Parenting Blog

Guest Blog by Jane Nelsen,
(From Positive Discipline in the Classroom)
www.positivediscipline.com

Listen to Jane Nelsen live on Dr. Laura Markham's radio show!

Wednesday June 24
MyExpertSolution.com
(9amPT/10amMT/11amCT/NoonET)

NO MORE LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES -- At least hardly ever!  FOCUS ON SOLUTIONS

For years I advocated the use of logical consequences. However, I was continually frustrated when I heard parents and teachers give me examples of the consequences they imposed. They sounded like punishment to me. I thought I was the first to discover this phenomenon until I reread Children the Challenge and found the following quote by Dreikurs. (Dreikurs, Rudolf and Soltz, V. Children the Challenge, New York, Plume, p. 80 )

When we use the term “logical consequences,” parents so frequently misinterpret it as a new way to impose their demands upon children. This children see for what it is – disguised punishment.

Even though I knew parents and teachers usually misused logical consequences, my real epiphany came from students. During a class meeting, students in a fifth grade class were asked to brainstorm logical consequences for two students who didn’t hear the recess bell and were late for class. Following is their list of “consequences:”
1.  Make them write their names on the board.
2.  Make them stay after school that many minutes.
3.  Take away that many minutes off tomorrow’s recess.
4.   No recess tomorrow
5.  The teacher could yell at them.

I became more and more uncomfortable as I heard all these punishments being suggested as “logical consequences. I interrupted the process and asked the students to forget about consequences and brainstorm for solutions that would help the students be on time. Following is their list of solutions:
1.  Everyone could yell together, “Bell!”
2.  They could play closer to the bell.
3.  Someone could tap them on the shoulder when the bell rings
3.  They could watch others to see when they are going in.
4.  Adjust the bell so it is louder.
5. They could choose a buddy to remind them that it is time to come in.

The difference between these two lists is profound. The first looks and sounds like punishment. It focuses on the past and making kids “pay” for their mistakes. The second list looks and sounds like solutions that focus on “helping” the kids do better in the future. It focuses on seeing problems as opportunities for learning. It other words, the first list is designed to hurt, the second is designed to help.

In the first list, the kids try to disguise punishment by calling it a logical consequence. Why do they do that? Could it be that this is what they are learning from adults? The Four Rs of Logical Consequences (Related, Respectful, Reasonable, and Revealed in advance) were conceived in an attempt to stop the trend of logical consequences sounding like punishment, but they have not totally eliminated this problem.

Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children DO better first we have to make them FEEL worse?  When people first hear this quote from Positive Discipline, they usually feel stunned as they think about how it doesn’t make sense.  However, when it comes to application, it seems that parents, teachers, and students have difficulty accepting that people do better when they feel better. 

For example, many teachers like Nos. 2 and 3 on the first list above, (“Make them stay after school that many minutes,” and “Take away that many minutes off tomorrow’s recess.”)  It is true that those suggestions are related, reasonable, and could be enforced respectfully and revealed in advance. However, they all focus on making the child pay for the past mistake instead of finding a solution to solve the problem in the future.  In other words, they are designed to make the children feel bad in the hopes that that will motivate them to do better.  Punishment often stops misbehavior, but it hardly ever motivates children to do better in the future—unless they are approval junkies. Instead, they are motivated to rebel, get revenge, or to be more careful about getting caught.
 
Kay Rogers, a recently retired teacher from Sharon School in North Carolina said, “After I heard about the possibility of focusing on solutions instead of consequences, it was the hardest habit for me to break. All my life I had believed that kids learned from punishment—or at least from consequences. I can now see that my students and I both tried to disguise punishment by calling it consequences. I had to learn about the effectiveness of focusing on solutions right along with my students. We were all surprised by the difference it made in our classroom. The level of respect and caring for each other was raised ten fold. Students became pleased to find their name on the agenda because they knew that we would have a whole room full of consultants to give them valuable suggestions. And, the solutions they found were much more effective in changing behavior than anything we had done before.”

This does not mean logical consequences cannot be effective when properly understood and appropriately used. However, logical consequences are rarely necessary and are only one possibility. Looking for solutions is more effective in most situations.
Of course, focusing on solutions instead of consequences is more effective in homes also. One parent said, “I can’t believe how many power struggles I created by trying to impose ‘logical consequences’. We have so much more peace in our home now that we focus on solutions.”

Guest Blog by Dr. Caron Goode,
author of Raising Intuitive Children: Guide Your Children to Know and Trust Their Gifts
www.RaisingIntuitiveChildren.com

Listen to Dr. Caron Goode live on Dr. Laura Markham's radio show!

Wednesday June 3
MyExpertSolution.com
(9amPT/10amMT/11amCT/NoonET)

Who Are They?

All children have the natural intelligence of intuition (II). Some children are highly skilled or gifted in this talent in the same way that others have a talent for math, music, languages or physical dexterity.

Since each of us has a preference in how we relate to the world, the book Raising Intuitive Children, shows how children with an intuitive learning style and intuitive intelligence view and interact with people, tasks and the environment.

Children with intuitive intelligence have traits that manifest in different ways along a continuum of normal skills to gifted talents:

•    Children who learn through feelings and process information kinesthetically. (Intuitive learning mode)
•    Children who are creative and artistic and intuition drives their motivation. (Artistic drive for exploring and creating, entrepreneurial)
•    Children whose intuitive intelligence is like a radar reading other people and understanding them. (Empathy and interpersonal skills)
•    Children who have intuitive episodes like dreams or a flash of creative insight. (Deep insight, precognition)
•    Children who are psychic. (Awareness of non-physical worlds through all senses or a specific sense.)
Intuition is the common denominator of these talents, and all children have the same intuitive capacities. Like musical prodigies and math geniuses, children display their intuitive talents differently. Some educators call the intutive kids the right-brainers! (Better than no-brainers, I guess)

Intuitive Intelligence is the new kid on the block
Education, parenting and psychology professionals recognize that children have multiple intelligences, and intuitive intelligence is the new kid on the block. All intelligences exist on a continuum of normal to gifted. There are math prodigies, musical geniuses and intuitive psychics. The traits for intuitive intelligence cluster into several groups:

•    Creative and inspired artists,
•    Sensitive and empathic feelers, and
•    Talents involving inner psychic awareness,
•    Spiritual intuitives
Intuitive intelligence stands as an entity deserving recognition. Brain mapping using EEG topography found that creativity and intuition are associated with theta waves usually linked with daydreaming or fantasizing. Theta waves are calm states in which intellectual activity at the conscious level isn’t occurring. Children and adults with ADHD produce excessive theta waves.

Our logical mind addresses stable patterns, snapshots of reality stored in our memory banks, for the practical living. The holistic or holographic side of our reality, intuitive intelligence comes from within. By focusing our attention on how intuition presents, we act from deeper understanding.

Intuitive intelligence operates on gestalts or whole pieces of information and functions from our memory, not logic. Intuitive ability is finally recognized as the fuel behind innovation, creative thinking, inspiration, insight, and psychic experiences.

Intuition is an essential part of the human mind, which includes our conscious processes and unconscious processes—thought perception, emotion, will, memory, and imagination. Intuition involves nurturing self-awareness of the inner world, the outer world, and the connection in between  

Connection is the key!
There is much we can do as parents to direct expressions of inventive and creative thoughts, help empaths deal with emotional overwhelm and establish resilience, face fears of ghosts. Children with intuitive intelligence, challenged by cultural systems which do not know how to connect with or teach them, need permission to follow their personal path and optimize their talent. We can give that permission and model it for them by developing our intuitive parenting. We also need to become intuitive parents.

Our truest parenting success is the feeling of resonance with our child, the connection of hearts, the meeting of minds—congruence.

Dr. Caron Goode is a licensed psychotherapist, author and inspirational speaker. Gifted with compassion and a deep desire to assist others in living their passionate purpose, Dr. Goode has become a well-respected leader in the parent coaching industry. In addition to founding and operating the Academy for Coaching Parents International that trains students in the empowerment model of parent coaching, Dr. Goode shares her holistic approach to achieving parenting success and managing family relationships in magazines, newspapers and radio. She is also the author of twelve books, including The Art and Science of Coaching Parents and Raising Intuitive Children. (read a free excerpt on www.RaisingIntuitiveChildren.com)

Guest Blog by Anne R. Pierce
Author of Ships without a Shore: America's Undernurtured Children

Listen to Anne R. Pierce live on Dr. Laura Markham's radio show!

Wednesday March 25
MyExpertSolution.com
(9amPT/10amMT/11amCT/NoonET)

The Demise of Childhood

Childhood in America is nearly lost. In fast-paced, competitively charged modern-America, there is unyielding pressure upon children of a younger and younger age.

Today, young children expend their energy on long days in group situations, on preschool activities and after-school programs, on team sports and music and athletic lessons. Steeped in an intellectual permissiveness, which allows us to believe something is true because our modern outlook tells us that it should be, we have convinced ourselves of these suppositions: that parental substitutes are as good as parents themselves at “caring for” children, that more lessons and sports are better than less and that the earlier children embark upon them the better, and that childhood innocence is less important than the development of worldly attitudes and competitive skills.

There is a definite sense that, if everyone else is increasing their step, we had better increase our step too, never mind the why.  We have become unsympathetic to exhaustion, vexation, and demoralization, seeing them as necessary corollaries to achievement -whether it’s the parent’s achievement or the child’s.

“They’ll get over it” we are told when babies in full-time institutional day care show signs of stress, fatigue and detachment. ”Come on you can do it” parents shout as children “try again” to achieve the perfect pitch of the ball, the perfect ballet pose, the perfect runner’s mile, the perfect musical performance.

Thus, we are taken by surprise when success strategies backfire; when, instead of gaining momentum, children lose energy, motivation and enthusiasm. But, this end result simply makes sense. For, when we emphasize outward displays of accomplishment over children’s actual moral and intellectual advancement, children inevitably feel a void.

Moreover, when we fill their lives with every opportunity except relaxed parent-child interaction, it is less likely that they will thrive.

It is sad to think of young children with little time at home and little time to play. They are missing the multifarious opportunities that homelife and play provides: for relaxing, imagining, exploring, creating, interacting, relating, role-playing, learning and just having fun. Our busy lives allow too little time to question whether all this busyness is necessary or whether the content that fills our children’s lives is good.

The possibility that children might find their activities less rather than more desirable when they are older because these activities were forced upon them at an inappropriately young age is not addressed.  The possibility that they will never find their own passionate interests because they spent so much time in structured situations does not enter in. The possibility that having a competitive edge might not be as important as leading a virtuous, intelligently thought out life is not addressed nor is the fact that one needs a certain amount of time to be a thinker; a certain amount of freedom to be creative.

Teaching children to be tough and prepared for the world, achieving doers instead of capable thinkers, has its consequences.  Children’s innate curiosity is intense. When that curiosity has no room to fulfill itself, it burns out like a smothered flame.

On my radio show today (every Wednesday at noon ET at MyExpertSolution.com) I interviewed Elizabeth Pantley about her new book, The No-Cry Nap Solution: Guaranteed Gentle Ways to Solve All Your Naptime Problems. I think this may be her best book yet because it addresses the questions parents ask most often, like "How do I put my baby down awake so he learns to fall asleep in the crib, when he always falls asleep nursing?" and "My baby hates sleeping on her back, she always startles awake.  What can I do?"

Elizabeth happened to mention her checklist for safe co-sleeping, and several listeners contacted me later to ask about it.  I'm reprinting it here as a guest blog, but I also encourage you to check out Elizabeth's website, where she has a wealth of material like this.  Here's her Checklist for Safe Co-Sleeping:

♦  Your bed must be absolutely safe for your baby. The best choice is to place the mattress on the floor, making sure there are no crevices that your baby can become wedged in. Make certain your mattress is flat, firm, and smooth. Do not allow your baby to sleep on a soft surface such as a waterbed, sofa, pillowtop mattress, beanbag chair, or any other flexible and yielding structure. 

♦  Make certain that your fitted sheets stay secure and cannot be pulled loose. 

♦  If your bed is raised off the floor, use mesh guardrails to prevent baby from rolling off the bed, and be especially careful that there is no space between the mattress and headboard or footboard. (Some guardrails designed for older children are not safe for babies because they have spaces that could entrap tiny bodies.)
If your bed is placed against a wall or against other furniture, check every night to be sure there is no space between the mattress and wall or furniture where baby could become stuck.

♦  An infant should be placed between his mother and the wall or guardrail. Fathers, siblings, grandparents, and babysitters don't have the same instinctual awareness of a baby's location as do mothers. Mothers: Pay attention to your own sensitivity to baby. Your little one should be able to awaken you with a minimum of movement or noise — often even a sniff or snort is usually enough. If you find that you sleep so deeply that you only wake when your baby lets out a loud cry, seriously consider moving baby out of your bed, perhaps into a cradle or crib near your bedside.

♦  Use a large mattress to provide ample room and comfort for everyone.

♦  Consider a “sidecar” arrangement in which baby's crib or cradle sits directly beside the main bed.

♦  Make certain that the room your baby sleeps in, and any room he might have access to, is childproof. (Imagine your baby crawling out of bed as you sleep to explore the house. Even if he has not done this — yet — you can be certain he eventually will!)

♦  Do not ever sleep with your baby if you have been drinking alcohol, if you have used any drugs or medications, if you are an especially sound sleeper, or if you are suffering from sleep deprivation and find it difficult to wake.

♦  Do not sleep with your baby if you are a large person, as a parent's excess weight poses a proven risk to baby in a co-sleeping situation. I cannot give you a specific weight-to-baby ratio; simply examine how you and baby settle in next to each other. If baby rolls towards you, if there is a large dip in the mattress, or if you suspect any other dangerous situations, play it safe and move baby to a bedside crib or cradle.

♦  Remove all pillows and blankets during the early months. Use extreme caution when adding pillows or blankets as your baby gets older. Dress baby and yourselves warmly for sleep. (A tip for breastfeeding moms: wear an old turtleneck or t-shirt, cut up the middle to the neckline, as an undershirt for extra warmth.) Keep in mind that body heat will add warmth during the night. Make sure your baby doesn't become overheated.

♦  Do not wear nightclothes with strings or long ribbons. Don't wear jewelry to bed, and if your hair is long, pin it up.

♦  Don't use strong-smelling perfumes or lotions that may affect your baby's delicate senses.

♦  Do not allow pets to sleep in bed with your baby.

♦  Never leave your baby alone in an adult bed unless that bed is perfectly safe for your baby, such as a firm mattress on the floor in a childproof room, and when you are nearby or listening in on baby with a reliable baby monitor. 

Is your child a cat-napper? Does your baby fall asleep being fed, while in a car seat, sling, rocker, or someone’s arms? When transferred to bed, does your baby then sleep 30 to 50 minutes? That’s the exact length of one sleep cycle. These factors combined define the main cause of mini-naps: an inability to fall asleep or stay asleep without aid – your baby wakes fully at the end of the first sleep cycle, resulting in a too-short nap. I refer to this problem as One-Cycle Sleep Syndrome (OCSS). This leads us to understand the reason that many babies are cat-nappers and also directs us to potential solutions.

Cycle-Blender Naps
One way to help your baby sleep longer is to put him for a nap in a setting that will lull him back to sleep when he wakes between sleep cycles. Cycle-Blender naps occur in slings, cradle-swings, rocking cradles, or baby hammocks. Any of these can help cat-nappers extend their sleep time because when Baby begins to awaken the rhythmic motion can lull him back to sleep.

You can also create a Cycle-Blender nap in a stroller. Take a daily walk outside (it’s good for both of you!) or bring your stroller in the house. Walk your baby until she falls asleep, and then park the stroller near you. If she starts to move about, resume walking or give her a bit of a bounce and jiggle.

Once your baby gets used to taking a longer nap in the stroller, you can make a transition to bed naps. Start by reducing the movement, rolling slower and for less time. After your baby is asleep, park the stroller, using the jiggle if she wakes mid-nap. Over time, let your baby fall asleep in the stationary stroller parked next to his crib, and when the nap habit is in place, change to naps in the crib.

Create a Sleep-Inducing Bedroom
To encourage longer naps, keep the sleeping room dark so bright light doesn’t keep him alert between sleep cycles. To soothe your child through sleep cycle changes, use white noise (a recording of nature sounds), or relaxing music. Keep this on all through naptime. This creates a sleep cue and will mask noises that can wake a child who is shifting through sleep cycles.

Build a Better Bed
To entice your baby to have a longer nap, recreate the crib into a cozier nest. Use softer sheets, such as flannel, plus a thicker, softer crib mattress pad. You can also warm the bed surface before naptime with a towel fresh from the dryer (remove this and test the surface before laying your baby down.)

Make the Bed a Familiar Place
Let your baby have several play sessions in his crib during waking hours. Stay with him, engage his interest and introduce a few new toys. Let him see you as a part of the crib experience so that he gets a happy feeling being there. This way, when he is put in his crib for naptime and wakes up mid-nap it won’t be a lonely, foreign place, but one that carries familiar memories of fun times with you. This can help him accept it as a safe place for sleep and allow him to fall back into slumber after that first sleep cycle.

Interpret Signs of Tiredness
If you put your child for a nap before he is tired, or when he is overtired he won’t sleep as well as when you hit that ideal just-tired moment. Observe your child for signs of tiredness, such as losing interest in toys, looking glazed, becoming cranky, or slumping in his seat. Put your child for a nap the moment you see any sign of fatigue. If you take note of the time that this occurs over a week you should see a pattern emerge. This can help you set up a daily nap schedule that suits your child’s tired times perfectly.

Gauge time spans between naps
In addition to signs of tiredness also watch to see how long your child has been awake. Children can only stay happily awake for a certain period of time until they receive a biological pull towards a nap. Once that “pull” begins your child becomes fatigued and his cheerful mood begins to deteriorate. Each child has unique sleep needs, but this chart shows the typical span of time a child can stay happily awake:

Age Awake time span
Newborn 1 – 2 hours
6 month old 2 – 3 hours
12 month old 3 – 4 hours
18 month old 4 – 6 hours
2 year old 5 – 7 hours
3 year old 6 – 8 hours
4 year old 6 – 12 hours

Keep in mind that children grow and change and their nap schedule should change with them. What’s perfect today may be different than what is perfect next month. Keep your eye on your baby and on the clock..