Parenting Philosophy Toolbox, Part 7

(This is part 7 of a series. To see the the first part, click here.)

7. Raise the child(ren) you have. Every child is unique, so parent to that child, and trust your instincts. Some children are petite and perpetually "too small"; some are too tall and heavy before they can take full advantage of playthings designed for kids in their age group. Some develop social skills faster; others focus on expanding physical development first. Some children follow growth charts precisely, and others continually yo-yo above and below the expected growth curve projections.

Some children are rambunctious and excited about life. Others are more sedate and prefer calmer activities. Some have great propensities for focusing attention while their peers are incapable of focusing seemingly at all. Some children have developmental abnormalities that prevent them from following the normal growth schemes they might otherwise have managed.

There are very few things that we can unequivocally state apply to all children other than that they are young. Even siblings, even so-called "identical" siblings, can be radically different from one another in temperament, personal preferences, physical talents, and viewpoints on the world. One child may be mild-mannered and inclined to follow the directions provided by a parent or other caregiver; another child may be wild and rebellious, prefer to lead rather than follow, and prone to violence when a parent or caregiver does not bend accordingly to the child's mandates. These two disparate children may be reared in the same home, by the same parents, and yet demonstrate wildly different characters.

Often, however, what you will find is that each child has a blending of personalities within him, sparring at any given moment for which shall be expressed. Is today the day he will be complacent? Or is today the day to tantrum like a wild beast when mommy leaves him at daycare? Will he cheerfully agree to consume what is offered for lunch? Or will he demand something other than what was prepared for him and refuse to eat unless his "request" is satisfied.

So, when I say that you need to parent to the child you have, I don't mean even just the child you prefer to have when she is well-behaved--I mean the child you have in the moment. We've already covered that children are in constant flux, ever-changing. Once you can accept that she is a developing individual, you can then focus on the individual she is being and your role in parenting her.

Tune into your child. Is he standing on the table wanting you to yell at him to get down? (Yes, this is a game my son occasionally initiates.) Consider what he would be feeling in order to ask you to "get him in trouble." Typically, children want our attention. They want to know that we recognize things that are important to them. They want our validation, our love, and our play. When we (for example) do not take enough time to focus on him, the child will often try to enforce his need for attention by getting it any way he can. Cue the toddler standing on the table shouting happily, "Get down!" He knows he will get into trouble for it (thus parroting our usual admonishment for the action) and may even understand that it's because Mommy and Daddy fear he will fall and become injured. What he wants may be to demonstrate his prowess in table-standing; but what it also shows, when I have the presence of mind to recognize it with Jackson, is that he is feeling neglected. Sure, I can be feeding him, providing toys for him, but if I'm not engaged, if he does not feel that he has my full attention and eye contact, we get games like "Get down!"

Being in the same room is not enough. Children need to feel special. They need to know that when they need some emotional fuel, they can fill up at the parental station. Dr. Harvey Karp refers to this as Feeding the Meter. Dr. Lawrence Cohen calls it Filling the Cup. Either way, it amounts to the same thing: your child needs a piece of you to feel whole. When interpersonal connections are continually denied to her, eventually she will turn elsewhere to try to refuel her emotional lows--and it may be a path you'd prefer she doesn't follow.

One thing you need to recognize is that your child is effectively the same as a child born 200 or 2,000 or perhaps even 10,000 years ago. So just because you, as an adult, understand certain realities of the world, you cannot expect your child to instantaneously grasp all the developments of technology and societal interaction that have come into play throughout the entire history of humanity. You need to recognize that you are raising a savage.

Dr. Harvey Karp talks in his book, The Happiest Toddler on the Block (which I highly recommend), about how toddlers are effectively primitive people. When you watch your child with the idea in mind that you are raising a caveman or cavewoman, suddenly many things that were puzzling or aggravating before can become easier to comprehend. Why does your young child act so feral? Well, because...she is! It takes a long time to civilize a human being. I believe it is for this reason that we do not grant people rights as adults, who are theoretically capable of making informed and rational decisions, until a certain age is achieved. We have a lot of mistake-making and learning to do before we can comprehend the rules in place in the world around us.

So, when you feel like your child is pushing you, testing your limits, that's exactly what he's doing. And it's his job to do it. It's your job as a parent to let him know what those limits are.

It's also your job to recognize that your child is an individual, not a statistical normal distribution of data points. Maybe you see your daughter speaking a little later than her friends. Maybe your son takes seemingly forever to potty train. Maybe your older child struggles to learn spelling and how to sit still in school. These are developmental milestones that cannot be forced and that every child (excepting those with specific developmental disorders) will learn in time.

The phrase, "Why can't you be more like _____?" comes to your lips. And there it should be swallowed, choked back, and maybe a glass of water drunk to dilute it in your stomach. Do not allow yourself or your partner to constantly compare your child to other children. Growing up is not a competition, though sometimes (particularly in the first 3 years) it can seem like it in our culture that obsesses over intellect and ability. After all, your child needs to grow and develop as an individual before intellect and ability have any usefulness in life--so treat her as the individual she is and cherish her for it.

Therefore, if your child needs nap time at noon and his friends nap at 2, then give him his nap at noon. If he wants to eat his banana in the specially designated Banana Zone, then let him, and enjoy his assertiveness and willingness to engage you in a game of his own making--as well as a chance for him to still feel powerful despite eating healthy food. Do not concern yourself with the opinions of others when you know best how to treat your child. If he's too young to hold still for an hour while you go out to eat, then let him have some time to roam so that when the meal is there, he can use his calmness reserves to eat before dashing off on some new adventure. Do not allow the (perceived or imagined) negative judgments by others to stop you from doing right by your child.

I'm giving you permission to be the parent your child needs you to be. I grant you permission to let loose with laughter. I absolve you of any indignity that rolling around on the floor with your child may provide you. If your hair is not perfectly coiffed, if your clothes are often covered in baby spit up or fresh smears of snot or cheese stains, if you wear comfy house clothes to the grocery store, you are not a lesser person. You're a parent with your priorities in order. And being a parent, you are making what we all hope to be a valuable contribution to the future, so any efforts you make on behalf of your children, we all appreciate.

Raise the children that you have. Take care of yourself, but remember what's most important: family. Your child's happiness is more important than the smirk the bagger boy gets on his face because he saw you yesterday in the same outfit. Whose smile deserves more attention? Your daughter who wears her princess costume to the grocery store with you; that's who.

Parenting Philosophy Toolbox, Part 2

This is Part 2 of a series on Parenting Philosophy elements to be used in an overall toolbox of ideas. By having a mental framework in place for how you believe situations should be handled, raising children becomes a much more attainable goal. To start at the beginning of this series, click here.)

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2. Babies (and children) are emotional, not rational, beings. Yes, babies will cry for rational purposes. If hungry, thirsty, wet, soiled, tired, cold, hot, etc., they will let you know in the only way they know that works. They will also cry at loud noises or because they miss you. They will cry because they don't understand that you are preparing the food, just that they want it now and it's not in the belly, which by the way, is very unhappy and wants fooooooooooooood!

Some are more sensitive than others. Jackson's friend Corinne would often cry if he looked at her or just said anything while she was around. Jackson, on the other hand, would cry if he was on the floor while I was standing. It's not something changeable about babies, so it's something that has to be accepted and treated accordingly. Again, by validating Jackson's emotions, rather than by making him feel that he is wrong for having them, he has developed a very strong sense of independence and is a highly secure child for his age. This is a good thing!

This same element was particularly evident with Jackson when it came to applying consequences to his behaviors. As babies begin their toddler stage, they test their boundaries. Sometimes Jackson would misbehave (i.e. play roughly with the vertical blinds) and so we would scold him. But he didn't respond to just saying no, and eventually we tried giving him time out. That worked very briefly, but we found that what was actually causing him to play with the blinds was that he felt in that moment that he wasn't getting enough attention. He knew that playing with the blinds would work. He would get yelled at, then go right back at it, be put into time out, even cry and protest wordlessly that he didn't want to be in time out. But then as soon as he was free again, he would run right back to the blinds, full well knowing that another time out was to follow.

Dr. Harvey Karp addresses this sort of phenomena in his book The Happiest Toddler on the Block. (I highly recommend you read this book, even if your child is no longer a toddler!) He stresses that the biggest key to avoiding behavioral problems is to give your child plenty of face time. In the above scenario, I applied that idea, and it's largely worked. So long as Jackson receives sufficient time with Mommy and Daddy every so many minutes of play time, he's happy and far less likely to get into trouble.

The general gist is this: while you may think your baby is overreacting or being irrational, and you're probably right, to him or her it's important that you respond. Moreover, it's important that you as a parent respond in a way that acknowledges and validates (or at least appears to) your child's feelings. Responding quickly and sincerely, and giving your child plenty of your love and attention on his terms will make for a much happier household all around. Let's face it, if the baby ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

This is also an important consideration for children who are no longer babies or toddlers. Around the time of puberty a person's reasoning functions start to really kick into gear. Until then children are still primarily emotionally-charged individuals. They will do things without knowing the purpose (if any), even if some part of them is at least vaguely aware that they could get into trouble for doing them. In preschool, my sister and I felt a sincere need to utilize an entire box of Band-Aids as stickers. We were so excited by the fun of the experience that getting yelled at for it was just some distant thought that hadn't really occurred until it was too late.

My nephew Gage had not spent much time outside of school with kids his age, so he spent as much of his time at school as possible socializing with other children instead of doing his classwork. He knew that Mommy would be furious with him for doing poorly in school, but he couldn't help himself. His emotions took over and demanded to be appeased. When asked in front of about a dozen family members why he was doing so poorly in school, then-8-year-old Gage could only crawl into his Auntie's lap and snuggle up to me in defense. He could not explain his actions in words. He could not justify his behavior because he did not have the vocabulary and the reasoning skills to recognize that it was an emotional need he was attempting to fulfill.

Meet the emotional needs as well as the physical, and trust that, in time, reason will grace your child with its presence! It's a long, arduous process that cannot be forced. You cannot yell your way into making a kid more rational. But you can love and respect him so that he will willingly learn from your example--rather than be repelled by it.

Stay tuned next week for the next installment of the parenting philosophy toolbox!

More Newborn Literature (An Overly Serious Post)

The baby is born, brought home, and the fun begins!  I've already compiled one list of literature that is pretty helpful to have before the baby arrives.  Yet that list is hardly complete.

When Andrew and I were preparing for our little guy to hop out, we had been attending classes at least once a week at our local hospital.  One class was on Newborn Care and lasted for two sessions.  The first session should have had its own name as the Harvey Karp class because nearly all we did in that class was to watch the video version of Dr. Harvey Karp explain his 5 Ss of newborn soothing.  Our initial impression of him was something along the lines of "Is this guy a pedophile?  Does he own any non-blue shirts?"  In time, though, I've come to see him as something of a Baby Whisperer.  Watching the video it was hard to deny that the man seemed to have supernatural powers for calming colicky babies.  The most wonderful part, though, is that he teaches others the tricks he uses--and there's a book that you can buy that talks all about it.

Now, I will be honest.  I never bought his book, "The Happiest Baby on the Block," though I did later go on to buy "The Happiest Toddler on the Block" because I was so impressed with his methods and how well they worked with Jackson.  Andrew and I learned enough to follow Dr. Karp's 5 part system for soothing newborns just from watching the video, so we thought the book would be extraneous.  After all, it was working just fine.  Jackson was responding very well to the shushing and swinging and swaddling and side-lying and sucking prescribed.  Our ignorance really showed, however, when our giant baby kept growing, and it was becoming increasingly apparent that at some point Jackson was going to need to be able to self-soothe--and we weren't allowing him much opportunity for that.

Andrew and I had become expert swaddlers.  Moms who saw me swaddle Jackson used to watch in amazement and inform me that either they were not good swaddlers themselves or that their children didn't like to be swaddled (which was almost always them not knowing they were bad at swaddling).  Andrew had developed a great technique which I adapted for my own.  Given that the weather was nice and cool for the first few months and that we kept the A/C set low, we found that using a double swaddle worked best:  two blankets swaddled individually around Jackson did the trick.  He was a VERY strong baby (think Superman as an infant; I do not exaggerate here), so this double swaddling helped increase friction and limit his motion.  Even still, with as tight as we used to wrap him, Jackson would manage to get his arms out almost every time, especially as he got older, but typically by that point he was either waking up or was sufficiently drowsy that he fell back asleep.

Jackson cried very, very little compared to the average.  I had heard statistics that say the average young baby cries about 3 hours a day in total.  Jackson was more on the order of half an hour a day (until teething began in full force and we weren't prepared to address it).  Why would we want to spoil a system in which we wrap the child in a blanket and he zonks out, almost instantaneously unconscious?

If I had it to do over again, I would have bought the book.  As it was, I found myself holding a 5 or 6 month old baby at the book store and hurriedly scouring The Happiest Baby on the Block for some idea of how to wean ourselves from the 5Ss while still maintaining a happy baby.  And there it was, a small unassuming paragraph, briefly delineating how to cut down over a period of time from using Dr. Karp's methods.  We were months behind this schedule, not having previously known that there was one.

It took us until Jackson was 7 months old (and about 23lbs!) before we were finally able to put him down without full-on swaddling, which was only accomplished via the use of afghans as an intermediary stage.  Since the afghan blankets (crocheted for Jackson by my wonderful mother!) had a lot of stretchiness to them, Jackson had some freedom of movement, but he was still restrained slightly, so it was comforting to him.  He also had a hard time unswaddling himself from the afghan because his little fingers would catch in the holes and end up holding the whole thing around him.

This brings me to another issue:  how to get your kid to sleep.  Andrew and I were very spontaneous people before we were parents.  We kept odd hours and traveled whenever we liked.  A lot changed for us when our little man hatched, and for several months we resisted changing our ways.  Jackson was giving us a heck of a time about staying asleep, and we couldn't figure out why.  What it boiled down to was that we did not have a bedtime routine.  Jackson napped sometimes 5 or 6 times a day toward later infancy, and there was nothing to distinguish between napping and bedtime for him.  There was nothing we were doing to signal to him that naptime or bedtime was approaching, so putting him down eventually became a struggle.

Then I read The No-Cry Sleep Solution by Elizabeth Pantley.  Everything she wrote just seemed so much like common sense, and a lot of it was stuff I had heard before.  I guess you could say that reading it finally guilt tripped me into recognizing that Jackson was not the one who was the problem:  his parents were.  With time and dedication, we were able to steadily make progress toward a bedtime routine.  Now that Jackson is 16 months old, he brings me his favorite Green Blanky and a pacifier to let me know he's ready for his story and snuggle.  Most naps and nights he is asleep within 2 minutes of going to bed.  And he sleeps in his own queen-sized futon bed (a story for another day!).

The main thing to get here is that kids have specific needs.  By recognizing what they are feeling and what you can do to address those feelings, your kid can be more responsive to your desires.  Overall, you can have a much happier child with no need to suffer the heart-rending sounds of a screaming child; no need to leave your baby shrieking, retching, and miserable in a crib because you are at a loss for what more you can do.

That being said, I want to take a moment to discuss colic.  The standard agreement most medical practitioners use these days for defining colic is crying more 3 hours straight, 3 days a week, for at least 3 weeks.  Most also agree that it's somehow related to the digestive tract.  Dr. Karp's methods can help soothe a colicky baby, but they will not address the root of the problem.

Through some research, we tried to resolve some issues Jackson seemed to be having, which I would call related to colic.  He didn't meet the criteria, because he didn't cry that often--but perhaps it's because we were using the 5 Ss to soothe him all the time.  But there were many, many times that we could not comprehend any other reason for him to be cranky other than something digestively related.

Consider this:  when a baby is born, he or she starts off with only what came through the placenta to the womb.  During birth, some bacteria might be contracted, but hospitals do as best a job they can of cleaning the child's orifices to prevent infection and irritation.  If the mother is nursing, the baby can potentially derive some bacteria from her skin--but only if she does not wash her breasts.  When babies go on to consume solids, they will need bacteria in their intestines to digest the food.  This is just how the system works.  Our world is so sterile that often children do not get exposed to enough germs.

Enter BioGaia.  My MIL serendipitously sent us some information on probiotic drops for infants, and we obliged.  It cost us about $37 for a bottle, which lasted about a month, and we did it for two months beginning when Jackson was just about 6 months old.  It helped him noticeably.  I can only imagine what these drops could have done for a colicky baby like Jackson's friend Corinne had been.  The poor little dear screamed her head off almost every night from 7pm until 1am or later until she was about 4 months old.  There are lots of remedies out there for colic that simply do nothing for the hurting children--or their parents who are rapidly going insane!  Check out these results for the BioGaia infant probiotic drops.  (I also have some PDFs saved somewhere after we requested more literature from the manufacturer, so if anyone is interested I can dig those up and share them.)

Hopefully you will read the literature I have recommended above.  There is much to be learned in the way of perspective from reading Dr. Karp's book, such as the idea that toddlers are essentially cave people and that they are emotional rather than rational beings.  Elizabeth Pantley's book provides some great insights into the idea of baby sleep cycles, as well as a great metaphor for helping parents to understand how a child feels when being put in a crib after falling asleep in a parent's arms.

As always, trust your own instincts.  You know your child better than anyone else does.  And whatever problems you are having now, remember that it's just a phase.  They will grow out of it--eventually!