier. This week, I stopped on my way into a store to snap a photo of a double rainbow on my phone and then stood and looked at it a moment, savoring it, knowing that in a minute it would be gone forever.

Before becoming a parent, I was so caught up in trying to get ahead that I dismissed anything done just for pleasure as frivolous. One of my son’s many gifts to me is that he makes me stop in my break-neck pace of deadlines and stress to look at a bug or see a bird in the yard. I realize that it’s important to stop and take in the beauty of these everyday miracles, including the miracle of the big scale at the supermarket exit.

At the same time, we adults do live in a world of schedules and we need to find a way to balance this while taking our kids’ priorities into consideration so that we can create a win-win situation where both sides feel like they get what they need.

Instead of going head-to-head with her son, the hurried mom could have spent the extra minute that she spent dragging him through the parking lot making a compromise: “We’ve got to get home to make dinner, sweetheart, so 10 more jumps on the scale and then it’s time to go.” She could then count backward as he jumped so that he’d know when his time was up. That way, he’d feel as though he was allowed to do something that he wanted, even if it wasn’t as long as he wanted to do it.

Or, if she was really in a hurry, she could have offered something more fun than the scale.

I am an athletic mom, so it’s always been easy for me to squat down, show my son my back and offer a ride. “The Mommy Train is leaving the station!” I’d call out when my son was younger, then make a door closing “Rheeeee!’ sound. My son could never resist, and he’d run over to jump on my back for a quick ride to the car. Or, if he didn’t jump on, I could scoop him up making big sound effects and then swing him around — with more sound effects, of course — as I carried him off, laughing. Now that he’s older, I can usually tempt him with a race to the car.

My friend, Cynthia, has a bad back and can’t carry her daughter, so she came up with her own invention of getting her little girl moving. Her daughter was captivated watching a marching band once, so now when she needs her to move quickly, she calls out, “OK, it’s time to march! Let’s march! Let’s march!” and her daughter quickly forgets everything else in her haste to fall in line and march after her mom.

Before I became a mother I was apprehensive about parent-child conflict. I’d seen so many of these confrontations in public places, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with them. My mom gave me her advice: “An adult should always be able to outsmart a child. We have experience. We have fully formed brains. If you can’t find a way to get a child to do what they need to do happily, you need to try harder.”

Does that mean that kids will always be reasonable? No, of course not. There are some times when they want something that they just can’t have.

My son used to want to operate heavy construction machinery. It’s just not possible, and he would get very upset. At those times, I would hold him close as he cried and let him know that I understood his frustration: “I know, honey. It would be so cool to push the levers on that truck! I want to do it, too! But we can’t. It’s not our truck.” He would cry for a moment, and then it would be over. He knew that I understood him.

I glanced at him now as we walked. His eyes were toward me now, looking for answers. I told him the truth as I saw it: “That Mommy was probably tired. She needed to get home soon and was in a hurry, so she tried to get him to leave. When he didn’t want to go, she grabbed him and made him go.”

Jason’s eyes were fixed on me now, riveted. I was confirming the horror that he thought he saw. And then I added, “I don’t agree with the way that she did that, and I would never do that to you.”

“I know, Mommy,” he answered. I then asked him, “What did you think of what you saw?” and he replied, “I don’t think she should have done that.”

Questions answered, his eyes left my face and he went back to his normal mode, contentedly observing the world around him and looking for exciting things to explore. I touched his shoulder in a gesture to satisfy my need for closeness after talking about something that disturbed him.

I wondered if that mom and son had resolved their differences as they got to the car. I hoped so.

Simple living by living simply

Sometimes I feel that everywhere I turn there is something else that I as a parent or my child “needs.” But how often do we actually need that product?

Likely, its almost never.

As I navigate this world of parenting, I find myself actively trying to move away from the world of “stuff” and focus more on the things that matter most. I am far from mastering this goal, but I have come up with some guidelines that help me keep things in perspective:

Children do not need every toy they see, or that we see for them.

I am often amazed at the amount of clutter we have amassed in our playroom in my daughter’s first two years of life. We’ve had birthdays, holidays and visits from the grandparents, after each of which there seemed to be an influx of new things. While I’m sure my daughter would tell you she loves each and every toy, I find most of them sitting unused while she favors a select few.

Coming from a large family, it is hard to limit the amount of gifts received. My husband and I are a work in progress at trying to strike the right balance between gift-giving and exorbitance. A couple of examples of how we try to do this:

We have asked our family members to limit the amount of gifts they buy our daughter.
We have decided that while we want all our friends and family to celebrate birthdays each year, a gift is not necessary to attend the party with a birthday party magician.

To be fair, my husband and I provide a full life for our daughter, and she will still receive presents on birthdays and holidays, so she is by no means left wanting. We are simply trying to raise her with the understanding of what is important in life.

With regards to toys, I have also found that the less electronics, the better.

In this world of technology, there are entire aisles filled with battery-operated toys that talk, sing and walk. Yet those are not the ones my daughter reaches for each day.

Occasionally an interactive toy is helpful, and children certainly enjoy them. However when given a choice, my daughter almost always reaches for the more basic options: colorful blocks, a picture book or a shape sorter that looks like a turtle.

It is the time we spend with our children, not the things we give them that make a difference.

Our lives are so busy, and often it seems as though there aren’t enough hours in the day. However, it is so important to remember to take time as a family. For us, that means family meals and dance parties.

We try to eat together as often as we can. Since my husband has a lengthy commute in the evening, and my daughter eats dinner early, family meals occur at breakfast. I have always heard that family dinners make a lasting difference in our kids’ lives. I need no better proof than to see the excitement on my daughter’s face when she yells, “Yay, we all eat together!”

Since our schedules prevent us from always eating together, we also have family dance parties. If you’re not a musical kind of family, that’s fine: Family time can be based on any activity your family enjoys, such as reading, playing outside or playing a game. My daughter has been dancing since she learned how to stand, so for us, it’s a dance party. We put on some music, turn it up loud and go crazy.

Remember to mindfully teach your children.

It is easy to forget, but our children are learning from us and the world around them each day. It is important to engage them in what you are doing, as each activity or moment provides an opportunity for growth.

It may take a little longer, but let them help you fold a load of laundry or empty their dishes from the dishwasher. Take some time to read with them, teaching them the letters and numbers they see on the page. Even something as simple as going for a walk, pointing out the trees, sky, clouds or cars you see, opens up an entire world for your kids.

Foster creativity in your children by teaching them how to use their imagination.

Teaching our kids isn’t just about the ABC’s and 123’s. It’s about remembering that part of being young is exploring the world through imaginative play.

Sometimes my daughter needs no encouragement. She will play in her kitchen, making meals for her doll and acting out her own story. Other times, she will start talking to me about a friend or a character, and after a few basic questions like “What you are going to do?” or “What does he/she want?” she has launched into an elaborate story filled with details that amaze me.

It is when I see her imagination at work that I am truly amazed by the little girl in front of me. It is in those moments that I am reminded how precious this job of parenting is and how responsible I am for her.

For me, remembering to focus on what’s important and letting the rest go allows me to keep things simple for her and our family.