Strive for Balance – Page 35

Impulse Control; How to Gently Encourage Your Child to Develop It!

Everybody has heard the adage “When we know better, we do better,” and everybody also knows it’s not always true. We as parents are not perfect. While we know and understand that corporal punishment is wrong, even parents who subscribe to this belief slip into this behaviour sometimes. In life we all make decisions to do something that we know isn’t the right one. We eat the chocolate cake we know is detrimental to our diet goals, we drink the soda pop with aspartame although we know the chemical content isn’t healthy to our bodies, we know better but we don’t always do better. And we console ourselves that we’re being moderate and that it’s alright to occasionally indulge ourselves in our impulses.

Somehow though, we expect our children to have a higher level of impulse control than we as adults have. Children, like adults, have a full range of impulse control development. Some children are born sensible, with sober second thought a part of their nature. Other children fall on the other end of that spectrum where thought and action are almost simultaneous! Most children fall somewhere along the spectrum and have occasional bounces to the other end. I was shocked when my normally extremely sensible 6 year old cut her three year old sister’s bangs. I was even more surprised when my normally highly impulsive 3 year old stopped suddenly at the edge of the sidewalk before I had the opportunity to stop her and looked three times up and down the road to see if there was traffic and then looked back at me to ask if it was safe!

What is normal behaviour? How do we curb impulsiveness that is destructive, dangerous or out of control? What do we as parents do to protect our property and others from our children’s normal impulses? What do you do if your child does something that is extreme when you know they should know better?
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It Takes a Village to Raise a Child

A lot of parents that practice attachment parenting or natural parenting point to the fact that this is the way children are often raised in traditional societies. This is true, to a great extent, but there is one big exception. In our society we seem to feel that practicing attachment parenting means that the parents alone are raising the child or sometimes even one parent alone (usually the mother) while the other one works long hours, goes off to war, or just runs away.

We parent alone. We raise our children alone. That is exhausting.

In traditional societies, it is true that people co-sleep, breastfeed much longer, and wear their babies all the time. But the village raises the child. There are grandparents, aunts, neighbours, and older children to share the parenting. In our society, if the mother cannot do it all, all of the time, we look down on her. Or, alternately, if she isn’t willing to just leave her baby with some stranger in order to get a break, we look down on her.
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It’s OK to Get Mad

Good parents don’t get mad. They’re never tempted into power struggles with their children, no matter how violent a toddler’s tantrum or how venomous a pre-teen’s backtalk or how silent a teen’s cold shoulder. Good parents never have to raise their voices or say “no.”

Who is this good parent? It certainly isn’t me. But there is this myth about Attachment Parenting that we don’t get angry, that no matter what our children do, we are always calm and don’t experience the strong emotions that parents not practicing AP do.

Being an attached parent doesn’t mean we don’t experience emotions like anger, disappointment, and frustration. Oh, we experience them – just like any parent does! What being an attached parent means is that we choose to express these strong emotions in ways that don’t hurt our children. We choose to look inward to ourselves when we’re feeling angry, instead of blaming others, in order to see the real reason for our feelings. Instead of “You make me mad when you throw your bowl of food on the floor,” we teach ourselves to think, “I feel angry when you throw your bowl.” No one can “make us mad” – we make ourselves mad. It is our expectations we place on situations that don’t get met, and that is what makes us mad.
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The Meat of AP

I first came to Attachment Parenting like most parents do – because it felt wrong to let my baby cry herself to sleep and it felt good to hold her all the time. And I came to Attachment Parenting International, because gosh, there are a whole lot of people in the world who feel compelled to criticize the way I raise my children.

It was through my membership to API, plus a whole bookcase full of parenting books and neuropsychology texts, that I learned exactly what Attachment Parenting is: that it isn’t just a feel-good approach to parenting. It is a set of eight parenting principles proven by science to raise our children to be well-adjusted, emotionally healthy members of society who are able to establish and maintain secure attachments with other adults and their future children. (Read Attached at the Heart by Barbara Nicholson and Lysa Parker to learn more about what the research says.)

We hear a lot about these attachments. What exactly are they, and why are they so important? Attachment is the emotional bond between two people in a relationship – in this case, between the parent and child. A relationship can either be healthy and stable, producing a secure attachment; or it can be stifling, violent, or otherwise dysfunctional, which indicates an insecure attachment. Relationships are absolutely vital to our individual happiness in life – they determine our success in school, our careers, our friendships, and our marriages – and our ability to attach to other people in a healthy way and maintain that attachment over the long term is absolutely vital to our relationships.
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The End Of Fertility

A few weeks ago, Justine wrote about coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy.

I’m coming to terms too, but I’m not pregnant. Instead, I’m coming to terms with the fact that I won’t be having any more babies.

There’s nothing wrong with me, nothing wrong with my husband, nothing wrong with my fertility. We have two children, a boy and a girl, and we have decided that those two will be it.

Sometimes it’s an easy choice to come to terms with. Like when we’ve spent an exhausting day with two cranky children and bedtime didn’t go as planned and tempers are flaring and we’re burnt out and the idea of one more kid is just too crazy. Continue reading “The End Of Fertility”

No “No”

While I was doing my grocery shopping the other day with Sweet Pea snuggled on my chest in the wrap, I passed another momma with a child who was probably about three. When we first crossed paths, she was telling him, “No, you can’t have cookies.” When he pushed the issue, she said, “There’s cookies at home!” Our families ran into each other (once literally, since my cart had a broken wheel) about four times over the next hour as we stocked up on yummy things to eat. Three out of those four times, she was telling her son “no” about something.

My intention isn’t to criticize her parenting, or the use of the word “no” in general. She was using it to set boundaries, some of which were specifically to keep her son safe (“No, you can’t ride on the side of the cart.”). It did reinforce for me, though, how important I think it is to not overuse the word “no.” Continue reading “No “No””

Stay at Home Mondays

We recently added a new event to our schedule: Stay at Home Mondays. The start of the week was being hard for us. Most often, we’d end up staying home anyway, but only after I felt like I’d failed to get us to the standing park playgroup Monday mornings with all our AP buddies, only after I’d imagined the grocery store trip we needed to make, and reviewed and been unable to accomplish anything on the errand and to-do list that had lengthened over the weekend.

I was feeling like maybe everyone else had figured out something I hadn’t; they had their weeks and time scheduled so they could get out of their homes more easily, keep a clean house and stocked fridge, manage their time and their things better than I could. That me vs. them thinking that inevitably leaves me coming up short while the rest of the world got some rule book I can’t seem to find. I posted on my blog asking for time management tips. I imagined setting up a routine for myself so that I would have a set menu-planning day, grocery day, cleaning day, etc. Then I started feeling hemmed in. I hate following schedules. I hadn’t even assigned days yet and already I wanted to tear up the calendar. For dumpster rental service you can go through www.dumposaurus.com website.

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Soon they are best friends (Part 4 in a series on having baby #2)

This is the fourth and last post in a series on preparing for a second baby. If you haven’t read them already, check out the first part What on Earth Were We Thinking? and the second part To tandem or not to tandem, and third part Move over: making room for one more in the bed.

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It wasn’t long until my anxiety about bringing a second child into our home gave way to the reality and excitement of introducing our little girl to the family. Our son was generally excited about having her around, but like any child he had his moments…moments where, for example, he said “Baby sister go back in mommy’s tummy now.” But those moments were few and far between and what I remember more than anything else was my son being a devoted big brother, one that was loving and helpful with his little sister. I remember him wanting to hold her and glowing when he did. I remember him getting her to giggle and laugh.

I think part of the reason things turned out so well is our capacity as humans to love. Our capacity as parents to expand our hearts and find so much more love. My son’s capacity to open his heart to this new little intruder in his life. But the other reason things turned out so well was that we prepared and we adapted.

So what can you do to prepare your older child? How can you make things easier for the big brother or sister?