Toy Review: Toys for the Third Year

One of the greatest joys of the third year is the sudden increase in verbal skills.  Kids start yammering away with words you might be surprised they know how to use.  They'll quote movies and songs and familiar phrases used by those around them.  (A personal recent favorite was Jackson's shouts of "Fire in the hole!" as he repeatedly defecated in the bathtub, post-bath.  Classy, eh?)

More fun still, however, she'll be developing her ability to pretend in play.  This faculty begins to gain some small strength in the second year, but by the third year pretend play becomes more important.  Over a gradual period or even perhaps overnight, she will begin to mimic behaviors familiar to her, trying activities that she is used to seeing others do.  Perhaps she will pretend to vacuum or sweep or do dishes.  She might pretend to drive or care for a baby.  And if you encourage this behavior, not only are you taking part in her play, which makes your child very happy, but you are helping to stimulate her mental growth.

For example, if the child has fake food toys that he likes to feign to eat, you can help him expand the imaginative play.  Maybe you set up a fake restaurant area.  One region is the "kitchen", another is the "dining area", and he has to cook and serve the food.  You can help him add seasoning or adjust the cooking temperature.  Perhaps he has chosen some rather unique food combinations:  "Oh, I've never had onions with my bananas before!"  You might also show him how to set a table or hold a pan so he doesn't get burned.  Meanwhile, he learns about the experience of cooking and proper dining behaviors as well as improving his gross and fine motor skills--with the added bonus that he is spending time with one of his absolute most favorite people of all time.

The third year focuses a great deal on skill refinement as well.  Her crayon drawings on your furniture will be more accurate with their circles.  When she knocks her stack of blocks off the table onto your toes, you can bet it was a much higher stack than she used to be able to make; and just look at how much farther those pieces can fly!

Interestingly, the American Academy of Pediatrics does not include a list of toys appropriate to the third year of life in its hallmark volume for parents:  Caring for Your Baby and Young Child: Birth to Age Five.  While it may or may not be present in the Fifth Edition, this is not explicitly indicated in the penultimate "revised" edition, which is the version I have and use.  Instead there is a box detailing ways to help develop your child's burgeoning intellect.

For some more ideas on how to help your child develop his natural drive to learn and improve, check out this list provided in the AAP book (referenced in the paragraph above) on page 330.  To save on space, I have only transcribed the first sentence of most of the bullet points:

• Encourage creative play, building, and drawing. Provide the time and tools for playful learning.
• Be attentive to your child's rhythms and moods.
• Give consistent warm, physical contact--hugging, skin-to-skin, body-to-body contact--to establish your child's sense of security and well-being.
• Talk to or sing to your child during dressing, bathing, feeding, playing, walking, and driving, using adult talk.
• Read to your child every day.
• If you speak a foreign language, use it at home.
• Introduce your child to musical instruments.
• Play calm and melodic music for your child.
• Listen to and answer your child's questions.
• Spend one-on-one personal time with your child each day.
• Offer your child simple choices in appropriate situations throughout the day.
• Help your child use words to describe emotions and to express feelings such as happiness, joy, anger, and fear.
• Limit your child's television viewing and video time; avoid violent cartoons.
• Promote out-of-home social experience such as preschool programs and playgroups in which your child can play and interact with other children.
• Acknowledge desirable behaviors frequently.
• Make sure other people who provide care and supervision for your child understand the importance of forming a loving and comforting relationship with her.
• Spend time on the floor playing with your child every day.
• Choose quality child care that is affectionate, responsive, educational, and safe; visit your child care provider frequently and share your ideas about positive caregiving.

Next week, I'll begin showcasing some of the toys that I've found to be great for the third year.  See you next Wednesday!

Parenting Philosophy Toolbox, Part 5

(This is part 5 of a series. To see the the first part, click here.)

5. Children, even very young babies, LOVE a predictable schedule. Be consistent 95% of the time with the schedule, with only minor deviations, and you'll be golden. Andrew and I fought this at first. Oh, no, it won't work with our son yet, we thought. He's too young for it to matter, so we'll go out late anyway. Well, I can't vouch for the first 5 or 6 months, since we resisted a schedule, but I can say this: as soon as we started being consistent with our habits, Jackson became a much more consistent child--and a much better sleeper!

People in general do better when they follow a daily pattern that coincides with the cycle of the sun. Babies and young children instinctively rise around the same time each morning regardless of the time they go to bed. My niece (who is 7 and a half years old) awakens at 7:30AM all throughout the summer months despite lacking the regulation that the weekdaily school schedule provides, no matter the amount of rest received. In order for her (and all other children) to get sufficient sleep, a bedtime must be set that allows for the child to catch enough Zs before her natural morning alertness.

Just about every parenting book these days discusses the importance of a bedtime routine. I've often heard it simplified to the alliterative phrase: Bath, Book, Bed. The general idea is that you provide a quiet, calming atmosphere for at least half an hour before sending your child to bed. No television, no roughhousing, no energetic or wild antics. As part of this, your darling dear would likely follow the 3B method of bathing, reading a book on your lap, then going to bed with a "transitional object" (which you might recognize as a favorite blanket, doll, stuffed animal, or other lovey). And as I said above, I resisted the truth of this for a long time. Like many other parents I know, I was convinced that I could reregulate my child's inner clock so that he'd sleep from, say, 9PM to 9AM, rather than 7PM to 7AM. To some extent, this is possible, but only if you make use of a significant amount of artificial light and curtains. It takes years of fighting our natural alertness cycles for adults to lose their innate sleep/wake programming, but for children the Circadian rhythm is still the ruler.

However sleep isn't the only aspect affected by the regularity of a routine. Your child's behavior is highly influenced by the level of predictability in his day. Babies, toddlers, young children, and older children all like to be included in knowing what is going to happen to them. Having a sense of order and chronology helps the younger portion of the population feel more secure and confident. Something that I continually hear parents say is that they never realized just how aware babies are and just how much they really apprehend of what is said and done around them. Even if a baby or toddler is too young to verbally express her knowledge, she may still have far more mental capacity than her parent credits her.

An example of my own naivete in this was discovered while we were moving to a new apartment when Jackson was just 9 months old. I had noted at our old place that Jackson very often got upset at the traffic light for our street whenever we were coming home from an outing. I used to work very hard to soothe him and assure him that we would be home soon, knowing that he highly disliked being in his car safety seat. What I hadn't recognized, however, was that that particular irritable reaction to the traffic light was because he did not want to be home. Even though the drive time was the same to the new apartment, he never complained when we were bringing belongings to the new place. However each time we neared the old apartment, he was upset that we were going there, ostensibly afraid that we would be going back to staying there again. I knew he loved our new home, but it had completely failed to catch my notice that he was aware of our driving patterns at such a young age that at just 9 months (and probably for a month or two beforehand at least) my baby was able to derive that we were heading to the old apartment. At 12 months old, Jackson led Andrew and I on a walk, which turned out to be a very well-directed journey the quarter of a mile to the playground here at our complex, which cannot be seen from our apartment. We soon learned that he clearly knew several different routes to take to the same location without needing to spy the playground itself to guide him there--as though he had a map in his head of all the local landmarks and could identify them from any angle.

As it happens, children are very prone to noticing patterns (such as common paths parents take when walking and driving). This is because their brains are working in overdrive to learn, and the easiest way to learn what is important and what is not seems to be by paying attention to things that occur with frequency. For this reason, it is of the utmost importance to be consistent in parenting so that your child infers the correct rules from your authoritative personage.

Another way in which a daily routine helps your child is by having a planned schedule so that everyone gets happy. If you are a work-at-home parent, you may recognize the essential nature of a predictable day fairly early. For example, if your little one requires a nap around mid-day, you know that you need to accomplish breakfast, morning activities, and lunch and be home in time for a nap. Then afternoon activities and snack and dinner, followed by the bedtime routine will fairly well absorb the rest of the day. Considering that play is the single most important thing for a young child (through about age 7) to do outside of basic biological functions, a large amount of time must be delegated every day to allowing children to play. If you plan your day in advance this is easily accomplished. Playdates can be planned with other children; fun activities to do around town are typically abundant, even in smaller cities; and fall-back activities to do at home are all part of the play regime. A good mix of playdates, parks, indoor activity places, and home time will help keep things diversified enough to be interesting to your child--and allow him to burn sufficient energy to take a solid nap. He will also need a certain amount of "face time" with both parents each day, which involves nothing but Mommy/Daddy and the little dear snuggling, roughhousing, stacking blocks together, or some activity that necessitates participation by both parties--done without distractions such as television or phone conversations, and with the focus put solely on the child.

If your rugrat gets plenty of time to be queen of the castle, she will be far more willing to be toted along with you to the grocery store once in a while. But the important part here is that you understand that this isn't just a matter of appeasing the angry god your child becomes when she doesn't get her way: it's an issue of treating your progeny as a person worthy of respect.

Consider the following hypothetical scenario, if you will: You have had a stroke that has affected your ability to speak properly and which has perhaps impaired some of your faculties for interpreting the speech of others. In addition, your motor skills are simply not as functional as they once were. However you still have emotions. You still have desires and preferences. Yet your ability to express them is inhibited by the effects of your stroke. More than anything you just want some control in your life, some say in what to do.

This is how your child feels. People tend to ignore babies, believing a large part of their behavior to be irrelevant. And yet there are moms and dads out there who do pay very close attention to their children and are able to communicate so much earlier that even children too young to support their own heads can signal an impending bowel movement with the intention of letting their parents know.

So, what am I saying, you should hold your kid over a sink every half an hour and make pissing noises? No. What I am saying, however, is that babies aren't just little roly polies with googly eyes. They aren't dolls, puppets, stuffed animals, or pets. Their methods of communication are significantly limited, but what they do understand, what they respond very well to, is being treated with respect. This can be as simple as maintaining a regular schedule so that your child can predict what happens next. It can be as minimally challenging as informing your child of your destination each time you go to leave the house or each time you bring him to the diaper changing table.

The point is that by keeping a predictable atmosphere, you can provide your child with a host of benefits. From sleep regulation to educational inferences to self-confidence, routines help children (and parents) to form an alliance that works in everyone's favor.