You are having a lovely pleasant chat with a mom you haven’t seen in ages and suddenly you hear a loud thud, an ear-piercing scream, and then another mother appears before you clutching a sobbing preschooler with a tear-stained cheek and red eyes. Apparently, your son hit her daughter and now the mother and daughter and all eyes from the playgroup are on you as to what you are going to do about it.
It’s a parent’s worst moment, and one that is never covered in the parenting books. What is the best way to handle playgroup altercations that leaves everyone feeling content and validated?
Sometimes I miss the days when my values and my daughter’s were one and the same. For the first few years of Isabelle’s life I believed I could, and actually did, shield her from Barbie’s plastic smile and Cinderella’s batting eye lashes.
Any signs of the Disney princess posse magically disappeared with a mom’s deft sleight of hand. I was on a mission to deflect and distract, determined to make sure my daughter did not fall prey to these sirens. I had the “Barbie and princess drawer,” a final resting place away from Isabelle’s watchful eye and curious nature where all gifts and goody bags bearing their likeness remained until they could be re-gifted or otherwise disposed of.
Then Isabelle turned three years old, and like Snow White’s poison apple, she tasted the forbidden fruit and has entered a deep slumber from which someday, fingers crossed, she will awake. It started with a birthday trip to the toy store with my mother-in-law. To my surprise, she came home with a Barbie. Naively, it had never occurred to me that something like this could happen. My mother-in-law has her own agenda, we all do. Hers includes a traditional notion of how girls should be raised — playing with Barbie and princesses of course! It has been a slippery slope ever since.
Let me clarify why this is a problem for me. It’s about two issues really:
One is the over-commercialization of our society where everything is branded and marketed. I don’t like the idea of corporate America infiltrating my daughter’s beautifully original brain and pruning down her neural pathways based on their bottom line.
The other is my desire for my daughter’s female role models to have more role and less model to them. My values are clearly biased toward the infinite possibilities of what Isabelle could become. Her strong, athletic body and bright, creative mind surely have more to offer the world than what Barbie and Disney represent. And when Isabelle looks in the mirror, her reflection does not match most Barbies and Disney princesses.
I could devote many paragraphs to the debate about why I believe Barbie and Disney princesses are harmful to our young girls, but rather than an academic discussion, I am most concerned with what this actually means for me and Isabelle.
Confounding matters is how I’ve raised Isabelle, who is four years old now, to think independently and figure out her tendencies based on her own ideas. She is consistently offered a lot of choices, and I encourage her to think through decisions and not go with the obvious or what others are telling her. Of course, she isn’t raised in a vacuum. Her head is filled with our family’s ideals and values, and our community and society as a whole play their important part as well. Still, Isabelle has become exactly who I wanted her to be. She is a clever and thoughtful child who, in most situations, is able to clearly identify her likes and dislikes and assert her preferences to those around her.
The Barbie and Disney princess struggle is almost a daily occurrence now. When it was time for a new toothbrush, Isabelle said she wanted one with sparkles. So we went to the store and couldn’t find any kid-sized sparkle toothbrushes. Her eye was immediately drawn to the electric Cinderella toothbrush. “That’s the one I want!” she declared confidently. I declined, reminding her she already had an electric toothbrush that she rarely used. “Plus,” I added, “you don’t need to have a princess toothbrush.” So we agreed on a set of brightly colored toothbrushes and moved on. Score one for Mom!
The next week, a dentist came to Isabelle’s preschool and gave a talk on oral hygiene. Each child got a take-away bag filled with floss, a mask, gloves, and a toothbrush. All the boys got a blue toothbrush with a Cars character. And I’m sure you can guess what all the girls got — a pink toothbrush with Ariel. Score one for Disney!
The following week, Isabelle had her routine dental check-up. Her dentist is a friend and knows to avoid the Disney characters with our family, so after the cleaning she showed Isabelle an array of colorful toothbrushes to choose from. Alas, Isabelle’s princess sixth sense kicked in. She picked one of those colorful toothbrushes then turned and pointed to a cabinet behind her head and said, “But I want one of those.” How she knew there were Disney princess toothbrushes in there is beyond me. We came home with Belle.
For those of you keeping score in the toothbrush arena, Disney trumped Mom two to one in a matter of weeks. So, what’s the moral of this fable? I suppose one lesson is that I am not a super mom who can and will take on the Disney giant and win, but I already knew that about myself.
I choose to believe the real lesson is the one I re-learn every day: The art of Attachment Parenting is a delicate dance where sharing your values and letting your child be free to be who they are sometimes trample on each other’s toes.
I’m not going to control what the random dentist at school passes out to my child, but I can say no when we’re at the store. And when my daughter sits through a cleaning at the dentist holding her little self together and doing what’s asked of her, I have no intention of quashing her request for a Disney princess toothbrush and the joy that it brings her in that moment, because in that moment, her joy is mine as well.
I’m making breakfast for my two-year-old son who stands on a stool next to me. Oatmeal simmers on the stove. “Lid!” Reuben says, pointing to the rattling pan and signing that he hears something. I turn off the flame, then slice an avocado, which I slide into the Vitamix blender. I add half a cup of oatmeal, an ounce of last night’s Parmesan pan-fried pork, applesauce, carrots, and milk. “Mix!” Reuben says, smiling up at me happily as I start the machine.
“Okay, buddy, let’s have breakfast,” I say, strapping Reuben into his high chair. I open the tab of his Mic-Key button, which looks like a beach ball valve on his abdomen, screw in the extension tube, and insert the tip of a syringe filled with the food I’ve just made. I sit down next to Reuben and push ten milliliters, about the volume of an oral bite, directly into his stomach through the tube. Meanwhile, I offer him banana slices and cereal, but he leaves them on his tray.
Reuben’s unusual relationship to food wasn’t always such a comfortable part of our routine.
“Oh, I know,” Other parents say, “my Jimmy is a picky eater, too.” I don’t want to be obnoxious, so I don’t say what I’m thinking: Reuben isn’t picky — it’s that he’s not an eater.
In the Beginning
Reuben’s feeding issues stem from medical complications that arose during birth. He spent 11 weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit, undergoing increasingly invasive treatments to save his life. I could not feed him, talk to him, or touch him. (Unlike some critically ill infants who thrive when touched, Reuben’s blood oxygen levels dropped with any stimulation). But I could pump breastmilk for him. Even though he was so ill that he received only a few milliliters of it each day through a tube into his stomach, pumping became my way of connecting with him and embodying my faith that he would recover.
The doctors warned us that feeding difficulties were often a side-effect of the treatment, but my husband and I assumed that once Reuben was allowed to eat, he would.
He did not.
Common Feeding Difficulties
Oral Aversion Oral aversion occurs when a child is reluctant or refuses to be breastfed, bottle-fed, or eat. The child may have negative associations with food or other objects near or in his mouth, or, in some cases, a child develops oral aversion when she strongly dislikes the texture of certain foods. This often happens when a child has been tube-fed for a long time due to illness or prematurity.
Dysphagia Dysphagia is when the swallowing of food causes it to not pass easily from the mouth to the stomach, which may cause food to get stuck in the lungs and throat. Children with this disorder may also begin to refuse food. This disorder often occurs as the result of another condition, such as prematurity, cleft lip or palate, and large tongue or tonsils.
Comfort in Breastfeeding
We started by offering to nurse him several times each day. Although he never ate enough to allow us to decrease his tube feedings, breastfeeding did give him some practice at sucking and swallowing, and provided him with positive oral experiences. Each time, he would shake his head excitedly, say “ah-ah-ah,” and dive toward me. Then, he would close his eyes and raise his eyebrows in an expression of deep contentment as he settled in. Now, at nearly three, he still asks for nummies as a way to reconnect when I return from work, or when he is particularly tired or upset. He barely latches on, but finds comfort in snuggling.
Through the time that I pumped breast milk for Reuben and he recreationally nursed, I sometimes felt criticized by people on both ends of the spectrum of parenting philosophy. Some people couldn’t understand why I would make the monumental effort to pump milk for 19 months. At other times, I felt pressure from exclusively breastfeeding mothers because Reuben used a nipple shield, didn’t get his nutrition “from the breast,” and received breastmilk calorie-enriched with formula. I had to learn to trust my own instincts, knowing that I was providing the best mix of experiences and nutrition for his unique needs.
Reality Sets In
The doctors reassured us that Reuben would learn to eat when we introduced a bottle or solids. But he did not. Months went by, and the tube remained in his nose; then, the day after his first birthday, it was replaced by one in his stomach. Some family and friends couldn’t understand why Reuben did not eat by mouth, suggesting that the problem would be solved if we simply held his tube feedings and offered only the bottle. They shared stories of breastfed babies who were forced into taking the bottle at day care. We knew this wouldn’t work, even if we had been willing to try it. Babies like Reuben have been traumatized by their oral experiences. They are so out of touch with their bodies’ signals of hunger and fullness, and so lacking in the basic motor skills needed to suck and swallow, that they will starve to death without tube feedings.
But I also understood their discomfort. Eating is central to daily life, social interaction, and celebration. Reuben’s refusal to eat felt deeply strange. More than once, even though we knew all of the medical reasons for Reuben’s behavior, Eric and I asked each other in frustration, “Why won’t he just eat?”
At each meal, I prepared a bottle and a bit of food, knowing in advance that the food would ultimately go in the garbage, and the contents of the bottle would be poured into his feeding tube. “Try to relax,” my husband advised. “Sometimes you focus on the negative, and I’m sure Reuben picks up on that.” He was right, but I wasn’t sure how to remain consistently cheerful when I prepared three meals a day for a child who refused to put them in his mouth.
Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline by Becky Bailey helped me realize that we can’t ever force another person to do anything; all we can do is set up the situation so it’s easier for them to choose what is safe, healthy, or polite. Or, in the words of one specialized feeding program we researched, “We teach our families the proper division of eating responsibility; it is the child’s responsibility to eat, and it is the family’s responsibility to provide the right environment, foods, and opportunities to eat.”
Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline By Becky Bailey
Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline provides parents with seven basic skills to turn conflict into cooperation through development of self-control and self-confidence on the part of both the parent and child. The focus of the book is to teach parents to learn to understand both their and their child’s motivations for certain behaviors and then how to help their child and themselves to improve.
Seeking Treatment
As our knowledge of feeding issues and confidence as parents increased, we became evermore frustrated with the hospital feeding specialist’s behavioral approach, which didn’t seem to work for Reuben or our family. He suggested we strive to “increase Reuben’s compliance with the spoon” and instructed us to set a timer for a three-minute “meal,” then touch the spoon to Reuben’s lips and say “bite” every 30 seconds. To our surprise, this worked well — for three meals. After that, Reuben screamed and sobbed, turning his head away from the spoon. Although we didn’t know the phrase “feeding with love and respect” at that time, we instinctively felt that seeking “compliance” was not compatible with our parenting philosophy.
When we consulted a different specialist, I immediately felt more comfortable. She approached Reuben and greeted him gently, getting to know him first as a person. She watched me feed him, then sat down to offer carrot sticks and Gerber Puffs and observe his reactions. She explained that she saw eating as a complex skill with sensory, psychological, behavioral, and biological components.
With her help, we discovered that Reuben was not comfortable with the preliminary sensory processing required for eating: He hated to have food on his face. She showed us how to work with carrot sticks and dip, as well as vibrating tools, to help him learn to tolerate sensations in and around his mouth.
She also suggested that Reuben requires strong flavors in order to locate food in his mouth. Refried beans and roasted carrot puree loaded with garlic and tahini became early favorite foods. Still, he only ate a bite or two of these foods at each meal.
Tips to Feeding with Love and Respect in Special Circumstances:
Let goof your sense of how things should be, and accept your child for who she is.
Approach your child’s doctors and other care providers as members of the team. They are experts on particular medical procedures, treatments, and diseases; you are an expert on your child. You should expect that medical professionals will listen to your experience and opinions. It is okay to ask questions like, “What other options are there for treatment?” or “What therapies are offered at other facilities?”
Seek out other parents and families in similar situations for support, advice, and alternative options.
Accept whatever is possible in your interactions with your child around food, whether it is making that food from your body or opening a can of formula with love.
Forgive yourself. Whatever decisions you made were based on the best available knowledge you had.
Trust your own intuition and your knowledge about your child. Be cautious of being influenced by those who see your decisions as either too child-focused or insufficiently pure from an ideological perspective.
Abandon any expectation that you will follow some perfect or pure set of principles.
Focus on the social, psychological, and behavioral aspects of mealtime and the possibilities for bonding they provide.
Relying on Other AP Practices, Too
Because feedings were complicated and sometimes tense, we found that other aspects of Attachment Parenting helped us maintain a secure bond with Reuben. I don’t own as many different wraps or know as many different ways to tie one as some people, but I consider myself a babywearing expert because I can get a baby into and out of a sling without dislodging a feeding tube from his nose — and have, on occasion, administered feedings while wearing the baby.
Cosleeping allowed us to ensure that Reuben didn’t become tangled in his tubes during the overnight portion of his feedings. Through soggy experiences, we learned all the ways the feeding tube could leak — once all in one night. First, I was awakened by cold wetness on my backside when the tube connected to Reuben disconnected from the bag containing his food. Two hours and a sheet change later, the medical port on the tube slipped open. This time we put a towel over the wet spot and went back to sleep, only to be awakened again when Reuben squirmed the tube extension off the button on his stomach.
People who say eating in bed is messy have no idea.
Feeding with Love and Respect in Special Circumstances
Over time, we have found ways to make Reuben’s tube feedings a nurturing and respectful experience for all of us. I choose the content of Reuben’s diet when I make his homemade blended formula (though we also use canned formula). Context is also an important part of eating, and we have learned to integrate Reuben’s tube feedings into our family meal time. We put whatever we are eating on Reuben’s plate, and he usually chews at least some of it. Eric pushes Reuben’s tube feeding while we all talk about our day. Before we start, we hold hands and say something for which we’re grateful. Then I smile at Reuben and ask, “Now what?” and he grins broadly as he says, “Blessings on our meal.”
Someday, the doctors assure us, Reuben will move to eating all of his calories by mouth and I will complain with the mothers of other teenage boys about the difficulty of keeping food in the refrigerator. Until then, we have learned that every kind of meal, whether intravenous or tube-fed, hung or pushed or pumped, eaten by mouth from the breast or the hand or the spoon – all of these are a blessing.
Family Resources
MealtimeConnections.com provides feeding therapy and consultation focused on developing a positive partnership between therapists and families, as well feeding in the context of a positive parent-child relationship. I especially recommend their “Mealtime Notions,” which are feeding aids based on the Mealtime Connections philosophy that “feeding is first and foremost a special relationship between the child and the feeder”; and the Homemade Blended Formula Handbook, an indispensable philosophical and practical reference for families of tube-fed children.
The Pediatric Encouragement Feeding Program at Kluge Children’s Rehabilitation Center is an intensive, interdisciplinary program focused on weaning children from tube feedings in a supportive environment.
By Judy Sanders, member of API’s Board of Directors and API’s Editorial Review Board
It’s dinnertime somewhere. Families sit around a dining table, or gather around a short-legged table, or settle on a rug in a circle. A baby may be in a high chair or on his mother’s back, having food handed to him. He may be in a hammock, gently pushed every so often, dozing, not eating, and absorbing the sounds of his family enjoying their evening meal.
Why regularly share the evening meal as a family? How does this routine activity serve us beyond nourishment? Continue reading The Family Table→
By Rita Brhel, managing editor and attachment parenting resource leader (API)
Who’s teaching your children about food and nutrition? As much as parents hope the answer is them, even attached children are barraged by food messages from sources you might not have even considered: the media and advertising.
“A lot of people say, ‘Media doesn’t influence me,’” said Melinda Hemmelgarn, a dietician and food journalist from Columbia, Missouri, when in fact, advertising is often the only form of “education” they may be receiving about food and nutrition. Even of those people who have heard about their nation’s nutritional programs, such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s food pyramid, few rely on them to make their food choices, she said.
Hemmelgarn is spending her fellowship with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy’s Food and Society Policy Fellows Program educating parents about the dangers of letting the media make children’s nutritional decisions. Media’s influence on our children is so pervasive, she said, that most of us don’t even realize how much our children – or we – are being exposed.
Advertisers are Relentless – and Want Our Children
The amount of advertising we receive on a daily basis is staggering: television, Internet, radio, billboards, newspapers, magazines, cell phones, video games, at sports venues, in supermarkets, food packaging, even in schools, and the list goes on and on. Children and adults are constantly hearing where they should go to eat or what they should buy. With so much marketing coming at us constantly, it’s impossible for media not to have an influence unless we live somewhere with absolutely no contact with the outside world. Cell phones now have the capability to allow businesses to track where users go, so if your teen walked past a pizza parlor, an ad could pop up for that pizza parlor on the screen of the cell phone. It’s both awesome and frightening what technology can do.
Advertisers are also keying in on trends, which are most influential on children and teens. “Now, with regard to children especially, you got to get them when they’re young, because if you can get them when they’re young, you got them for life,” Hemmelgarn said of how advertisers think regarding children.
Study: Food Marketing Aimed at Children Influences Poor Nutritional Choices A recent report by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies shows that food and beverage marketing targeted to children 12 years old and younger leads them to request and consume high-calorie, low-nutrient products. Advertisers aim for this age group because dietary preferences and eating patterns form early in life, the study says. The report calls for manufacturers and restaurants to direct more of their resources to reshape children’s awareness of food by developing healthy foods, drinks, and meals for children. The report also calls for the government to enhance nutritional standards in school meals and offer tax incentives to companies that develop healthy foods, and for schools, parents, and the media to support the government and food industry to pursue these initiatives.
It’s the Parents’ Responsibility
Parents need to teach their children how to be smart about buying their food – to realize that the purpose of food is to provide nutrition to the body, Hemmelgarn said. Children need to learn that there’s more to buying food than convenience, price, or emotional comfort. They need to learn how food choices affect their health, not just their checking accounts or their schedules.
Parents also need to teach their children that just because an advertiser makes a claim, it’s not necessarily accurate, Hemmelgarn said. For example, 78% of people in the United States say they like to buy green brands because they want to be eco-conscious, but not all advertisers who claim to be green or sustainable or organic actually are. One fast-food restaurant claims that its chicken nuggets are green because they don’t have trans fats, but there’s no information on how the chicken was raised or any other nutritional facts about the food. Even the term “organic” can get confusing, as many companies are now diluting this label to include naturally raised, yet not organically certified, foods.
Media Literacy is a Learned Skill
The key to guiding our children’s ability to make smart consumer choices regarding food is to teach them to be media literate – using critical thinking to sort through the messages they are receiving in order to find the truth about the food being advertised and if it aligns with their own values and beliefs.
“Media literacy is not media bashing,” Hemmelgarn said. “It’s a counter-balance. It’s an antidote to the excess media of this age. But, it’s an alternative to censoring.”
Through media literacy, consumers learn that all media is constructed to deliver a specific message to consumers and to persuade them of something — in the case of food purchases: where to go and what to buy. They learn how to think beyond the plate to find “food truth,” answering questions such as: Where did this food come from? Who produced it? How was it raised? What’s in it? How might eating this affect the environment, society, my community, my family, or me?
There are seven key questions for consumers to ask themselves before basing a food purchase on a media message they received:
Who paid for the message?
What is the purpose of the message?
Who is the intended audience?
What techniques are being used to grab and hold my attention?
What is being sold?
What is not included in the message?
What are the unintended consequences of purchasing this food?
Using the case of a fast-food restaurant’s ad promoting parties to schoolteachers for their classrooms during field trips, Hemmelgarn demonstrated how to use these questions:
Who paid for the message? McDonald’s
What is the purpose of the message? To sell food
Who is the intended audience? Teachers
What techniques are being used to grab and hold my attention? Happy, fun character interacting with happy children
What is being sold? A free event for classrooms
What is not included in the message? That the food is unhealthy
What are the unintended consequences of purchasing this food? Children learn unhealthy food choices from the teacher’s decision, and children learn to overlook healthy food options such as homemade meals or healthier restaurants
Here’s another example using a soft drink company’s pop machines in schools:
Who paid for the message? Coca-Cola
What is the purpose of the message? To sell bottles of a soft drink
Who is the intended audience? Children
What techniques are being used to grab and hold my attention? Bright colors, catchy slogans
What is being sold? Easy, inexpensive drink option
What’s not included in the message? That the drink is unhealthy
What are the unintended consequences of purchasing this food? Children learn unhealthy food choices from the school’s decision, and children learn to overlook healthy drink options such as milk or juice
Sorting through media messages can be difficult to learn and to teach to others, but says Hemmelgarn: “If we love our kids and if we’re interested in protecting them from these media messages, then we need to know how to do this.”
Cheap Food is Often Unhealthy Food
Anyone who has ever walked into a grocery store knows this is true: Healthy food is not cheap. Earlier this year, at the groundbreaking of U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama’s home garden, CBS News reported that people going through the economic recession were more likely to opt for inexpensive, unhealthy foods over whole foods, even when they know the long-term consequences of an unhealthy diet. When it came to saving money, people are more likely to trade their $3 organic apple for a $1 fast-food sandwich rather than look for other money-saving options. As attached parents, we must keep in mind that we are raising our children to grow into healthy adults and to value health over greed. And we must model the decisions we want our children to make. Be careful when you begin cutting the family food budget.
By Rita Brhel, managing editor and attachment parenting resource leader (API)
Isabelle Fox, PhD
Attachment Parenting International regularly fields questions from members regarding different aspects of attachment, child development, and challenging family situations. Easily the largest area of concern is among divorced and separated parents who are involved in custody cases in which the other parent is demanding overnight visitation for an infant or young child.
Parents involved in this stressful situation believe that overnight visitation is harmful not only to their individual attachment with the child but also to the child’s overall development. Isabelle Fox, PhD, a psychotherapist, author of Being There, renowned expert on API’s Principle of Providing Consistent and Loving Care, and a member of API’s Advisory Board, wants to leave parents with the truth – that, yes, overnight visitations can be quite harmful to the young child…but that, unfortunately, the courts system is woefully behind on education in this arena of child development. Continue reading Dr. Isabelle Fox on Overnight Visitations: As Harmful as We Suspect?→
By Rita Brhel, managing editor and attachment parenting resource leader (API)
Isabelle Fox, PhD
Ideally, marriage lasts forever, but for a variety of reasons, many families today will experience divorce – an event that is as difficult on older children and teens as infants and young children for whom psychotherapist Isabelle Fox, PhD, advocates no overnight visitations with a non-primary caregiver until the child is at least three years old. Just because an older child is able to articulate her feelings and comprehend the concept of divorce doesn’t mean the event is any less traumatic.
“Older children and divorce is also complicated,” because the child has developed a strong attachment to each parent and being forced to deny attachment with one parent is devastating, said Dr. Fox, author of Being There, renowned expert on API’s Principle of Providing Consistent and Loving Care, and member of Attachment Parenting International’s Advisory Board.
Dr. Fox spoke during the second day of API’s 15th Anniversary Celebration gathering in Nashville, Tennessee, last weekend, in a special Hot Topic session, “Custody and Separation.” The session was attended by parents, therapists, and others who work frequently with attached parents dealing with marital separation.
How Divorce Affects Older Children
Parents don’t think about how difficult their divorce will be on their children. Older children and teens are more likely to blame themselves for the divorce or to wonder why their parents don’t love them enough to stay together. Continue reading Dr. Isabelle Fox on Divorce and Older Children→
By Amber Lewis, staff writer for The Attached Family
Every child and each parent is different, and family situations differ just as much as the people in them, making each situation unique with successes and challenges all their own. In my family, I’m the parent who works full-time outside the home while my husband stays at home with our daughter. In addition, I am in the military — and that means my work sometimes can take me on extended travel or deployment.
When a parent must be away from her family for a long time, as in the case of business travel or military deployment, it’s important to realize that this can be very hard on children and that these extended separations must be prepared for. One resource I recommend to military families is SurvivingDeployment.com.
A key concept to keep in mind is that children often act-out more during these extended separations as a way of coping. The parent at home can help prepare the environment for this by talking with teachers, friends’ parents, and family members about what to expect and to prepare them for providing support.
Here are some ideas about how to help your child deal with your or your spouse’s extended separation:
Keep everyone connected and communicate often – Before deployment, don’t keep it a secret, but you don’t have to make a big deal about it either. During the extended separation, make recordings for each other, send lots of letters and packages back and forth, and put in lots of pictures. Also, the parent at home needs to be sure to talk to the child often about his feelings toward the separation. After the parent returns home, she owes everyone some one-on-one attention and reassurance.
Make friends – For both parents and the kids, making friends who have been through or are going through a similar experience will help everyone.
Establish the home boss – Remember the parent at home is the one in charge; the other parent should never try to undermine the spouse’s authority while away.
Most of these tips are more about raising the child through an extended separation from a parent rather than what to do when your child acts out because that is a big part of what discipline is. If you’re looking for specific discipline techniques for specific situations, what works best for separations is also what works during times when the family is together: positive discipline done in a loving, compassionate, nurturing, and empathic way.
For more information on practicing positive discipline, look forward to the upcoming Fall 2009 annual Growing Child “Positive Discipline” issue of The Attached Family magazine.
“The older they got, the more I yelled,” recalled Walton, an International Network for Children and Families (INCAF) parent educator and author of Key to Personal Freedom who busted a few of the powerful myths outlined in her book during an INCAF teleseminar last week.
When her four boys – all within five years – were younger, yelling was a somewhat effective discipline, she admits. But that changed when they hit their teen years. Yelling no longer worked at all, and Walton was forced to find another way to interact with her children. She turned to positive discipline. As she acquired new skills and a new philosophy of parenting her children, one truth stood out among the others: that 95% of what children learn comes from what their parents model.
What was Walton teaching her sons by yelling? To solve problems, especially interpersonal conflicts, through exerting control over others.
Myth Busted: Validation Works Better Than Yelling
What Walton learned is that the strongest tool parents can use during a moment of conflict with their children is validation. Children, like adults, want to be heard and understood, even if the answer is still “no.”
For example, say a girl asks her father if she can turn on the television and he believes she has watched enough TV for the day. So, she begins to have a tantrum. What does Dad do? What is not helpful is saying, “No, you can’t.” While the girl certainly wants the TV on, the way to resolve the situation is not to engage her in a power struggle over the on/off button. An example of an appropriate validation here is, “I know you want to watch the TV, but you’ve already watched two hours worth today and that is enough.”
Just as with yelling, the certainty of mainstream culture that spanking and other fear-based forms of punishment are effective at disciplining children is a myth. Parents don’t need to use punishments to get the behavior they seek in their children. The first challenge is for parents to realize this truth; the second, and harder, challenge is for the parents to adopt new ways of disciplining their children. Walton suggested parents first place limits on their behavior, making it a rule that they will not use threats, bribes, or other fear-based discipline tools on their children. With this rule in place, parents can then begin using the positive, teaching- and guidance-based discipline tools they can learn through books such as Attached at the Heart by Attachment Parenting International Co-founders Barbara Nicholson and Lysa Parker, local API Support Group meetings, and other API resources.
It’s important, though, for parents to realize that it does take longer for children to learn a concept through positive discipline than through punishments, Walton said. However, once that child learns the concept, he is truly competent in it. Whereas, with punishments, a child behaves out of fear and does not learn the concept for the long term.
For example, a listener at the teleseminar described how her three-year-old son pushes and hits his 15-month-old sister. The mother is having a difficult time dealing with this sibling rivalry without resorting to spankings. Walton suggested she instead try validating her son’s feelings, acknowledging that his acting-out behavior is actually a cry for attention. To do so, Walton suggested the mother to give additional one-on-one attention to her son when he is not acting out, and when he does, to explain to him that it’s not OK to hit his sister and, if she wants more attention, all he needs to do is ask Mommy.
Myth Busted: Mistakes are Opportunities to Strengthen Connection with Our Children
No parent is perfect. We all make mistakes in relating to and interacting with our children. The key is learning to forgive ourselves but also learn from our mistakes – important not only for ourselves but for our children to learn. Walton explained how helpful it is for parents to look upon their children’s undesirable behavior not as something to be feared or ashamed of, but instead as opportunities for learning.
For example, a listener at the teleseminar described how her three-year-old daughter makes grocery shopping difficult because she grabs items off the shelf. She tells her daughter over and over not to touch things on the shelf. Walton suggested that the mother set up a mock grocery store at home and role play the behaviors she wishes to see first at home before going out to the store. Then, before going into the store, the mother would explain to her daughter that she isn’t to touch anything without Mom saying OK, just like when they play at home. Finally, when her daughter starts knocking items off the shelf, the mother should continue to focus on teaching her daughter to clean up and put the items back.
“Teach, teach, teach,” Walton said. “And when she does make a mistake, say ‘I love you, and we’re going to be OK,’ and help her clean up.”
Myth Busted: No One Knows Your Child Better Than You
One of Walton’s favorite parenting tools is to allow children to be children. She recalls a neighbor telling her, when her boys were young, that she needed to exert more control over them. She opted not to take this advice, because she enjoyed her time with her sons. She thought it was fun to let them be who they were, instead of trying to force them into certain behaviors to please those outside her family.
Walton said new parents are barraged constantly with advice from their family, friends, pediatrician, neighbors, and even strangers. But, no matter what others may claim, the real parenting expert for your child and in your family is you. And parents do best to only embrace the parenting tools and philosophies that they find are best for their individual family. For example, parents who cosleep with their children shouldn’t do it because a book said to and shouldn’t stop doing it because they saw a television ad that said so. Each family should be cosleeping or not because that is what they have found works best for their family.
In another example, it is Walton’s belief that parents cannot love their child too much. Others criticize this parenting approach, saying that they will spoil their children. Walton said they can spoil their children by teaching them that love equals material possessions, rather than being derived from emotionally healthy relationships. This parenting approach works for Walton, and no one’s criticism, or approval, weighs as much as on the decision to continue a nurturing parenting approach as what Walton sees working for her children.
Myth Busted: You Can Be Friends with Your Children
Many parents don’t like the thought of being friends with their children, because they connect that idea with an image of overly permissiveness. We know that children need discipline. They need boundaries.
Children also need parents who care and who are willing to listen when they talk about the joys and challenges of their day. The myth that parents can’t be friends with their kids stems from the image of a parent buying alcoholic beverages for their underage teens and perhaps even partying with them. What Walton is meaning is that parents need to give of their time to be with their children and, as was the theme of the 2008 Attachment Parenting Month, to give presence instead of presents.
Being friends with your children doesn’t mean that parents give up striving for personal and family life or not setting and maintaining boundaries and limits for their children’s behaviors, as outlined by the Attachment Parenting International’s Eight Principles of Parenting. Parents still need to maintain their self-respect by keeping their parenting approach family-centered rather than child-centered, and parents must remember that discipline is a vital parenting tool.
For example, Walton said her sons used to tell dirty jokes around her, so she talked to them about her concerns. Walton didn’t let her children do all that they wanted, as it was affecting her sense of balance. Motherhood martyrdom eventually breeds resentment.
The Price Families Pay for Myths
Too many families are stuck living according to these and other myths about parenting and child behavior. They’re trapped by their expectations that children should “act their age” and fears of spoiling their children, Walton said. They cannot truly enjoy parenthood and family life.
“What it can cost is that freedom to create the family we aspire to,” Walton said. And it can cost the child’s development of creativity, emotional regulation and ability to healthily attach to others, and other life skills. Walton calls on parents to bust the myths that constrict their family life – to break free of the bonds of fear and expectations, so that they can experience fulfillment in their parenting roles and reap the rewards of a close, connected family: “When we let go of these myths, it creates so much freedom.”
By Rita Brhel, managing editor and attachment parenting resource leader (API)
Board games, sports, and other competitive activities can bring families closer together as well as teach children important lessons about character. A friend of mine has a nephew who is so unpleasant when he loses, that she refuses to play board games with him anymore. He pounds on the table, calling the other players cheaters or making excuses that it wasn’t his fault he lost the game.
It’s naturally for children and teens to feel disappointment when they lose a game — especially in a society where winning gets attention and attention boosts self-esteem.
The Dangers of Poor Sportsmanship Go Beyond the Game
Without a parent to teach the child how to handle wins and losses gracefully, as well as healthy ways to boost self-esteem, competitive children can turn to winning to feel good about themselves. And it’s not just winning by skills alone on the volleyball team, but winning at all costs in other areas of life where they may be tempted to turn to stealing clothes to win peer acceptance, cheating on a test to get parental approval, or badmouthing a teammate to win attention from the coach.
Teaching Sportsmanship Begins at Home
Teaching good sportsmanship is like teaching anything else. Children learn primarily from what their parents model in their behavior. In her Life.FamilyEducation.com article, “When Good Kids are Bad Sports,” Susan Linn lists these questions for parents to ask themselves when they notice poor sportsmanship in their child’s behavior:
How do I behave when I’m playing games with my child? How do I react when my child makes a mistake, when he wins, when she loses?
How do I behave at my child’s sports games? Do I ever get visibly angry at the coach or the referee?
What to Do When It Happens
In the moment when your child is displaying poor sportsmanship, it’s important to react with calm empathy and to focus on teaching the behaviors you wish to see, just as you would when your child is having a tantrum or upset with something else. Here is an example of how to do this:
Observe without judgment – “You look upset.”
Open the lines of communication – “I’m here if you want to talk about it.”
When your child does describe the situation, empathize – “Gosh, that would be frustrating.”
Problem-solve with your child, letting him take the lead but clarifying any family values – “Let’s come up with some ideas about what to do if this would happen again.”
Take the pressure off your child – “I know you really wanted to win, but it’s more important that you have fun.”
Share examples from your life of feelings after you won or lost, and the choices you made in displaying those feelings – “I remember playing soccer when I was younger, and we lost our last game of the season. I was so disappointed, I even cried! So I decided to practice more, and when the next year came, our team played a lot better.”
How do you resolve feelings of disappointment in your child when he loses a competition or game?
Connecting with our children for a more compassionate world.
You are having a lovely pleasant chat with a mom you haven’t seen in ages and suddenly you hear a loud thud, an ear-piercing scream, and then another mother appears before you clutching a sobbing preschooler with a tear-stained cheek and red eyes. Apparently, your son hit her daughter and now the mother and daughter and all eyes from the playgroup are on you as to what you are going to do about it.
Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline provides parents with seven basic skills to turn conflict into cooperation through development of self-control and self-confidence on the part of both the parent and child. The focus of the book is to teach parents to learn to understand both their and their child’s motivations for certain behaviors and then how to help their child and themselves to improve.
It’s dinnertime somewhere. Families sit around a dining table, or gather around a short-legged table, or settle on a rug in a circle. A baby may be in a high chair or on his mother’s back, having food handed to him. He may be in a hammock, gently pushed every so often, dozing, not eating, and absorbing the sounds of his family enjoying their evening meal.
Who’s teaching your children about food and nutrition? As much as parents hope the answer is them, even attached children are barraged by food messages from sources you might not have even considered: the media and advertising.
Every child and each parent is different, and family situations differ just as much as the people in them, making each situation unique with successes and challenges all their own. In my family, I’m the parent who works full-time outside the home while my husband stays at home with our daughter. In addition, I am in the military — and that means my work sometimes can take me on extended travel or deployment.
Susie Walton used to yell at her kids – a lot.
Board games, sports, and other competitive activities can bring families closer together as well as teach children important lessons about character. A friend of mine has a nephew who is so unpleasant when he loses, that she refuses to play board games with him anymore. He pounds on the table, calling the other players cheaters or making excuses that it wasn’t his fault he lost the game.