Tag Archives: play

10 Ways to Gently Respond When Children Say “I Can’t!”

By Dionna Ford, contributing editor to the API Speaks blog, blogger at www.codenamemama.com, cofounder of www.nursingfreedom.org

Kieran
Kieran

My son, Kieran, has been struggling with a bout of the “I cannot’s” lately.

“I cannot take my shirt off, you do it mama.”

“I cannot ride my scooter! I cannot!”

“I cannot glue the ribbon on.”

At first, I tried to isolate the problem:

  • Am I asking him to do too much? His “can’ts” are sometimes, but not always, in response to something I’ve asked him to do, so I don’t think they are the result of request overload or mere unwillingness. And they are usually in reference to a skill or activity that I know he can do, so they are not based on inability or even fear of failure.
  • Are the “can’ts” related to a mood or condition? I have not connected them to a time of day (i.e., when he is tired or hungry) or an emotional state (i.e., when he is upset). Nor do they appear to be a matter of disinterest.
  • Does he really think he can’t? The frequency of the phrase made me worry about his developing self-esteem. It is important to me and my husband to respond in a way that will acknowledge Kieran’s feelings as well as empower him, but we weren’t sure how to address the “can’ts.”

After researching, reading, and soliciting the advice of some wise mama friends, I came up with the following list of ideas parents may use to respond to a case of the “can’ts”: Continue reading 10 Ways to Gently Respond When Children Say “I Can’t!”

One-on-One Time

 

Kelly Bartlett and her children

By Kelly Bartlett, certified positive discipline educator and leader for East Portland API, Oregon USA

This weekend, my husband and daughter went camping, and I was able to spend 2 whole days with just my son. It surprised me how I was able to connect with him in a way that is not usually possible when we are together as a family.

I was able to see what he really wanted to do when the choice was all his. I came to understand his love of guns, swords, and robots, of which I had previously been somewhat unappreciative. I was also able to focus on his quirks and characteristics — to fully realize those unique traits that exhibit themselves every day but often get glossed over with the business of the day.

Our weekend was great, but normally our one-on-one time together is not that intense. With both my son and daughter, we do set aside time every day as “special” time. One-on-one time is one of the best tools in the positive discipline toolbox because it is proactive; it allows us the opportunity to be fully present with our children and to experience who they truly are. Though it may not be immediately obvious, this actually goes a long way toward working together and solving problems during moments of discipline.

To strengthen relationships, parents and children should habitually find time to be alone and connect. Here are some suggestions for creating special one-on-one time with your kids: Continue reading One-on-One Time

How to Play with Your Toddler

By Emily Rempe, founder of Productive Parenting

We are all too aware of how modern technology is changing our lifestyles. Arguments could be made with much validity on each side to the merits and detriments of its steady infiltration into our lives. I am not writing to deny or defend the impacts of modern technology in our society and in our families. Rather, I am writing to declare with confidence one area that remains unsurpassed by modern technology – your child’s play.

Children are designed to explore and understand the world around them through their senses. Their primary field guides in this exploration is you: the parent. Parents understand the importance of this role and aspire to introduce their young children to the world around them in creative and engaging ways. However motivated parents may be, when it comes to specific ways of engaging with their children in meaningful play, I often hear a collectively shared experience of inadequacy. This is when it becomes easy to buy into modern technology in an attempt to provide us with a commercialized means to nurture our children.

Why Do We Feel Inadequate?

I would like to offer my thoughts on why the perceived sense of inadequacy exists and how it can be alleviated. A generation ago, our mothers’ educational opportunities were primarily limited to nursing and teaching. As these teachers became mothers, they naturally applied what they were doing in the classroom to their own children. The understanding of early childhood development easily translated into age appropriate ways of engaging with their own brood.

While it is wonderful that the opportunities available to women today are much broader, it has created a need for early childhood experts to share their expertise with parents who have become educated and skilled in other areas of study.

Components of Meaningful Play

When parents are equipped with the insights and ideas of early childhood experts to promote learning through the five senses, two key developments take place that cannot be usurped by modern technology:

  1. It promotes experiential learning through a child’s five senses which lays a fundamental understanding of the world around them.
  2. Sharing the learning experiences together promotes and deepens bonds between parent and child that will lay a strong foundation for their future relationship.

When we as parents become a vital part of this nurturing process through activities that promote bonding between parent and child, we are well on our way of fulfilling our role. Equipped with timeless activities that have been nurturing young minds for centuries, we do not need to feel inadequate in our approach.

Attachment-Promoting Toddler Games

Below are a few examples of play activities that engage the senses and strengthen the attachment bond between you and your toddler. These suggestions come from ProductiveParenting.com, which offers simple ways to bond with your newborn through five-year-old child.

Clapping Numbers
Clapping Numbers gameTarget Age: Early 2 year old

What To Do: Children learn using the sense of hearing. Listening and following directions are important skills for your child. Introduce this fun activity by saying, “I will clap one time.” Clap. “I will clap two times.” Clap. Clap. Continue up to four times. Have your child try clapping one, two, three, and four times. Continue only if your child is still interested.

Phone Conversations
Phone Conversations gameTarget Age: Middle 2 year old
Materials You Will Need: Two toy phones or disconnected phones

What To Do: Your child has seen and heard you on the phone many times. Now may be the time to let your child have a conversation with you on the phone! Dial your home number. Say it out loud as you dial. Talk to your child. Give your child time to talk to you. Show your child how to dial the home number. Keep the phones on the toy shelf for playtime.

Letter to Myself
Letter to Myself gameTarget Age: Late 2 year old
Materials You Will Need: paper, envelope, stamp

What To Do: Children love to bring in the mail! Help your child understand how this works firsthand with today’s activity! Begin by having your child write a letter. (This usually means drawing.) Put your child’s letter in an envelope. Address the letter to your child. Let your child put a stamp on the envelope. Take your child to a mailbox and let your child put the letter in the mailbox. Let your child check the mail every day until the letter arrives. Children are so excited to receive mail, just like you do!

Past, Present, Future
Target Age: Early 3 year old

What To Do: Today’s activity will help develop your child’s concept of time. Discuss the concepts of past, present, and future with your child. Give your child a few examples of things that have happened in the past (last birthday, last vacation, etc.), and see if your child can come up with some, too. Now discuss today’s events as things that are happening in the present. Do the same for things that will or may happen in the future. Test your child’s understanding of the concept by giving your child an event and asking him/her to categorize it.

Coin Patterning
Coin Patterning gameTarget Age: Late 3 year old
Materials You Will Need: assortment of coins

What To Do: While waiting in a restaurant, use the coins you have in your pocket or wallet to practice patterning with your child. Start with simple patterns, like penny, nickel, penny, nickel and see if your child can continue the pattern. Try more complicated patterns with more than two coins or let your child come up with his/her own patterns.

Unschooling: Learning through Play

By Jan Hunt, member of API’s Advisory Board and API’s Editorial Review Board. Reprinted with permission from www.naturalchild.org

Unschooling: Learning through PlayMy son Jason, now a young adult, has been unschooled from the beginning – we were fortunate to have discovered John Holt’s books when Jason was two, and never looked back.

Jason was a very inquisitive child, who loved learning new words and playing with numbers. He had an extensive vocabulary by 18 months, understood the concept of infinity at two years old, and taught himself squares and square roots at three. In spite of all this, I still wondered if I should use a curriculum, especially for math. It was hard not to worry when taking a path that was so different from the one I had taken in childhood. It was also hard not to be affected by my parents’ doubts, even though I understood the reasons for their skepticism.

When Jason was seven years old, he asked for a math book as his special holiday gift that year. We had recently read John Holt’s glowing review of Harold Jacobs’ book, Mathematics: A Human Endeavor, in Growing Without Schooling. The book proved to be as wonderful as John Holt had said, and we enjoyed it a lot. But a few months later, I noticed that Jason hadn’t looked at it for a while. I decided to suggest reading a chapter per week together. Fortunately, I was busy that day and didn’t get around to asking him. That evening, Jason came up to me, book in hand, saying, “Let’s play math.” My first thought was, “Whew, that was a close one.” Had I made my offer, he probably would have accepted it, and even learned from it, but where would the concept of math as play have gone? Continue reading Unschooling: Learning through Play

Diverting Anger in Toddlers

By Gaynell Payne

angry toddlerWith toddlerhood comes tantrums. While some parents are taken by surprise by the seemingly violent appearance of a child raised in a non-violent home, it is a perfectly natural rite of passage for any child. The reasons behind it are simple: lots of emotions with little logic. The emotions that can overtake a toddler can be a floodgate of overwhelming proportions.

I’m OK, You’re OK

While watching their sweet angel turn into a hitting and kicking tornado may leave some parents at their wits’ end, the idea is not to suppress your child’s anger or frustration but to teach him to control them. In a young child, the strength of his emotions can be scary for him, also. That’s why it’s important that the parents stay in control of themselves during a tantrum. When you do, you are showing him by example how to maintain calm in stressful situations, even if it doesn’t seem like he’s getting that picture yet. If you’re out of control, then you are in effect asking your child to do what you cannot: calm his intense emotions. In this situation, a child’s fear of his “out of control” emotions may eventually escalate into what psychologists call magical thinking, according to Abnormal Psychology by Leonard Zusne and Warren Jones. “If mommy can’t handle my emotions, who can? They must be too strong for anyone.” This could lead to an abundance of issues in adulthood.

No one is perfect – at least, no one I’ve met. The best of parents will occasionally fail to maintain perfect calm and no one will be injured for it, but on the whole that is the goal. If you empathize – put yourself aside and try to see things from your child’s point of view – it is easier to be compassionate and not lose your cool.

Give It an Outlet

Anger isn’t a very fun thing to have bouncing around in your insides. It’s got to come out somehow and  preferably in a way that is acceptable to the rest of the family. For me, I’ve found that some wonderful advice, such as handing my son a crayon and asking him to draw his emotions, didn’t apply to a child under three. When my two year old would try to hit me, I’d take his hands and say, “You’re really mad! I know you’re mad! Hit your hands together!” I’d pretend I was mad, too, to show him. I’d clap my hands together, growl, and say “I’m mad!” He’d clap his hands together as hard as he could and growl.

Validate

Part of why this tactic works for him is he feels validated. Validation involves listening to your child, then reflecting back to him what he is feeling.

We all feel sometimes like we are speaking a foreign language. We’re trying to talk, but the person we are talking to just doesn’t “get it.” If it’s someone very important to us, this can lead to a rainbow of very ugly feelings like frustration and despair. To a child experiencing this, those feelings can quickly escalate into rage and hopelessness. This is true from birth. Crying is the only language that infants possess. Picking up our babies to comfort them instead of letting them “cry it out” is the earliest form of validation.

When our babies grow into toddlers, their ways of communicating have evolved a little bit but not that much. It’s still a rare child who can always rationalize what he is feeling and communicate his needs. Many adults haven’t mastered that skill! It is still up to us to help them recognize what they are feeling, identify it, and work through it.

To a baby, it is enough to pick them up and change his diaper when he’s wet. They learn that “Oh, I was uncomfortable, because I was wet. Mommy fixed that.” They not only get a clean diaper but two added bonuses: They learn why they were unhappy, and they learn that someone cared enough to see it and fix it. Knowing that someone cares enough to do that for you is one of the basic emotional needs of humanity. Relationships of all types are won and lost in that regard.

A two year old is just entering the real meat of the emotional arena. Some see their constant need for emotional reassurance as manipulation or a weakness that must be toughened up. But humans are hard-wired to seek out validation at any age. We must know from someone that we are OK as we are, cared for, and loved. A toddler especially is in an age of discovery: so many new challenges and things he is learning to do, and having trouble doing, and things he can’t or isn’t allowed to do. It can all tie in to a child’s sense of self-worth. The newness that a toddler finds herself suddenly experiencing leaves her needing more reassurance.

Most of the time, it is relatively easy to validate a child. All you have to do is pay attention, and reflect back what you see. ”I know you’re mad, (sad), (frustrated), (you’re smiling, are you happy today?)” A validated child feels loved and in sync with the world.

I could tell that my son and I were making progress when we were in the mall and he wanted to go play in the toy store. Again. We were on our way out, and we had already stopped there earlier. I told him “No, it was time to go home.” He drug his feet and finally sat down and said, “I’m mad!”

“You’re mad?” I replied. “I know you’re mad! I know you wanted to play with the toys. But we still have to go now.”

He climbed to his feet and came with me without any more protest. He had just wanted me to know that he was mad. I was proud of his ability to tell me what he was feeling instead of throwing a fit.

Play It Out

Children love to play pretend, and it can be rewarding and fun for an adult to play, too. It is also a wonderful learning tool. Adults can use pretend to teach a child what to do when a real situation arises.

“Pretending that you’re mad” is a fun game for most children. This is the easiest time to show them healthy ways to be angry. This play time gives your child the opportunity to decide what works best for him, or to even come up with his own stuff. One of our favorite books, My Two Hands, My Two Feet by Rick Walton and Julia Gorton, has a line that says: “When I’m mad, I stomp my feet, like drummers as they beat, beat, beat.” My son would joyfully pretend that he was mad and stomp his feet.

The next time he’d get really mad, I’d say, “You’re really mad! Stomp you’re feet; you’re so mad!” And he would, crying through his tears, “Beat, beat, beat!”

It takes repetition for a child to learn to use their new diversion instead of hitting mommy or daddy, or the cat. That’s when you’d just gently take their hands and say, “No, don’t hit Mommy. If you’re mad, clap your hands together.”

Anger Management: Ways to Say ‘I’m Mad!’

  • Clap your hands
  • Stomp your feet
  • Growl
  • Say “I’m mad!”
  • Color a picture with angry scribbles
  • Get a cloth and twist it really tight
  • Hit a pillow

I’m Mad, Too

Sometimes, the best way to teach is by example. Some days we all just get overwhelmed. When you’re upset and he’s yelling, an honest “I’m mad!” said in a childish, exaggerated way may feel silly coming from mommy, but you’re showing your child that you’re human, too. This could be when that light of dawning association may occur: “Mommy said it like I say it. Is she feeling like I felt yesterday?” This is the beginning buds of empathy. As parents, this is one of our ultimate goals! A child who learns healthy ways of handling his emotions will feel emotionally balanced and more in tuned to everyone else around him.

Keep a Sense of Humor

You’ve talked, you’ve validated, he’s still “mad,” and you’re both a weepy mess. It’s time to change the subject. Children have a harder time walking away because for them, everything is now. Joke, make light of the situation (but never make fun of him!), and have fun. Kids are very eager to play – it’s what they do! As parents, it’s important for us also to remember that it’s not the end of the world. Tantrums happen. It’s not a personal attack; it’s just childhood.

Whatever methods you prefer, the important thing is that, as parents, we work towards showing our children what to do when they are angry or upset.  When we do that, we are also showing them that it is OK to feel the way they do. There is no shame in feeling angry. With this validation, they can go on to eventually learn more mature ways of dealing with their emotions.

Sources for Adult Anger Management

  • Boy Town – BoysTown.org,  1-800-448-3000
  • United Way – LiveUnited.org
  • Child and Family Support Center – 1-877-900-CFSC
  • National Domestic Violence Hotline – 1-800-799-7233
  • Domestic Violence Hotline/Child Abuse – 1-800-4-A-CHILD
  • Family Violence Prevention Center – 1-800-313-1310

How do you help your toddler deal with her anger?

How to Play with Your Baby

By Maathangi Iyer, staff writer for The Attached Family

Baby's playYour child is naturally imaginative — all children are. Most theories of child development view young children as highly creative, with a natural tendency to fantasize, experiment, and explore their physical and conceptual environment.

Having said that, the role of a parent in developing, stimulating, and nurturing the child — with respect to his emotional, cognitive, and language development — cannot be over-emphasized. Based on analysis by “Early Childhood Longitudinal Study’s Birth Cohort (ECLS),” 31 percent of American parents know very little about the pace of a typical infant’s development, such as when a child should start talking or begin potty training. Lack of knowledge can be a detriment to a baby’s development, whether it’s expecting a baby to be able to do something he’s not developmentally ready for or ignoring the child’s need for playful learning.

Even very young babies enjoy playing with their parents, and as the baby grows, so does her need for exploring and learning. The first few years of your child’s life is an exciting time for you and her, as it is this stage that the growth and development of her young brain are the fastest in her life. The day-to-day experiences are responsible for shaping the brain. Your baby’s experiences are what she sees, hears, feels, tastes, and smells — and each experience triggers electrical activity in the brain, enabling it to form these connections and grow. Continue reading How to Play with Your Baby

Help Your Toddler Bond with the New Baby

By Naomi Aldort, author of Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves

**Originally published in the Spring 2008 New Baby issue of The Journal of API

Siblings“Mommy, why do you need another Yonatan?” asked my first-born, looking at my growing belly. I hugged him and said, “I do not need another Yonatan. There is no other Yonatan. You are the only ‘you’ there will ever be, and I love you so much.”

No matter how much we explain and include a young child in welcoming his new sibling, he will not comprehend this concept any more than you would welcome another lover for your spouse.

In an extended family, the situation is a lot easier, as mom is not the only caregiver. In the nuclear family, a seven-year-old would happily welcome a new baby as a wonderful addition, but a toddler or a young child who is still seeing himself as the needy one will have a lot of inner turmoil and needs your reassurance that he is still your darling child. Continue reading Help Your Toddler Bond with the New Baby

Focus on the Simple Moments

By Nikki Schaefer, staff writer for The Attached Family

Nikki
Nikki

On a rainy day, I took my three-year-old son to the restaurant with the golden arches, thinking that he would love to go down the big slides. He did…one time…then stopped to take a bite of his apple dippers.

I asked him, “Do you want to go down the slides again?”

“No,” he replied emphatically. “All done!”

He began to gobble down a few more slices. Having trouble believing that a child would not want to play in Playland, I asked him again, “Do you want to go down the slides?”

“NO,” he said, “ALL DONE!”

He began to run around in circles yelling, “Circle! Circle!” His blond curls bobbed up and down with a toothy smile across his face as he continued to run around, over and over again.

Amused, I watched my son closely. “This is why I love being a mom,” I thought. “What a joy it is to watch this little person take such delight in something so simple.”

It was in that instance I was reminded that, it is not in the jungle gyms of life but in the daily cycles of being where the greatest joys are found.

In a culture that teaches that a child needs Disneyland, a dance class, and a soccer team at age three to find satisfaction, my child reminded me that what he needs most is the space to “be.” My call as a mother of a young child is to allow him the freedom to run, spin, laugh, dance, chase a bug, touch the rain, paint a mural, or just “be.” My job is to create the margins in my life to hold him, talk to him, delight in him, mend an ouchie, pour a glass of milk, and share the wonders of God.

Sometimes, the Playlands of life have their place. It is good to get out of the house, move our bodies, change the scene, and experience some of the greater amusements…from time to time. Yet, instead of always ordering the Big Macs, we are called to “supersize the ordinary.” By consciously choosing not to focus on the highs of life, but instead on the simple moments, we as parents choose a love for our families that is extraordinary indeed.

My call as a mother of a young child is to allow him the freedom to run, spin, laugh, dance, chase a bug, touch the rain, paint a mural, or just “be.”