The Parent Vortex — Gentle Discipline and Natural Parenting

Mother’s Day

by michelle on May 14, 2012

It was just the kind of Mother’s Day I like best.

A tasty breakfast, homemade cards, a small and thoughtful gift (gluten-free licorice!) and an adventure in the woods. We hiked off the map and followed unknown trails, and made it back to our car before we ran out of snacks. Then naps and knitting on the sunny porch while drinking wine, and off to eat dinner at the seaside. There were daisy chains and the kite was sent airborne. The sun shone and we spent the whole day together. It was a beautiful treat, and one that I definitely savoured.

Happy Mother’s Day to all you amazing moms out there. And thank you to Tom, who cooked and cleaned and told me to go knit while he took care of it all.

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Gentle Discipline for Preschoolers

by michelle on May 10, 2012

Last week I wrote about what preschoolers are like, and I described some changes that kids will show as they grow from toddlers into preschoolers. The preschool years can be very challenging, especially if you decided to take a less punitive or more attachment-based approach to parenting when your child was a newborn. Toddlers and preschoolers need to see that you are an “alpha,” a person who is strong and in charge, but at the same time it’s important to be compassionate, empathetic and sensitive to a child’s feelings and needs as well. Finding the balance takes some trial and error in practice, but here are some ideas that can help you find that sweet spot a little sooner.

1. Preschoolers need adult help

Yes, they seem big and capable. Yes, they know what you’re saying and understand what you mean. But that doesn’t mean they are able or should be expected to obey immediately without some adult guidance, especially if you’re helping them develop some new habits or your child is very distracted and excited. If you child is jumping on the bed and you’ve asked them to stop, step in and physically lift them from the bed and guide them out of the room if they don’t stop when you ask them. The trick to this is to be gentle and firm, and to help them get started with a safe activity right away. If the sight of your child being openly defiant makes you see red and erupt in rage, that’s a sign that you need to attend to your own ability to manage your emotions. Look to meditation, counselling or possible food intolerances for help developing a calm approach.

2. Expect a mess

Little people learning to do things by themselves make a tremendous mess along the way. Having strategies and rules in place can help contain or minimize the mess, such as “soil stays in the garden,” or “bubbles stay in the sink,” but there will probably be times when you will all want to bend the rules in the name of fun and learning. The best way to deal with the mess is by cleaning it up, as soon as you can. Teach your kids to clean up one toy before another one comes out and you’ll be miles ahead of the game. We’re still working on that one in our house.

3. Make ritual and routine work in your favour

The more you keep regular “anchors” in your day, such as meals at regular times, the more you can hang important tasks on either side of those meals and let the routine dictate when things are done. You don’t have to schedule the day down to the half-hour, but having a regular, predictable flow of events with enough time to transition from one event into another makes the day go much more smoothly.

4. Avoid overscheduling

Three and four year olds are still well ensconced in the world of magic, make-believe and wonder, even though some may be learning skills like counting and identifying letters. Don’t let these early skills dupe you into thinking that your three or four year old is ready for a highly structured, academically focused preschool. Early childhood is a time for play-based learning, in the home and in the real world as much as possible. If your child does attend preschool, make sure you plan to have some quiet downtime at home afterwards. Rushing from one structured, highly social activity to another is a recipe for an overstimulated, overtired kid. And that makes it so much harder for a child to behave well.

5. Remember the cuddles

Whether you’ve had a smooth day or a challenging one, a little kid still needs lots of cuddles, snuggles and one-on-one attention. If you’ve got a newborn too, make sure you work some time to be alone with your older child into your daily routine. It’s normal and healthy for preschoolers to test the boundaries of what they are capable of and what they’re allowed to do, so don’t take it too personally if you’ve had a difficult day. Parents need to be cuddled and listened to also, so make sure you get support from the other adults in your life.

The preschool years can be some of the most magical, so try to step back and imagine yourself as a parent with an empty nest 15 or 20 years down the line. This child will be in this stage of development for a relatively short time, so don’t wish it away while grudgingly picking up blocks. Take charge of setting limits in a firm but gentle way, create healthy routines and offer lots of hugs. Before you know it your child will be losing teeth, writing letters to grandma and doing math problems, and the preschool years will be behind you.

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How Children Learn

by michelle on May 8, 2012

A few days ago Bea and I were sitting on the couch reading Farmer Boy together. We’d just read about Almanzo’s family sitting down to supper, with the schoolteacher there to be boarded for two weeks and a wealth of food on the table. In those times it was expected that children were seen and not heard at the table. Only the adults were allowed to talk.

“I think that’s WRONG!” Beatrice exclaimed. “Why would they have a rule like that?”

I explained about how our beliefs about what kind of behaviour is acceptable in children has changed over the years, and that in those times they believed that it was the adults’ right to talk without interruption over dinner because they had been hard at work all day and didn’t have any other time to talk about important things. I went on to say that adults in those days believed that the children would learn more by listening quietly to the adults’ conversations, because the adults had more experience and the children could learn from that.

“Do you think that could be true? That children can learn by listening to adults talk?” I asked.

“No.” Bea answered.

“How do you think children learn?”

“They figure things out for themselves!”

This is the essence of learning: people (of any age) figure things out for themselves when they’re motivated to.

But we’re not truly reinventing the wheel every time. Even though Beatrice doesn’t see how she is learning by listening to adults talk, she is unconsciously absorbing all kinds of information by spending time with adults. How to behave, how to communicate clearly, how to make decisions and maintain relationships with others.

I’m glad she is confident in her ability to learn by figuring things out for herself. This kind of self-directed and interest-led learning was one of the things that attracted me to homeschooling, and I see many successful adults continuing to learn and grow this way through their entire lives.

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What are Preschoolers Like?

by michelle on May 3, 2012

In a week or two, Claire will be turning three. Yes, three. I can’t believe it’s been three years since she was born, but the way she is changing tells me it’s true. She’s definitely not a baby anymore, and not really a toddler either. At three she’s well into the realm of the preschooler, and with that comes all kinds of changes I wasn’t prepared for when Beatrice turned three. What kind of changes? Well…

1. Open defiance

Babies defy their parents wills all the time, but in an innocent, she-doesn’t-know-how-to-coordinate-her-hands-yet-so-she’s-off-the-hook kind of way. Toddlers defy their parents wills too, but the indiscretions are usually fairly mild, and again, you can be pretty sure your toddler didn’t expect the entire tube of toothpaste to come out when she squeezed it for the very first time. She was exploring and experimenting. By three and four, many more acts of defiance are open expressions of will. The kid KNOWS you’ve said “no jumping on the bed,” she has banged her head while jumping on the bed once already and THE KID IS STILL JUMPING ON THE BED.

2. Increasing independence

Previously attached-at-the-hip babies and toddlers can transform into kids who take off running when they are dropped off at a friend’s house and don’t come back for a goodbye kiss. Sleep starts to consolidate and many kids who nursed through toddlerhood will wean now, either on their own or as a result of mom’s limit-setting. Securely attached preschoolers will still want to reconnect with a trusted adult regularly through the day, but this increasing independence means more and more kids will be ready to go to preschool, art class or playdates without mom or dad at their side.

3. Blossoming skills

Scissors! Pencils! Colouring inside the lines! Pedaling tricycles, swinging on big-kid swings, walking on balance beams and turning somersaults. Some kids will start to enjoy recognizing letters at this age, especially the first letter of their name. This is the phase in which you will find a million tiny pieces of paper hidden in every corner of your house as your preschooler learns to cut with scissors and use those bits of paper in imaginary play at the same time.

4. Choice and control

Preschoolers now know more of what they like and what they don’t like, and this will be reflected in the choices they want to make. Clothing can become a Very Important Decision. Same goes for food, and previously adventurous eaters may now start refusing to eat anything other than buttered toast and noodles. Tasks like toothbrushing and handwashing are best handled in a regular routine, always done at certain times of day with no exceptions. If there’s any uncertainty about the need to perform these tasks, be prepared for a battle of wills.

5. Repetition and ritual

We always sing Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious while brushing our teeth. Every night, it has to be exactly the same. Before she’ll put on her pajamas, Claire wants to pretend to be trapped in Bea’s bunk bed, and I pretend to rescue her. If I refuse, the meltdown takes longer to ride out than it would have taken to just play the “trapped” game in the first place. I don’t know why three and four year olds love repetition and ritual so very much, but they do. And if you can handle the Groundhog Day flashbacks, rituals can actually make the day flow more smoothly, even if it seems like it takes a long time to run through the games and rituals in the same way every day.

I’ve heard many parents say that they found the “terrible twos” much easier than they expected, it was age three and four that really challenged them as a parent. I agree. When Beatrice turned three, I had the added challenge of having a newborn to look after. This skewed my perspective, making Bea seem much bigger and more capable than she really was. After all, she used to be a tiny newborn and now she’s huge! But three and four are still small in the bigger picture of an entire childhood, and the changes in wilfulness, independence, skill, ritual and choice are all normal, natural ways for a three and four year old to behave, as challenging as they may be from a parent’s perspective.

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Hard at Work

by michelle on May 1, 2012

Today. I wake up at the same time as I did yesterday, make the same thing for breakfast and mediate the same disagreements between the hungry children waiting for their pancakes. I clean the same kitchen, sweep the same floor, read the same websites. I know time is passing because the cherry blossoms bud, blossom and burst in an explosion of pink snow, but at home each day seems very much like the one that came before.

Am I moving forwards at all? I work hard every day, but what exactly am I working at? Where do you see the proof of my labours?

I might point out the brand new, handmade purple spice shelf I made with Beatrice. We measured and sawed and hammered and sanded and painted and then I took the most difficult step of all, figuring out how and where to affix it to the wall and actually doing it. Creating physical objects is supremely satisfying to me. There it is, that thing that we made. Every time I look at it I am reminded of the entire process of creativity: conception, building, problem solving, perseverance, completion, evaluation.

It is so tempting to say that my life’s work is raising my children. In one sense it is true; it is my work to care and provide for them until they are mature enough to take care of themselves. But my work doesn’t make them grow. They grow themselves. And the work of tending to the growth of children isn’t quite the same as putting a purple shelf up on the wall. It’s ephemeral. It looks more like keeping house, making notes, reading books, brushing out tangles, listening to whispers at bedtime.

I want to feel like the work I do every day is building something worthwhile, something tangible. I want to be able to point to it later and say, “This is what I spent my life doing. Here is my positive contribution to the world.” Deep in my heart I believe in the value of raising children at home. But there are days when it feels like I work hard at knitting up something that is unraveling at the other end. And I don’t know how much credit a parent can really take when it comes to their child’s future success or failure. As a parent you do your best, but it’s not your life, it’s theirs.

In truth, I crave both kinds of creativity. It just takes a little more energy to make the tangible creativity happen with all the tending to the children and our environment that goes on around here. I think a few changes are in order to make it easier for the tangible creativity to happen spontaneously… Maybe it’s time to rearrange the furniture again.

What’s your creative process like? Do you feel like you are working at something important every day? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Playful Self-Discipline and Living Gluten-Free

April 30, 2012

I’ve been gluten-free for about a month now. After the initial difficulty, we settled into a new food routine pretty quickly, and for Claire and I the results have been really positive. Claire’s a happier kid, more outgoing and less likely to spend a whole playdate clinging to my lap. She doesn’t have a bad [...]

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Playing Laura and Mary

April 23, 2012

It’s a warm spring day and the girls are outside, wearing playsilks as bonnets and making mud pies. We’re just back from a long weekend road trip and I haven’t the heart or energy to tear them away from their play to do something more structured, but I wonder. Am I doing enough? Does this [...]

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Spring Book List – Writing and Literature

April 19, 2012

I call my blog The Parent Vortex, but I work on and think about more than just my parenting skills. I’ve been reading about the craft of writing, and reading well-written literature lately. Because writers don’t just write, they also read, read and read some more. The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. I can’t [...]

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Spring Book List – Parenting and Feminism

April 17, 2012

When my creative energies ebb and flow, the ways I spend my time change too. When the drive to write wanes, the pleasure of reading increases. And so I’ve been reading a lot these days. Want to peek onto my bookshelf? Here’s some of the books I’ve been immersed in. Last Child in the Woods [...]

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Nature Refuge

April 14, 2012

Last week we went out wildcrafting nettles. We walked along, gently pinching off a few fresh new tops in each cluster. As we walked, we talked about gathering only what we needed, making sure we weren’t pulling up or trampling the plants. We spotted dandelions, some pretty snails, and little hiding places in the bushes [...]

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Reset

April 6, 2012

I feel like the reset button has been pushed in my life. And in the best possible way.

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Going Gluten Free

April 3, 2012

What a surprising couple of weeks it has been. After realizing that Claire was sensitive to something in her diet, I gradually started eliminating foods, first dairy, then gluten, until I felt confident I could pinpoint what was bothering her. The offender? Gluten. More late nights in front of the laptop led me to discover [...]

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Sensitivity

March 22, 2012

There are always things going on outside of the frame of the photo. Sometimes this is good. The entire internet does not always need to know about my every insecurity, random obsession, fear, doubt or sniffle. But right now I’m pretty much fully absorbed in the task of figuring out what is going on with [...]