Category: General Interest

Let me tell you this story of what happened the other day.  While we were out, my son disappeared from my sight for about 10 minutes.  I tell you, not because it’s entertaining, or to share my experience as a warning that “something like this could happen to you someday“, but because when this happened, I didn’t react the way I thought I would.  It seems like my AP skills went out the window, and I’m trying to rationalize that.  For a few moments, my child was lost, and I lost myself as a parent.

One second he was there, and literally the second after I stooped to pick up my bag he wasn’t.  We were in the locker room of our health club, just after a swim, getting ready to leave & go to lunch.  Did he run ahead to wait for us? Sometimes he runs to wait by the basketball courts, but when I got there, he wasn’t.

Did he go into the men’s locker room?  Sometimes he thinks it’s funny to run in there because he knows I can’t follow.  My daughter was with us, and while I don’t think she should go in the men’s locker room anymore, she is under age 6 and technically allowed in.  So she went through the men’s locker room, looking for him, calling his name, checking the showers.  No brother.

She and I walked around downstairs, checking places he might have gone to watch exercisers or wait for us. With still no luck, we went upstairs through the restaurant, thinking that maybe he assumed we were going up there for lunch after swimming. Nope.
Continue reading “Lost Child, Lost Mom”

The other day, I made lunch for myself and my two kids. Chicken sandwiches on wheat bread all around, apple sauce for them and a pickle for me. I was putting dirty utensils into the sink when I turned around to see that my 5 year old son had snatched the pickle off my plate, taken a bite, handed it to his sister, who also took a bite and handed it back to him. When he looked up and saw me watching him, he said, “I like it! I like pickles!” He took another bite, then placed what was left back on my plate.

Germ sharing aside, I couldn’t help but marvel at how far this once super picky child of mine has come. And within the confines of my brain, I heaved a giant sigh of relief and thought, “Yes! It finally paid off.”  In this photo, they enjoy a dinner of Asian Pork Linguine, broccoli and cantaloupe.

Picky eating is common among 1 to 3 year olds, and part of the reason is because it’s developmentally normal. As growth slows down, children eat less because they need less. But it’s also incredibly common for a child for a child who once ate everything with gusto to suddenly slam on the brakes and refuse to eat once favorite foods, certain textures, or any type of vegetable. It can be alarming.

As they get older, most picky kids will expand their palates and begin to eat more, but the key for you as a parent is getting through those picky years with your sanity intact. Some picky kids will indeed grow into picky adults (my brother does most of the cooking in the house because his wife found it impossible to cook for him when there are so many foods he won’t touch), but if you teach good habits now, even those picky adults with limited diets can be healthy and happy.

Some tips that have worked for me:

• Acknowledge your child’s right to not like certain foods–Chances are there are foods you don’t like, foods that are quite good for you. I’m not crazy about most kinds of seafood, pearl onions, or pancakes, and I won’t touch zucchini, beets or eggplant with a ten foot pole. Sure, presenting a food ten or twenty times might convince your child to eat it in the end, but then again, maybe not. Don’t be surprised if your child won’t eat foods that you don’t like either. Food preferences are partially genetic.
• Keep your expectations realistic–Sure, you know that avocado mashed with pepper and some lemon juice makes a scrumptious swap for mayo on a sandwich, but to your toddler, it’s a funny color and a strange texture. Go ahead and introduce foods that you drool over, but don’t blow a gasket if your two-year-old balks at kale.
• Model healthy eating–Take a look at your own eating habits. Do you skip meals, guzzle coffee or munch on junk all day? If your own food habits are less than stellar, try to clean them up a little. Kids notice things, and they’ll be quick to call you on what they perceive as hypocrisy.
• Try peer pressure–At my children’s preschool, the only food allowed for snack is fresh fruit. So my kids take a lot of bananas and apple slices, which are fruits they both eat well, but seeing other kids eat other fruits meant they each added one or two fruits to their “approved” list. It doesn’t have to be another child too. Seeing mom chow down on sweet potatoes is powerful. Eat as a family or invite an adventurous eater over and see what happens.
• Take advantage of distraction–If you’re truly worried about the volume or variety that your child eats, try getting them to eat when they are otherwise distracted. Many kids will mindlessly polish off a bowl of baby carrots while watching TV. I got my own son to eat melon a few weeks ago at the beach by following him around asking him to take a bite here and there while he was playing with his friends.
• Reconsider cooking separate meals–Do you make separate food for your picky eater? Be careful, because your child might start to treat you like a short order cook. My first child had a milk allergy when he was younger, and in the interest of getting calories into him, I did make him special meals, food I knew he would almost always eat. But when he got demanding, I quit. For the most part, the kids eat what my husband and I eat. I do try to keep their preferences in mind, making sure there is at least one thing on the menu that they like. The transitional period was rough, but both kids now know that they are expected to sit down with the family and eat what I cooked. They don’t have to eat something if they don’t want to, but I also won’t be making something else in it’s place.
• Make “kid food” healthy–Chicken is a good source of protein and potatoes are loaded with potassium. Homemade versions of kid friendly food will set your mind at ease when it comes to the nutritional profile.
• Watch your portion sizes–Think back to when you were pregnant, suffering from morning sickness, and a full plate of food had the power to turn your stomach and make you not want to eat at all. For a picky eater, being presented with too much food can be overwhelming. Keep portions kid sized and if you’re cooking a food on the “non-approved” list, make the portion even smaller.
• Look at the big picture–Some days, both my kids eat well, other days one eats well while the other picks, and some days neither seems to eat much of anything. If you’re worried, take a look at what your child eats over the course of a week or two and you’ll probably see that he or she eats more than you think.

And finally, hang in there. It gets better. It really does. My pickle snatching, watermelon eating, edamame snarfing 5-year-old is living proof.

Work/life balance isn’t a challenge exclusive to single dads – the vast majority of single moms I know work too – but I think that finding balance between work and parenting is tougher for men. Decades after the modern feminist movement began, our culture still reflects the belief in men as so-called breadwinners and women as nurturers, managing the house and taking care of the children.  Don’t believe me?  Check out the movies in the local cineplex, the most popular TV shows and the books that have a sustained run on the best seller list. Or ask your friends how many know men who feel emasculated because they earn less than their female partner.

It’s an even greater challenge when you approach parenting from an AP perspective, because once they’re not wee little ones, attachment parenting involves really paying attention to your children, listening, making time, and honoring and respecting them. As you would imagine, that takes time. Time that could otherwise be spent watching an NFL game or World Cup match, shooting hoops with buddies, grabbing a post-work beer, or – gasp! – dating and having a social life of your own, even as you’re a father.

Ostensibly, the “proper” thing to do as a single dad is to focus on your children when they’re with you, and live the rest of your life when they’re with the other parent. Kinda works if it’s a 50/50 situation (or less, many, many men seem to end up with a gradually diminishing percentage of their children’s time, but that’s another discussion entirely), but even there, if parenting time is split 50/50, that means that you have to squeeze a week’s worth of your work and life into half a week of time. Doesn’t leave much space for sleep!

Maybe that’s not so proper after all. I mean, are we supposed to completely change our schedules and our lives to meet the needs of our children, or is there some happy middle ground where they learn to work around the reality of our adult lives too?

More importantly, one of the things I think about frequently is that I am modeling behaviors for my children. I can talk about work, but if they never see me working, the message I’m sending them is that money just shows up magically. Sure I work when they’re not around, but if they don’t see it, they don’t really believe it.

I’m in my third year of being a single dad and have evolved my perspective to where I now believe it’s important for me to work when my children are with me rather than compartmentalize it to where I just hang out and play with them for half of each week. I am fortunate that I’m an entrepreneur and can arrange my work hours to meet whatever weird schedule I desire, but that’s not typical: most people have someone else set their work hours.

The challenge is to find a balance that lets them see me as a worker, as someone who is doing something to earn a living (because, darn it, money doesn’t grow on trees after all and they’re going to have to understand work begets money begets the stuff you want and lifestyle you desire), but who is still a doting and devoted father who always has time for them and their concerns, their interests and their passions.

And that’s where it gets interesting because by having my own interests, meeting up with my friends sometimes when we’re out, and having them occasionally occupy themselves for an hour or two while I work, they’re also learning that life is defined by what you give, not what you take.

It’s an interesting topic, and if you’re a dad who has to not only earn your own living but cover child support and even write an alimony (oops, sorry, “maintenance”) check, it’s a fine balance to attain. How are you doing it and how’s it going for you and your kids?

Learning something when you’ve been told you need to know it is pretty boring sometimes. Following your child’s lead and letting natural interests develop is a lot more interesting.

My almost 6-year-old is having a lot of fun with this large map, finding the places he has heard about, comparing how far they are from Baltimore, and finding the corresponding flag for that country (pictured at the bottom of the map).

Today’s geography lesson came about after my 3 1/2 year-old daughter, while eating a banana, announced that monkeys like to eat bananas, but why do we never see monkeys in Baltimore (not counting at the zoo)? Her brother answered that monkeys live in jungles, like in Africa. In this photo, he shows her the distance between the US and Africa.

While we had the map out, we also talked about how many continents and oceans there are, the difference between countries and states, and how an island that is nowhere near the country it belongs to can still be a part of that country. And we added a new place to our list–Indonesia, where a neighbor is currently visiting relatives. Both kids listened with rapt attention, something I can say I never displayed during geography lessons in school.

My son will attend a traditional school in the fall, but I’m enjoying working with him at home and letting him choose the lesson of the day.  He’s taking me places I wouldn’t go on my own.

Where have your children’s interests taken you?

My son has started naming his emotions and feelings lately. He has been telling me when he is happy, sad, hurt, hungry, has to go potty, I’m hot/cold, that’s funny… etc. all things that have to do with his body and emotions. I have noticed that I have been asking him questions more often like “Are you tired?” “Are you hungry?” “Are you hot/cold?” “Are you sad?” “Isn’t that funny?”.

Now I am not teaching my son these emotions. They come naturally. Isn’t it strange how you do not have to teach a child to hit or scream but they seem to do it naturally? It is the same way with affection as well, there are certain gestures that just seem to come naturally. No, my son is not learning emotions, he is learning how to identify emotions.

In the years that I have worked around and with young adults in a therapeutic type of environment, I have observed as these young adults struggle to identify emotions. Emotions come naturally; identifying them takes practice and encouragement, as well as a safe environment where one is allowed to explore each emotion at length. There have been times when we have had to use a happy/sad/angry face chart with young people because the needed a visual image to match their emotion to so that they then could identify and then express that emotion.

Learning to identify ones emotions takes time and it takes nurturing. That is why it is so difficult when a child is not attached properly, they learn to identify their emotions wrongly or to ignore them completely.

Lately emotions have been overwhelming my son. He comes to a point where he is feeling too many or too much of one emotion and he goes on overload. It is then my job to step in, wrap him up in my arms or give him his own personal space to sit in, thus giving him a safe, secure and secluded environment where he can peacefully identify, experience and then deal with his emotions.

Jasmine is a co-housing, home birthing, missions minded, community living mama with a passion for fierce writing. She blogs.