Partners in Parenting

Juggling Mother Sets up Some Natural Consequences

This True Grit story comes from Juggling Mother, mother to a son (Mstr A), and two small daughters:

When Mstr A (now six years old) was little he was looked after 2-3 days a week by his doting grandmother, and even more doting great grandmother.  Despite the fact that I was totally neurotic and only fed him the freshest fruit, veg. and homemade food, by the time he was 6 months old, they happily fed him chocolate and Mcdonalds most days they had him.  It didn’t matter how many times I asked them not to, they still did so.

When he was about 2, he was a very good communicator, with a large vocabulary, clear enunciation and a good understanding of what was being said to him.  So one morning when they were coming over, I didn’t feed him breakfast.  I knew they were going out shopping as soon as I left for work, so naturally within 15 minutes Mstr A complained he was hungry and was soon happily stuffing gummy bears and chocolate.

Within 30 minutes he was throwing up all over the shop, all over grandma and great grandma and all over their car. (*evil grin*)

It taught all three of them a lesson!  Grandma and great grandma learned to moderate their treats and Mstr A still remembers the day “big nan made me sick with too many sweets”.  He is very restrained with sweet stuff now and ALWAYS eats a proper meal first. Results! 

Shame I can’t do the same for the girls – I don’t have the patsy any more.

Mary's Sleep Story, Part 2

As promised:

With my first baby, I used gentle sleep 'training', and it worked like a charm. She was in bed with us for the first few months, I nursed her to sleep when she was tiny, then moved her to a crib, used 'shushing' and soothing, a gentle hand placed on the back, tip-toing out of the room. She followed all the sleep charts without a hitch, and never gave me more than a few moment's sleep-deprived frustration, and always with easily identifiable causes. (Teeth, illness, travel.) As I said in the first post, the perfect 'starter baby'.

My son seemed to be following much the same pattern for his first few months. A cheerful baby, he only cried when hungry, tired or in pain, and was easily soothed. By six months, he was sleeping 10 or more hours at night, and napping twice or so during the day. And then, at seven or so months, he regressed in a big, bad, ugly way. He woke once during the night, every night for a week. Then twice, then three times, until finally he was waking me every single hour. I tried all the things I'd used with both he and his sister. I nursed, I rocked, I shushed, I sang. I paid attention to his sleepy signals. Still. Every hour. He was not teething, he was not ill, nothing out of the ordinary was happening, and yet still with the hourly wakings, week after week. What had happened to my lovely little sleeper?

And let's not talk about what he was like during the day - cranky, prone to tears and rages, constantly fretful. Plus, he just looked awful: shadows under his big brown red-rimmed eyes, his skin pale, his motions jerky and frenetic. He was a Miserable Baby.

And me? I was a zombie. A walking, talking zombie. I Could.Not.Cope.  With a tiny baby, there's a light at the end of the sleepless tunnel. With a six, seven, eight-month-old who'd previously slept well and now, for no apparent reason, was not -- there was no reason for this! How could I know when -- if it would ever end?

I couldn't cope with that. Not at all.

I was relating my woes to a friend, who pulled out a book. "Try this," she suggested. "I used it with my daughter and it saved our sanity."  Everyone knows the book now, but back then, it hadn't been out long. It was new to me.

I took it home, read it through, and said to my husband, "We are trying this out." He was not supportive. This plan involved a crying baby. He didn't want to deal with that. Thus far, HIS sleep hadn't been disturbed. (He had to work, you see, whereas I was at home (doing nothing, presumably), so I did 100% of the night-time parenting. And yet still he tried to exert veto power over my attempts to solve the problem.)

No, we are not married any more.

So, anyway. Said to the then-husband, "We are doing this. We will do this for three weeks. If it doesn't work in three weeks, we'll stop, but for three weeks, we do this. By the book. No wimping out."

So, I was seriously sleep-deprived, a couple months' worth by now. I had an older child who also needed my care. I had an unsupportive spouse. I was All Set.

The book's method has the parent go in at gradually increasing intervals. Though you do not pick your child up, you can soothe and make him aware of your presence for 2 or 3 minutes. Then you leave. The idea being that the child knows he's not been abandoned, but that sleep is the only option.

First, though, we had to disassociate nursing from sleeping, so for the first five nights of the program, I nursed Adam whenever he cried, as I'd always done. Each night, though, the nursing time was decreased by one minute. First night, six minutes, second five and so forth. Baby was fine with all this. Clearly this was not about food for him. Seems a three-minute nurse every hour worked just fine for him.  Too bad it didn't work at all for me!

When we got down to two minutes, the let-down had happened, but he didn't have enough time thereafter to ease the pressure. Ugh. THAT wasn't working for me, so that was his last night of night-time nursing.

That's when things got loud.

The next night, when he woke, I went in at five, then ten, then fifteen minute intervals. The first time, he cried for an hour. The second, for an hour and a half. The third, for two hours. This was NOT what I'd hoped to see. Each time I went in, he'd have pulled himself up on the side of his crib, and he'd be screaming. He'd calm a bit when he saw me, but when I left, the roars would escalate. He was OUTRAGED.

"WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING, WOMAN???"

So much for the soothing reassurance of my presence. This popping in and out, though good in theory - I liked the idea of letting the child know you were still around - was not working for Adam in practice.  Not at all.  In fact, judging from the fact that the crying bouts got longer throughout the night, it was making matters worse.

But what were my options? I could give up and -- and what?  Go back to being woken every hour, as I had been for the past two or three months?  No, I couldn't do that. Going in at intervals was not helping this boy. It was not helping me.

I stopped going in.

Yes, folks, we did total, hard-core, cold-turkey CIO. He was 8 or 9 months old and miserable. I was twenty-nine and desperate.

Night one: first waking - three hours; second waking - one hour; third waking - forty minutes
Night two: first waking - one hour, ten minutes; second - twenty minutes; third - eight minutes
Night three: first waking - ten minutes; second - five minutes
Night four: three minutes
Night five: no crying. NO CRYING.

Yes. In five nights, we went from hours and hours of crying to None.At.All. From the beginning of the program, ten days.

How did I feel during all that crying? Awful, of course. But I'd pledged three weeks to myself, and three weeks it was going to get. All mothers probably feel guilt at making their child so miserable, but THIS mother was also defiantly aware that he child had been making her miserable, too, and it had to stop. Such sleep-deprivation was unhealthy for everyone. He was miserable during the day, cranky and fretful with sleep-deprivation, I was barely functional and a poorer mother to both my children as a result. So, no, I didn't enjoy the crying, of course not, but I never considered not seeing through the course I'd set myself.

And look at the results: Ten days to ten hours. After that, he was a Sleeper. The occasional disruption, sure, but no more multi-night ordeals.

Every method doesn't work for all kids. We say that, but how many of us are willing to try the Other Method? This Gentle Sleep-Training mommy did, and I now know - they both work. They work, and they cause no harm.

The lessons I learned from this were: that in the great balance, my child's health is more important than my discomfort at hearing him cry; that the tears don't go on forever - it's a few rotten hours in a life of healthy sleeping!

Definitely worth it.

Squealing Tot

Julie has a problem I'm sure a lot of you can relate to!

My 15-month-old son will squeal at such a pitch as to cause terrible pain in our eardrums. He will squeal when he is frustrated, not getting his own way, having to sit in one spot too long (eg. Out for dinner, or in the stroller shopping)…normal toddler issues. What can we do to stop this? Should we ignore it and cause the general public to also deal with ear pain? Or is it time to start some discipline with timeouts?

This is a tremendously common toddler behaviour, particuarly at this age, when language is generally so limited.  It is a way to express their feelings, and it's generally hugely effective at getting what they want. For the toddler, it's a win-win. Not so much for the parents and any innocent bystanders!

What to do?

First, whenever possible, avoid the squealing by dealing with the situation before it gets to that point. (I'm quite sure you already do this, but I can't skip it and have everyone assuming I don't do this first, too!) Take the tot from the high chair as soon as he's done; leave the mall when he gets restless. Bring toys to distract and snacks to keep the blood sugar stable.

If squealing starts, speaking simply and firmly, identify the problem, and give the child a positive option. "Suzie! Too loud. You want down? Use your quiet voice. Quiet voice."  When you say "quiet voice", say it quietly. Model a quiet voice. You may have to put your lips right to the child's ear in order to be heard over the racket she's making!

Sometimes, particularly when we're in public, I will point out some distraction in a whisper in the child's ear. ("Oh! Freddie! Look at that fire truck! See the fire truck? It has ladders and hoses. Maybe the firemen are going to a fire. Do you think the truck is going to a fire?") Often very effective, and a quick fix for public squealing.

As far as misbehaviour in public: At home you will have to put up with yowls of protest as you teach a new behaviour or raise your expectations of your child. However, I believe it is inconsiderate to inflict this on the surrounding public. If the child isn't calm in short order, I always leave. Don't worry: this doesn't mean that you're training your child to misbehave in public: the real training for good behaviour anywhere happens at home. Innocent bystanders do not need to spend 20 minutes caught in the crossfire of someone else's battle. (I'm aware that this is a multi-layered subject of a much longer post, but that's my working principle in these situations.)

Third, and the most important, a principle applicable to almost any behaviour you wish to eliminate: don't reward the behaviour!  Whatever the child wants to achieve by the squealing, make sure it doesn't happen!  For example, if she's squealing for attention, put your hands over your ears and walk away. Remove your attention.

(It is not necessary to say anything to the child. The most you need say is, "Oh! Too loud!" with an unhappy frown. Then leave, hands over ears. Body language will speak as well as words. You can prevent him/her following you by having a baby gate up. You can either step past the gate, leaving the child behind, or you may put the child on the other side of the gate. But do not be bathing the child in words and explanations as you do this - words and explanations, even scoldings, are attention.)

Another example, with a couple more options:  Baby wants down from the high chair.

Be sensitive to whatever (non-squealing) cues she's giving you; use words to confirm her cues. "You want down? All right! I can get you down!"

If she squeals, offer an alternative to squealing. Words if she can speak, and/or signals if she can't.  "You want down from the high chair? Say 'down, please'!"  As you say 'down, please', you rap on the chair's tray with both hands. Take your baby's hands and smack them on the tray as you repeat "Down, please! Down, please!"  This sort of thing can very quickly become a game.

A variation of the above is to add the remove-attention tactic. "I can't help you when you yell at me. No yelling. I'll help you when you're quiet."  Then you very deliberately turn your back on your child.  Wait fifteen seconds or so, then turn around and try  with the alternate again. ("Say 'Down, please!''' and slap the tray with baby's hands.)

As baby gets the idea, raise the bar. It shouldn't be too long - two or three weeks - before baby understands what "No yelling. Quiet voice," means, and that it's more effective to rap on the tray than squeal.  Not every time, but you'll see substantive progress.

And if you're discouraged by slow progress, be assured that this behaviour is generally 'just a phase', and that it will fade as their vocabulary improves. It's good to make the point now, though, lest you find yourself, in another few months, being screeched at -- in actual words!

It's All About Balance

Prepare to be astounded:

Now, if you've had much to do with 4-year-olds, you know that most of them find it sufficiently challenging to clap at the right time in "If You're Happy and You Know It". This child is a genius. I mean that quite literally. I am not exaggerating in any way. If he becomes anything other than a musician when he grows up, I'll be astonished.

Why is he so talented? Well, it's his dad playing the bass in the background, so he comes from a musical family. It's probably in his genes. And yet, there's that full drum kit with sound-absorbing wall in behind it. Someone is sure giving him the opportunity to develop his talent.

With stuff like this - extraordinary talent, evidence of genius - we don't have too much trouble attributing it to genes. Without the support he's getting, he might never have discovered his talent, but the support doesn't create the talent. That's innate. Not many people would argue that.

But what of other traits? What of kindliness, sociability, ambition, patience, thoughfulness, extroversion, love of books, love of sports, stick-to-it-tiveness, and on and on and on? Very often as parents we attribute the development (or lack thereof) of any of these or a gazillion other traits entirely onto things we have or have not done. Is this fair? Is this reasonable?

There is a balance between innate and environment, but I feel strongly that in our culture, we place the balancing point at the wrong spot.  I believe that as parents, we burden ourselves tremendously with exaggerated notions of our own potency in our childrens' lives.

Please understand:  We are important. We are, for the first years of our childrens'  lives, supremely important. We have the power to foster, to guide, to nurture, or to squelch, demean and discourage. What we don't have is the power to make our child other than what he/she is. Some of what our child is, is simply innate. It is who s/he is. How much is innate is up for discussion; knowing that some is innate neither gets us off the hook, parentally, nor makes our contribution worthless. But parenting is a contribution to who your child will become. It is not the beginning, middle, and end, the be-all and end-all.

Without the drum kit, this child may never have discovered his talent - but he'd still have it. Without the talent, all the drum kits, lessons, and practice in the world wouldn't turn him into this kind of a drummer. In this area of his life, his parents have helped him discover who he is; they didn't make him who he is.

I think this is true of all areas of our childrens' lives. And that, fellow parents, is a good thing.

My Sleep Story, Part 1

Part one because I have three children who each have quite different sleep stories!

Haley is my eldest, and, apart from the colic of her first three months, was a terrific starter baby. Calm, curious, affectionate, easy to soothe, she was a delight from day one. (Well, excluding the hours spent screaming each and every evening from days 22 through week 12. Textbook colic, that girl.)

The day after she was born, my MIL came to stay for a week. (MIL was the perfect post-baby guest, BTW. No MIL-slamming here: though she adored her new baby granddaughter, she left the childcare to me except when I asked for assistance, and she dealt with the house. My floors were cleaned, my stockpile of food was added to, my laundry was done. The day she left, she even defrosted both the fridge and the chest freezer - "because you won't be getting to it for a while!" How right she was. Righter than she dreamed...)

However, MIL also provided a beautiful hand-made cradle, which had been in husband's family for four generations. Baby Haley would be the fifth to rest within its heritage.

Too bad Baby Haley hated it. I'd bring her to bed to nurse, then try to place her back in the cradle. My nights looked like this: 20 minutes nursing, 40 minutes soothing baby back to sleep, one hour's sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat. Over and over, all the wretched night long. I was miserable, Haley was miserable.  Oh, how I wanted to ditch it. But it was the Historic P-Family Cradle! Though I knew she wouldn't say anything, I felt the MIL's joy in sharing the damned thing with us, and didn't feel I could let her down by rejecting the gift.

The night she left, Haley joined us in bed, where, though still nursing every two hours, she slept the rest of the time. I went from being wide awake every other hour to being semi-awake 20 minutes every other hour. Much, much better.

Haley stayed in bed with us till she was four months old, when she made the transition to the crib in her own room.  At four months, she was waking about twice each night, nursing, and going instantly back to sleep. I never let her cry. I'd rock her in my arms and gently, gently lower her to the crib, then stand over her with my hand resting on her back till she settled. Then I'd creep out, ready to start over if she fretting. Gradually, she needed less and less assistance, and by six months, I could lay her down, kind of half-awake, and she'd settle with a gurgle. By this time, she was sleeping 10 plus hours at night with  three  1 - 1.5 hour naps during the day.

At a year, she was sleeping 11.5 hours at night, and had almost finished the move to one (2 - 3 hour) nap a day in the afternoon. Our nighttime routine included bath and 15 minutes of story/snuggle, then I'd sing one song while rocking her in my arms, lay her down, awake, and leave. No fuss, no muss, no crying.

By three, she'd given up the daytime naps and was sleeping 12 hours at night.

So, there you have it: co-sleeping, no-tears, and a great sleeper. Gentle sleep learning at its best. If I'd stopped with the one child, I'd be an unbearably smug parent, I tell you.

In part two, I'll tell you about my middle child, my son.

The boy who taught his gentle mommy the virtues of sleep training.

Back to School Home?

It's been a big week here at the MaryP home. I don't talk much about my home life, nor my family much, so a bit of background is probably in order. I have three children: Haley is soon to turn 21, and will receive her BA next May; Adam, 17, is in his final year of high school; and Emma is 13 and in grade 8. Until each of them was 10ish, they were homeschooled. (My reasons were pedagogical and social/developmental.) The older two had a virtually wrinkle-free transition to school.

But Emma, poor Emma, my most social child, who was chomping at the bit to get out there and follow her siblings into the wider world... Whereas Haley and Adam got wonderful teachers for their first year of institutional school, Emma got a raving maniac whose tumultuous, and reputedly very nasty divorce proceedings, had her having tantrums in the class on a near-daily basis. The teacher gradually calmed down over the school year, and by the end of the year, Emma was willing to try another year. Phew. The next three grades passed uneventfully, though unlike my older two children, Emma still occasionally considered returning to homeschooling. These periods didn't generally last long, and she seemed to be enjoying her school experience overall.

This year, though, Emma has had enough. She doesn't want to go to school. We have had several long conversations since the beginning of September, which have become increasingly focussed. Homeschooling through high school intimidates me somewhat, but not enough to rule out the possibility, and it's always been my principle that the children have the right to choose the venue for their education.

She has a bunch of issues:

Restrictions of time and place:  "Sometimes when I'm trying to work something out in my head, I like to be able to move around. Even if the teacher lets you, and mostly they don't, the other kids would so mock you."

Social restrictions:  not the ones placed on the kids by the teachers, but the ones the kids place on each other. "They try to tell you who you can and can't be friends with. There are so many stupid rules to follow if you want to be cool and popular, and when you're popular, you're almost always mean to other kids who aren't cool."

Sartorial restrictions: "I really get tired of having to defend what I want to wear! Whose business is it but mine?" (Again, it's generally her peers that she's resisting, not the school authorities'. Though she does enjoy mocking the school's dress policy. "SPAGHETTI STRAPS!?!?! You total slut!!!")

Sexual issues:  "You can only talk to a boy or hang out with him if you're going out with him. How do I know if I want to get romantic with a boy if I never have boys who are just friends? "

Attitudes to education: "If you let anyone know you really like what you're learning, you're a geek. I have to pretend I'm not really interested, even when I am." How sad is that?

Attitudes to family: She likes spending time at home, she likes being with family. "You can't admit that you like your mother. That's totally dorky."

And hers is a nice school, in a nice neighbourhood, with (apart from the 4th-grade lunatic) nice teachers. Having been home-schooled, she knows she has alternatives.

Meantime, and entirely coincidentally, mother has been reading Reviving Ophelia, by Mary Pipher. According to Ms. Pipher, Emma is doing remarkably well at her age, but that the storms are only going to get worse for the next few years. Preadolescent girls are generally strong, confident, interested, full of the zest of life. Early adolescence changes these girls.

"Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves...In early adolescence, studies show that girls' IQ scores drop and their math and science scores plummet. They lose their resiliency and optimism and become less curious and inclined to take risks. They lose their assertive, energetic and 'tomboyish' personalities and become more deferential, self-critical, and depressed. They report great unhappiness with their own bodies."

Why does this happen? In essence, it happens because of all the pressures which Emma finds so chafing, pressures which, because adolescence comes earlier these days than ever before, hits these girls when they are too young, too unformed to handle it. Pressures to look and act a certain way, to conform to a certain body and behaviour pattern, to be pretty, to appease, to be malleable and non-demanding in relationships and in life.  Some girls - and I suspect Emma will be one of them - withstand the pressure and emerge strong and whole at the end of this. Many others don't, and we have grown women who lose themselves in relationships that are damaging them, women who obssess about their appearance, who are never satisfied with their physical body, women who hesitate to be assertive lest they be labelled 'bitch', women whose sexual identity rests solely on the approval of a lover.

I am impressed that Emma is able to articulate her dissatisfactions so clearly. I am impressed that her dissatisfactions go beyond "school is boring and I'm sick of teachers telling me what to do all day". I am impressed that what is really bothering Emma is her understanding (which she only partially comprehends) that school requires her to sacrifice valuable portions of her true self. Since she is justifiably reluctant to do that, school has become a continual struggle, a constant abrasion, a non-stop defence of who and what she is against forces that would turn her into something she is not.

We still haven't made a decision, but I am so proud of her.