From Mouths of Babes
A celebration of parenting with Katrina Roe

Category Archives: Education and learning

My little mimics

April 12, 2013

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My youngest daughter is about 16 months old now.  When she turned one, her big sister gave her a beautiful baby doll to play with.  Nothing warms my heart like seeing Molly care for her baby doll.  She makes a little crying noise and sometimes even says ‘up’, she picks the dolly up, gives her a cuddle, gently pats her back, kisses her very tenderly, then cuddles her again.  After she’s done all that, she either gives her baby a bottle, puts her to her chest like she’s breastfeeding, or tucks the baby into bed, gives her a pat and then rocks her to sleep.  At the end of the sequence she gets this big smile on her face like she’s really proud of herself.

It’s just the sweetest thing you’ve ever seen, and I find it amazing that even at 16 months, she’s starting to care for someone else and thinking about their needs.  (Even if that someone else is just a lump of plastic in the shape of a baby!)

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She’s obviously learned that stuff from watching myself and other adults caring for their babies.  And that’s not the only way she mimics the adults around her.  One of the first things she ever did was pick things up, hold them to her ear and talk on them like they’re a phone.  It could be anything – a shoe, a Tupperware container, a banana.  My husband likes to imply that this somehow means that Mummy is always on the phone, which I assure you is not the case!

Yesterday my husband brought home a beautiful hand-me-down toy kitchen from someone at his work.  Both my girls spent all afternoon playing with it.  They were doing pretend cooking, filling up the fridge with pretend food, stacking plates, washing-up, heating up bottles of milk in the microwave and making tea.  They were having so much fun!  Why isn’t it ever that much fun when I’m washing up?  But for kids, play is their work.  Play is how they learn.  These little role-playing games that my girls are acting out are their way of learning about the world.  And scarily, the person they learn that from, is mostly me.

Sometimes my little mimics aren’t so flattering.  Sometimes Birdy tries to cut a deal with me, or makes conditions on what she does.  For example, I’ve just asked her to pick up her clothes and she says, “I’ll only clean up my clothes if you let me watch another episode of Mr Moon.”  That kind of controlling behaviour is kind of ugly when it comes out of your kids’ mouths, but of course she’s learned that from us.  We use those techniques as a way to get our children to do what we want, and then they can’t understand why they’re not allowed to do the same thing.  It’s probably just as well that our children’s behaviour can sometimes hold up a mirror to us.  I just hope that one day my children will mimic Mummy doing something a little more inspiring than washing up, cooking dinner and talking on the phone!

Posted by in Babies, Education and learning, Family and Relationships

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Travelling with kids

March 7, 2013

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We’ve been away on holidays last week.  It was my Dad’s 80th birthday so went to visit him in the little town where I grew up.  I also managed to throw to together a mini-book tour, visiting my two old primary schools, a local pre-school and hosting a special Storytime at Griffith City Library.  But a holiday can’t be all work and no play and since I had all that family babysitting on tap, we also managed to enjoy an extremely rare kidfree dinner out with some old friends.  During our uninterrupted conversation, we got to reminiscing about the travelling we’d done overseas when we were younger, before we had kids.   As the stories came out of various shenanigans around the world, I realised that one of the few things I miss from my life before kids was being able to occasionally travel to other parts of the world  (that and having any kind of uninterrupted adult conversation for more than five minutes!)

Of course, some people do manage to keep travelling after they have children, it’s just a lot more expensive and takes a lot more organization and planning.  It’s also likely to be a different style of travelling.  You might be less likely to back-pack around Europe and more likely to spend a week in a resort in Fiji!

I’ve never done one of those Fiji holidays, but they seem to be very popular with families because they include free kids clubs.  In fact they’re so popular around here that nearly every kid from Birdy’s kindy class has either been to Fiji or Bali in the last year.  She even said to me last holidays, “Mum, next time we have a holiday, can we go to Bali or Fiji so I can get my hair braided?”  She wanted to come back to school with braided hair like so many of her friends.  So what did we do?  We went to Griffith – OK so it’s not exactly Fiji, but there are lots of Tongans there!

For me, half the point of travelling is to see something different and have new experiences and you don’t have to go overseas for that.   On our holiday, we drove for eight hours in the car without stopping – that was a new experience.  We saw emus on the Hay plains – that was a little bit exciting!  And of course there was lots of time with family which is always special.  But one of the highlights of the holiday was when we went to Canberra on the way home.  We had a really nice day out at Questacon, which the kids loved, then at night we wandered the streets of Canberra in the -5 degree icy wind to see the Enlighten festival.  This is where some of Canberra’s leading artists create artworks that are projected onto the city’s most iconic buildings, like the old Parliament House and the National Library.  That was pretty spectacular.

Later that night, when we arrived home feeling cold, weary and hungry – we had another completely new experience – we discovered that Birdy and I have knits! That’s probably what we’ll remember – this was the holiday when we had knits for the first time!

So instead of staying up late having red wine and conversation, we stayed up to midnight treating our headlice.  My friend Jacqui pointed out to me that this was a pretty serious indication of the depth of our friendship that she was willing to stay up half the night picking knits out of my hair with fine tooth comb.  (I have a lot of hair, so it’s not a small job!)

The funny thing is, Caillie and I have now got our hair plaited to stop our knits from spreading.  So Caillie did go to back to school after her holiday with braids like she wanted.  We just didn’t have to go to Fiji to get them!

Reading Marty's Nut-Free Party at a special Storytime at Griffith City Library

Reading Marty’s Nut-Free Party at a special Storytime at Griffith City Library

Posted by in Early childhood, Education and learning, Lifestyle Tags: , ,

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Hellos and Goodbyes

February 19, 2013

I want to write about manners today, but it sounds so old-fashioned so I thought I’d call them social skills instead!  Last week my daughter came home from school saying her buddy doesn’t like her.  For those who aren’t familiar with the ‘buddy’ concept, all the little kids at school get allocated an official buddy – an older student who’s supposed to look out for them in the playground.  So I asked her why she thinks her buddy doesn’t like her and she told me she saw her buddy at the bubbler on Friday but she didn’t say ‘hello’.  And I thought why is it that we put so much emphasis on teaching kids ‘please’ and ‘thankyou’ when really saying ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ are so much more important.

Saying ‘hello’ to another person is the most basic way of acknowledging their presence.  It’s almost foundational to society, because when you say hello to someone, whether you know them or not, you’re recognising your shared humanity.  If you think that sounds over the top, next time you go through the supermarket checkout make an effort to say ‘hello’ and make eye contact with the person serving you and see the difference it makes to how they treat you.

And goodbyes are also really important because when we say ‘goodbye’ we let the other person know that we care whether or not we see them again.  We say, ‘See you next week’ or ‘Catch you round’ or ‘I’ll call you’.  Or we let people know that we care about them by saying, ‘Take care’ or ‘Drive safely’ or ‘Have a good holiday’.  And they’re small things to say, miniscule really, but they’re ways of showing care for each other and valuing the other person’s presence.  Sadly as people interact more through devices and less with the people around them, it seems like some of those basic courtesies are going out the window.  That’s why I think we have to be quite deliberate about teaching them to our kids.

It’s also important to remember that something as simple as saying ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ is not necessarily easy for a child.  I was a very shy child and my daughter is quite shy so she finds it quite hard to say ‘hello’ to people she doesn’t know very well.  In that case, the worst thing you can do is make fun of the child, or their shyness.  If I had been given a dollar every time an adult said to me ‘What’s the matter?  Cat got your tongue?’ I would have been a very rich kid.  When I was little, we lived on an isolated property, and I wasn’t used to seeing people I didn’t know.  I still remember how terrible it felt when a grown-up would make fun of me for that.  If you have a very shy child, you can at least encourage them to wave and make eye contact, because even though it’s not the most polite way of saying hello or goodbye, it is at least acknowledging the other person.

We’ve had an ongoing struggle getting Caillie to say goodbye properly when her grandparents or aunties leave after they’ve been staying with us.  I think she gets a bit overwhelmed by her feelings and at those times her instinct is to withdraw and hide.  So we’ve had many, many talks about why it’s important to come out to the car and give them a hug and say goodbye properly, and she is gradually getting better at it.  But it’s taken three or four years for her to really improve.  If she doesn’t want to hug, I don’t usually force her to, but she does have to come outside and wave them off.

I think that part of the reason that kids aren’t that good at saying ‘hello’ these days is that about half the population doesn’t say hello to them.  I see it at the school gate all the time.  Parents rush up to each other eager to talk, but forget to say hello to the child on the other end of their friend’s hand.  (I’m sure I’ve done it too.)  So all of us can help just by introducing our children and by saying hello to the kids we see at church or school or in the street.  And you’ll notice that when a child does return your greeting confidently, it really stands out.

We’ve got some friends who have four kids, and the first time we visited them on their farm, all the kids came out to the driveway to greet us and the eldest son, who was about six, shook my husband’s hand, looked him in they eye and said hello.  We nearly passed out in shock – it was so unusual – but it also really made us feel really welcome.  That’s why I think that ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ are so important – more important even than ‘please’ and ‘thankyou’ – because they have the power to really influence how people feel.

Do you have a shy child or did you struggle with shyness as a child?  How are your child’s manners or social skills developing?  Do you have any tips for helping children to learn social skills?

Posted by in Behaviour management, Education and learning, Family and Relationships Tags: , , ,

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Living in Lego Land

February 12, 2013

Lego

Last year, some good friends of mine travelled from the country to Sydney to bring their kids to the Lego exhibition at the Powerhouse.  At the time I was a little surprised that Lego could inspire such devotion.  But last weekend I was introduced to the world of Lego for the first time and I now understand where that devotion springs from.  I think I’ve been converted to a Lego fan!  And I’m obviously not the only one.  I recently learned that if you laid end to end the amount of Lego sold in a year, you could circumnavigate the world ten times.

My daughter was recently given her first big tub of Lego for her sixth birthday (we’ve had little bits and pieces of Lego before, but never a big set) and it kept her busy for 3 hours on a Saturday afternoon.  That was 3 hours of blissful peace and quiet while Molly took her afternoon nap.  I put on my Angus and Julia Stone live album and sat there fishing for pieces from a huge tub.  It was quite therapeutic – almost like running sand through your fingers!  I was just sifting through piles of Lego looking for the pink arch piece or the red flower piece or whatever.  And I was really enjoying it until that moment where there was one crucial piece missing in a set that we’d only just opened, which meant we couldn’t finish what we were making.  And then it ceased to feel therapeutic and suddenly felt like a lesson in anger management!  Grrr.  But even with that frustration, if I had boys, I would definitely be investing in some pretty nice Lego, because anything that can keep a boy quietly occupied without a computer screen has to be a good thing.

There actually has been some research into developmental outcomes of playing with construction blocks – not necessarily Lego but anything that involves building things out of bricks and blocks.  Obviously it’s good for fine motor skills and spatial awareness, but it also helps kids cooperate because if you’re building something you’re better off working together, rather than being competitive.  It teaches children to follow instructions, but also to develop creative problem solving when they go off-plan.  It’s even been shown to lead to improvements in maths!  I also think there’s some good discipline involved because it teaches children to follow a task through to completion.  Then at the end there’s all the imaginative play that takes place when they’ve finished building their rocket or space station or whatever.  Birdy played with her horse and stable for the rest of the weekend, but the great thing is that when they get bored of playing with what they’ve made, they can just smash it up and make something else!

Finally I think that Lego can be a great vehicle for teaching children about forgiveness because when their little brother or sister inevitably destroys that space alien they’ve just spent three weeks making, they’re going to have to learn about forgiveness!

Do the kids (or big kids) in your family enjoy playing with Lego?  Did you play with it as a child? 

Posted by in Early childhood, Education and learning Tags: , ,

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A wealth of treasure without spending a cent

February 6, 2013

One of the things that I’ve been wanting to do this year is to have a little bit more structure and routine in the week.  When you first have a new baby, it can be very hard to find any kind of structure in your life. But this year I really want to make the effort to get out of the house and do some things with Molly.  And the first thing on my list is to do a regular trip to the local library.

When Birdy was little I used to take her to the library once or twice a week, but since she’s been at school, she now brings home books from the school library and we haven’t been going up to our local library as much.  But during the holidays our book supply was cut off so we found ourselves back the local library out of sheer desperation.  And the funny thing is, whenever we go to the library, Birdy still wants to see the Library Storytime man that used to come and read to her class at daycare.  That’s two or three years ago.  He is like a rock star to her.  She goes all shy and says, “Look, Mum there’s the Library man!”  He obviously made a big impression on her.

Chris Cheng does a special Storytime at Leichhardt Library

Chris Cheng does a special Storytime at Leichhardt Library

Because I had my new children’s book out last year, I actually went to read it at some of the local library Storytime sessions.  I was pleasantly surprised by how well attended they were.  I visited a number of different libraries, Ryde, Balmain, Leichhardt, Mosman and they were all packed to the rafters.  Some of them had more than 40 kids turning up for Storytime!  I was encouraged that so many parents recognise the value of doing this kind of activity with their kids.  And it’s free!  There is so little you can do these days that is free.

I was also impressed by how lovely many of the story spaces are now.  So many libraries have made it a priority to open up their space, or to have a special room that they’ve decorated for the kids.  It makes the library so much more appealing for the children.  When I was a child, libraries were somewhere you had to be quiet and they weren’t much fun to visit.  Now the best libraries are much more of a community centre.  Leichhardt Library is a great example of that.  It’s right in the middle of the Italian forum, really easy to access and very much in the heart of the community.  Sadly, in other parts of the world, such as in the UK many public libraries are closing down.  Last week I heard a really interesting interview with with Caitlin Moran who’s the author of How to Be A Woman.   (She’s pretty out there so don’t take this as an endorsement!) One of the things she was talking about was that the closure of public libraries has been such a loss in the UK.  She pointed out that libraries are one of the last places you can go without needing to spend money or without having any kind of commercial exchange.  In a library, your choices aren’t limited by your finances.  That’s why they’re such a great place to take little kids.  If they say ‘I want this’, you can say ‘Sure thing’ and it doesn’t cost you anything.  If they want ten books, you can still say ‘No worries!’.  And if they want to stay and look at the books for 2 hours, there’s no pressure to leave just because you’ve finished your coffee an hour ago.

So if you haven’t already, make this the year you introduce your kids to the local library.  Find out when your nearest Storytime is and make it a regular date.  Not only does it foster a love of books and learning in your children, but according to Professor Torr from the Institute of Early Childhood at Macquarie University, studies show that a child’s pre-school vocabulary relates to their literacy achievement in later life.  In other words, reading to your child now does affect their future learning outcomes.  We’re really lucky to have this amazing free resource, so make the most of it.  Otherwise one day you’ll drive past and notice there’s a shiny new McDonalds or Starbucks where your local public library used to be.

Do you enjoy Storytime at  your local library?  Is your library kid-friendly?

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Sticks and Stones

November 26, 2012

A few weeks ago I had my twenty-year school reunion!  That shows you how old I am.  It’s always fun to get together and reminisce about the old days.  But what I really noticed this time is that people don’t just remember the good things – a lot of people recall the hurtful things that happened at school.  One girl told me that in the Year 12 common room, the cool kids sat closest to the coffee machine and the daggy kids sat closest to the toilet.  She said that she was such a dag, that she had to sit right outside the toilet.  I had no recollection of that, but for her that was a memory that still lingered.  Another friend reminded me of some of the cruel names she was called in relation to her body shape.  Again, I had forgotten that, but for her it was still a very strong and powerful memory.

I never had that experience of being name-called in high-school.  In primary school I got all the usual names for my red hair, but that only ever came from the boys.  Nobody teased me about my red hair in high school, probably because I went to an all-girl school.  I do remember people commenting on how skinny my legs were and telling me I had chicken legs.  During the first week at boarding school, while we were walking to dinner, the housemistress commented on my skinny legs.  Then in front of all the girls she asked me if I had to have callipers on my legs when I was a kid because it looked like my legs were so weak!  Thanks for that!  Really sensitive!  And 25 years later I still remember it!

Everybody is going to be singled out or teased for something at some stage.

Last week Birdy came home very upset because two of the boys in her Scripture class had called her a very rude word.  She was actually so upset that she didn’t want to say it.  Eventually I got her to write the word in air, but there wasn’t really any positive interpretation I could put on it for her.  So we just had a cuddle and we talked about how it feels when people say mean things.  I hope that will help her to develop a bit of empathy and not say things like that to other people.

When I was a kid and I would get upset about being teased or excluded, my mum would always say to me, “You just be your sweet self and they’ll love you.”  Mum’s philosophy was that if somebody was unfriendly or consistently snobbed you, you should try to win them over with kindness.  It was good advice and one that I still try to follow, but after 37 years, I’ve realised that it doesn’t always work.  So I also tell Birdy that it’s okay if somebody doesn’t like you.  Sometimes despite our best efforts, people are still unfriendly.  So I also tell her, you can’t be everyone’s friend, but you can still be friendly to everyone.

As parents, we can’t fix it when people say things that hurt our kid’s feelings or when their friends tell them they don’t want to play with them.  But we can make sure that home is a refuge for them – that when our children come home they know they are safe and loved and that they can tell us anything.  And it reminded me of the importance of having that time together at the end of the day.  Birdy only told me about what happened because we were winding down at the end of the day and the things that were on her mind came tumbling out.  It’s so important to have a meal together or to make time for a cuddle and a chat to help kids deal with whatever is going on at school.

If a child is getting teased or excluded at school, it’s not just upsetting for the child, it’s also upsetting for the parents.

I sometimes worry about Birdy because she’s such a sensitive child – she really takes things to heart -  but I know there’s also a positive side to that, which could help her be sensitive towards others.  Going to my school reunion really helped me have a long-term perspective on these things.  Both those girls who talked about being teased or excluded at school have gone on to have successful careers, they’ve got families of their own and they’re happy and settled in life.

As a parent, of course you want to see your child happy and settled at school, but even if they do have a hard time fitting in, it will pass.  They will find their friends and their place in life and they will learn to get over the names they were called.  It doesn’t have to hold them back and it doesn’t mean they won’t go on to be happy and successful in life.

Were you teased about something at school?  Has your child found it easy to make friends?  How do you help you children deal with it when they are teased or excluded?

Posted by in Behaviour management, Education and learning, Family and Relationships Tags: , , , , , ,

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Going bush

August 27, 2012

On Friday night I went to the launch of a new book and app called The Great North Walk.  A friend of mine, Matt McClelland runs a bushwalking website called Wild Walks and he’s just put together an impressive new guidebook on one of the best bushwalks in Sydney.

But there is another reason bushwalking has been on my mind and that is because the Oxfam Trailwalker was on over the weekend. I had a few friends from my church doing it – which is pretty impressive – because they have to walk 100k in 48 hours.

Since we had Molly, we haven’t done as much outdoorsy stuff as we used to.  I must confess that my kayak is pretty dusty right now, which is very sad.

When Birdy was little we used to throw her in the backpack and go bushwalking quite a lot.  I can actually walk to The Great North Walk from my house – in fact it runs right past my daughter’s school.  With the weather in Sydney being so good lately there’s really no excuse to sit around inside.

I often think the trick to getting out and being active is not to be too ambitious.  My husband works all weekend, so if we waited for a free day to go bushwalking it would never happen.  So we went out after school last week, just on a Tuesday afternoon, for about an hour.

I can’t say Birdy was too enthusiastic about the idea.  When I first mentioned that we were doing a bushwalk after school, you would have thought I’d told her we were going to spend the afternoon cleaning the toilet.  She really did not want to go. But having a husband who suffers from a great deal of inertia at times, we have both learnt that if you just do these things, whether you feel like it or not, then usually everyone enjoys it once they get there.  And that’s exactly what happened.  As soon as we were out in the bush, Birdy started planning how she’s going to make her next birthday party a jungle party, and she’s going to have a treasure hunt through the bush with a map.  It was amazing how fast her attitude changed once we were actually out in the bush.

It’s really hard to be grumpy when you’re surrounded

by a beautiful view of the water on a clear sunny day.

 Just a week ago, I saw a story in the paper that quoted some new research by Planet Ark.

26% of kids have never been bushwalking and 17% have never visited a national park. 

In this country there’s no excuse for that.  In Sydney there is so much amazing bushland and there are so many beautiful waterfront parks that you can get to by public transport. Recently Richard Louv visited Australia – he’s the author of a very influential book called Last Child in the Woods. He coined the phrase ‘nature deficit disorder’ to describe the disconnect between children and nature in modern life. One of the things he’s discovered in his research is that kids learn so much better in natural settings, even when they’re studying subjects like maths, history and art.  He says that getting kids outside actually stimulates them and improves their cognitive function, creativity, behaviour and learning ability.  So when you’re choosing a school for your child, don’t forget to ask about their approach to outdoor education.

Of course the other major benefit of getting out into the bush is that it’s a chance to spend gadget-free quality time together.  (Although it might be good to have a gadget, just in case you get lost.)

Interestingly, bushwalking has been shown to help reduce stress and depression, probably because it puts all our little problems into perspective.

You just can’t feel quite so overwhelmed by the stresses of life when you’re looking at a mighty river or a towering precipice.

Do you enjoy spending time in the Great Outdoors with your kids? Are they enthusiastic about it?  How do you make it enjoyable for everyone?

 

 

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Who’s the biggest loser?

August 6, 2012

Last week I wrote about getting kids active and in my weekly chat with Aaron and Erin on Hope Breakfast, we touched on another topic that I thought we should explore a little more – winning.  Well, winning and losing really, because you can’t have one without the other.

In our conversation, Erin touched on the fact that we’ve stopped letting kids lose.  We want to protect them from any kind of disappointment in life and I’m not sure that does them any favours.  We hear a lot about resilience – resilience is the ability to bounce back after adversity – but it’s hard to develop resilience in a culture where everybody wins a prize.

I was at a kid’s birthday party last weekend, (actually I’m at a kid’s birthday party pretty much every weekend), and they had the obligatory game of Pass the Parcel.  When we were kids, – if you were lucky enough to get a party and a cake and a Pass the Parcel then you’d struck gold already – there was usually only one big prize at the end of the parcel.  There may have been a few lollipops scattered through the layers, but they were usually those awful green ones that nobody likes.  And it certainly wasn’t expected that every layer would contain a prize.  These days, every child has to win, and all the prizes have to be the same so that nobody thinks their prize is worse than anybody else’s.  A few years ago, at Birdy’s 3rd birthday we did a pass the parcel and we left some layers empty.  I warned the kids, “Not every layer will have a present,” but everybody was talking about it as though we’d served up brussell sprouts instead of fairy bread.

I think is important to give kids lots of practice at both losing and winning.  We are all going to experience both in life.  When we apply for a job, not everybody will get the job.  When we want to win over a love interest, they may decide they prefer somebody else.  We may not get into the course we wanted to at TAFE or Uni.  So losing and missing out are inevitable at some stage.  But how we deal with winning and losing really comes down to how we manage our expectations.

It’s been interesting to reflect on this during the Olympics.  If an athlete wins a silver medal, when they were expected to win gold, the story will be, “Seebhom has missed out on the gold medal…”  There’s also been lots of talk about the Mens Four, who were acting like silver medal was worse than a kick in the head.  Whereas for an athelete who wasn’t expected to win, the headline would be, “So and so has taken out a silver medal”, like it’s a great triumph, which it is.  So how we perceive winning and losing is all about our expectations.  I don’t think we should let our kids win all the time.  If every time you play a card game you let your kids win, you’re creating unrealistic expectations and they’ll be devastated when they don’t win.  On the other hand, if they lose all the time, they’ll become discouraged and won’t want to play.  The way to manage this without rigging every game is to make sure that what you’re playing is on the right level for your children, so they can win sometimes.  For small kids, a game of chance may be fairer, or a game that combines elements of skill and chance, otherwise the youngest sibling in the family is never going to win anything.

Having said that, it’s not healthy for little kids to feel like their performance is being judged all the time.  After all, they are only learning (everything!) so they shouldn’t be expected to perform to a certain standard, or to always be compared to their siblings or peers.  It’s helpful to have other goals besides winning.  If you play a sport and your only goal is to win, then you are going to be disappointed.  You need to have other achievable goals so that when you don’t win, you can still be proud of what you’ve achieved.  I’m a writer, and for every manuscript that gets accepted I would probably get 30 rejections.  If I felt that every rejection was a failure, then I wouldn’t bother trying.  So when I first started sending out my stories, I would consider my submission successful if I got a personal letter back with some positive feedback.  At least that publisher thought my work had enough merit to want to offer some encouragement.

So while there’s nothing wrong with wanting to win, encourage your kids to have other goals as well.  “I want to improve on my best time.” Or “I want to pass my maths exam.”  If we can help them set some goals that are realistic, then winning doesn’t have to be the be all and end all.

Are your kids naturally competitive?  Do they get upset when they lose?  Should children be protected from the whole concept of winning and losing while they’re little?  How do you strike a balance between playing for fun and enjoying the achievement of winning?

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Teaching self-control

July 23, 2012

As parents there are lots of things that we may want to teach our children, but one of the greatest gifts or skills we can give to our children is self-control.  For Christians, self-control is listed as one of the fruits of the spirit, along with virtues like patience, kindness, goodness, but it’s probably also the virtue that is the hardest to teach.

How do you teach self-control?  How can you show children what it looks like?

Obviously it helps if parents can model self-control, but I think it is also possible for children to learn this skill even if one or more of their parents may be lacking in it.  My daughter actually taught me a great lesson in self-control.  I said something that was a little negative and she told me off and said, “Mum you don’t say that.  You just keep it inside your head.”  And she went on to explain to me that if you want to say something, but you think it might hurt the other person’s feelings, you just keep that thought inside your head and you don’t say it.”  I thought that was quite a good explanation of self-control from a five year old.  Of course, the next step is learning to think less negatively so you don’t have to internally correct yourself all the time.  (But that’s another whole topic!)

Of course self-control isn’t just about what we say, it’s also a skill that kids need to learn so they don’t throw tantrums, or hit other kids, or so they can overcome their distaste for a task which they may not want to do.   All these things take time to learn.  Even as adults we can’t always get it right.

But at least children have more of an excuse when they lose the plot.  Developmentally, you can’t expect young children to exhibit the same ability to control their emotions and behaviour as adults do.  When we’re born as babies we have zero self-control.  Babies function purely on instinct and it’s only in the toddler years that parents have to start teaching those skills of self-control.  Interestingly, brain research is showing that the neural pathways that children need to control their primal instincts are being forged when they’re very young.  And those connections develop when a distressed child is comforted.  So, when a baby is upset, their carer comforts them and the body produces the right hormones and chemicals to help them calm down.  Then gradually as the child gets older, they learn to soothe themselves.

So if you want your child to be calm and self-controlled, you actually have to calm them down when they’re little, so they learn to do it themselves as they grow older.

The best way to do that is with your physical presence – holding them close, patting them, soothing them and speaking reassuring words.  It sounds so simple, but when a young child looses control, comforting them and helping them get back in control of their emotions will be more effective than just dishing out a punishment.

However if a child is really struggling in this area, there may be other factors to consider. 

In kids that have frequent outbursts of aggression, there may be a medical cause behind it.   But like us, kids are also affected by physical needs that can influence their mood.

-       Are they overtired, cold or hungry?

-       Could their blood sugar be low? That can cause mood swings in some children.  Include some low GI carbohydrates in their diet.  Protein is also important in mood regulation.

-       Consider artificial colours, food chemicals and additives.  If a child becomes suddenly negative, anxious, aggressive or emotional, it may be a response to artificial colours, flavour enhancers and even natural food chemicals. Simply taking those things out of the diet can make a huge difference.  (See Sue Dengate:  Fed Up with Children’s Behaviour)

I just wanted to mention those things briefly because we can’t expect children to be self-controlled if their basic physical needs aren’t being taken care of first.  It’s funny.  Just tonight my daughter had a big wobbly at bedtime.  It came after a big weekend.  She sang in an eisteddfod on Saturday, we were out all day on Sunday and had a late night at church on Sunday night.  By the time I finally got her into bed tonight, we were all feeling frazzled.  I don’t feel I can hold her too responsible for her behaviour when she was probably hugely overtired.  We all have our limits.

Do you have any ideas on how to teach self-control to kids?  Do you find it easy to be self-controlled when dealing with your own children?

Posted by in Behaviour management, Education and learning, Family and Relationships, Toddlers Tags: , , ,

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Homework time!

June 4, 2012

My eldest daughter started kindy this year.  I’m very new at being a school parent and it’s been a steep learning curve for us all.  But now that we’re four months into the school year I think we’re finally starting to get the hang of doing homework.

I don’t think we ever had to do homework at such a young age.

I know we had to do the occasional project and I remember that we used to go home with spelling words to learn in the primary years, but we certainly didn’t have homework in kindy.

It can’t hurt to get into good habits of learning and being disciplined. 

I was talking about this with my husband.  He said he didn’t do any study at all in all his 13 years of school.  If he had assignments, he did them the night before.  He still struggles to be organised and disciplined and I think it’s held him back a little in some areas of his life.  So he certainly wants to see our children form good habits around study and discipline.

The other good thing about homework is that it gives parents a chance to see what their kids are learning and how they’re going with it.

My daughter just gets two pages to complete and they get the whole week to complete it.  Homework books come home on Monday and they have to be handed back in on Friday so it’s not too bad.

For first term we were really quite haphazard with doing homework.  The first time she brought back homework, Birdy was so excited she did it straight away.  But she was also sometimes diving in when I wasn’t able to supervise properly – like when I was cooking dinner or feeding the baby.  So sometimes she was starting it, but not finishing it, or working in pen and making mistakes and crossing them out, or not following the instructions properly – it was all over the place.

It all came to a head about two weeks ago. 

It was Friday morning and her homework still wasn’t finished.  She was supposed to be finishing it while she was eating breakfast.  I turned my back for five minutes and when I came back, she was cutting up bubble wrap and dipping it in blue paint to make a cloudy sky picture.  Very creative and all, but not getting the homework done!

That was when I thought: this just isn’t working!  Something has to change.

Birdy’s homework last week. To draw and label a farm animal.

Now we have a designated homework time.  Homework has to be done between 4pm and 5pm on Tuesday afternoon.  No play dates.  No TV.  No playing outside.  And either myself or my husband has to sit with her the entire time and supervise properly.  Not half supervising while talking on the phone or cooking dinner but really giving it our full attention.  So we tried it for the first time last week and the difference was amazing!  She still did all the work herself, but it was so much better, so much neater, and it was all finished in one easy sitting. Then when it was finished I said, “Well done, you can watch TV for half an hour now!”  So I hope we can stick with that routine and make homework easier for everyone.

Do you think kids get too much homework now?  Do you struggle to get them to complete it?  Do you think it’s a helpful skill for kids to learn to do homework, or is too much pressure on children and their parents?

Posted by in Behaviour management, Education and learning Tags: , , ,

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