Tantrums And Empathetic Children ~ Chris

Posted on August 22, 2018 by chris

I have many discussions about whining and how it related to empathy with several parents.  I think most people see whining as something other than what it is.  Whining is just a primitive way a child expresses himself, but it means so much more than this for it sets up how a child will use communication based on your reaction.

When a child whines, he’s expressing an issue.  Simple right?  Annoying too.  For arguments sake let’s stripe away age, and look at the situation from an adult context.  I firmly believe that we’re not raising children, but in fact are raising adults and what you do in your kids childhood will be reflected in his adulthood.  Communication patterns constructed right now will set up how your child operated later on.

So an “adult” comes to you complaining about such and such.  He wants a cookie or wants to play outside.  Maybe this “adult” is a spouse to someone else.  Do you talk about it?  Throw things around the house?  Does everyone ignore each other?  Do you put Tabasco sauce in each other’s mouth (an actual suggestion by another parent!)?

What you decide to do will be reflected later on.  Effective people talk it out.  Talking about an issue is not the same as giving into an issue – not in the least.  You can talk about anything you want to a toddler and then refuse it.  Many people think you need to hide things from a toddler – but often this is only a mechanism you use so as not to have to discuss it!  Sound familiar?  Maybe you’re using techniques handed down by your parents.  So instead of talking about why you can’t have a treat before dinner, you simply hide all the treats.  This isn’t a bad idea, but as your child ages, he’s going to come to understand that treats are always in the cupboard and don’t disappear, so best deal with it now while your child’s will is weaker and more manageable.

So talk, talk, talk.  Talk about everything including your child’s desires and aspirations.  Even if they’re just simple ones like wanting to go outside, or play with a toy they can’t at the moment, or play with you or read a book.  I promise that more lofty requests are down the road and you’ll need to discuss these too.  You can always follow your parent’s lead on this and shove issues under the carpet – perhaps your child’s spouse will enjoy this way of dealing with things!  Doubtful, but perhaps they’ll do the same.  However, I contest that happy and effective people can talk about any and everything freely.  And yes, talking about an issue is not even close to giving in to an issue.

So when whining starts, have your toddler stop.  You can sign and say the word STOP – it’s actually a very effective word to sign because you drop your hand down in a hurry onto your palm facing upward – chopping motion.  Get down on your child’s level and establish eye contact.  If your child is still crying or carrying out ask him to calm down.  Until your child is calm, no communication can happen.  Wait for your child to calm down.  I have my son exhale and he does so.  This helps him breath instead of getting upset.  Usually breathing patterns quicken when a toddler is upset so this is an early give-away to melt down.  If a child starts huffing in and out, it’s time to calm the situation down.

If your child doesn’t calm quickly, anchor with him by putting an arm on his shoulder or hand.  This establishes a connection with your child and is a nonverbal way to show empathy.  Next ask your child to use his words.  Let him talk and see what he comes up with on his own.  If he’s under or around 2, he might not have all the vocabulary he needs to have a discussion, but that doesn’t mean you don’t try.  A child old enough to throw a fit, is old enough to work it out.  Help your child fill in the words he can’t say or sign and fragment a sentence together with his help.  Have him repeat it back a few times and emphasis the key words so he has language during his next issue.  “Oh so you want to go read a BOOK with MOM”  Or “Oh you want to eat an entire box of chocolates, but your upset that you can’t?”  Remember, nothing is off the table, talk, talk, talk.

After you’ve use proper language, it’s time to decide what you’ll do.  And you thought discussing something was off the table because it might mean you’d have to implement a request!  Absolutely not.  Now’s the time you talk.  Discuss the situation with your child and offer a reasonable explanation as to why you can or can not do what’s been requested.  “No, I’m sorry, you can’t eat the entire box of chocolate because we’re just about to eat dinner and besides eating all the junk food in one sitting is not healthy.”  Don’t make stuff up, as your child will catch on.  “Oh mommy, it’s not even close to dinner is something your child might come up with later on.”  However the “not healthy part” will cover you.  On the other hand, you might say “Okay, you can have one small piece, but that’s it, after that ALL DONE.”  When reading a book is concerned, you might say “I can’t read a BOOK right now, I’m busy making dinner, let me put the food on the stove and I’ll come read a BOOK.”  In this case, the moment you are finished, GO READ THE BOOK!  If you don’t your child will come back and bug you again – you will not have kept your side of the bargain.  Do you know anyone in your adult life who can’t keep promises?  People not have integrity?

After you have made your (reasonable and justified) decision it’s absolutely time to stick to it.  If you bend, then you’ll teach your child that negotiation is okay – maybe to you it is, but it might also set you up for additional whining.  If whining happens again, just repeat the same process as above and continue to re-establish good adult communication patterns.

Is what I write easy to do?  Nope, not at all.  It’s easy to just tell baby-Jim to go fly a kite on his own – but if you want a mini-adult in your house sans-whining, this is the way to do it.  You wont’ get ride of tantrums, but they’ll end up less forceful mini-tantrums and everyone will be happy for it.  Studies have shown that children offered empathy turn out to be caring people in adulthood.  This is why – children repeat the patterns they see.

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Sign Difficulty And Sign Approximations ~ Courtney

Posted on August 15, 2018 by chris

Some signs will be more difficult for your baby to sign than others.  It works out really well that many of the first signs you will want to teach are relatively easy to perform.  MORE, EAT, ALL DONE, and even MILK do not require too much fine motor coordination for your baby.  Although he will likely demonstrate an approximation of each of these signs for quite some time, you will easily be able to figure out what he is trying to tell you.

As your baby gets older and becomes more adept at signing and more eager to know the sign for everything, you may introduce signs that are more difficult either because of the coordination involved in performing them, because they involve more than one step, or because your baby doesn’t yet have the body awareness to mimic you when you do them.

Our son could not do the sign for OWL properly for the longest time.  Despite his best efforts, he just couldn’t bring his hands to his eyes.  They would always end up elsewhere on his face or out in front of his face.  It was really quite cute to watch him try!

Another sign that has recently given him some difficulty is BLACK.  I would have thought it would be easy to learn as it only involves drawing the index finger above the eyebrows from one side of the forehead to the other.  However, he always drags his finger along the side or back of his head!  Again, it’s really quite funny to see when you know what he’s trying to do.

It doesn’t bother me at all that he can’t do some signs when he first learns them.  Experience has taught me that he will do his best approximation until one day when he will just be able to do the sign properly.  For some signs it takes some extra effort as far as modeling and guiding him, but in the end, he always gets it!

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Ignoring Life Laws When Raising Children ~ Chris

Posted on August 8, 2018 by chris

I’m always surprised by how ineffectual some people are with managing their lives.  I won’t get into specifics on this, but suffice it to say that if you make complaints, and they are for or about things you can control, the issue with fixing them resides on you.  While there are many things out of our direct control, there are also many things within our direct control.  Take for example high gas prices of which we have no direct control.  What we can control though, is our choice in vehicle.  We can choose a small vehicle rather than a truck or a hybrid or even a good used vehicle and spend the extra money directly on gas.  Saving on a vehicle means we have more money left over to spend on gas.  This is just one way to work with life laws where we can come out as winners.

Let’s take a baby example and see what we can come up with.  Baby wakes up too early.  Let’s see what we can do, I did.  First we darkened the room to cancel out the sun as a stimulus to waken baby.  The sun is a trigger that tells all of us it’s time to get up.  If you’ve never noticed, people will tend to want to sleep in later in the long winter nights and less in the shorter summer months.  You can fix this somewhat with dark blinds and tossing your alarm clock!  I found this to work well with my son.  I tried to help my sister and her kids with this but it didn’t work.  This is likely because she has two kids and one wakes up the other.  At one point she had one boy up at 4-5 a.m. well before daylight!  Turns out his internal clock was set to put him to be at 7 p.m. at night so he got his 10-12 hours of sleep and was ready to go.  Stretching it out made him overtired because my sister wasn’t able to stretch the bedtime out and push his naptime back in the day.  Engineering things to suite your needs take diligence and careful monitoring in order to slowly tweak things.

While working with life laws it’s important to be diligent and observe – then experiment to see what works.  My son loved to bother me throughout the day, even if I need to write on the computer.  Instead of barking back, I got down and started him playing with some toys then quietly left to resume my work.  After a while he’d come back and when he was almost 2 years old, I was able to tell him that I was almost done and would come and play when I was finished.  Because I kept my word, he’d go off and do something with confidence that I would keep my word.  It’s this fact which permitted me to finish in peace.  The life law is that kids will always want to bug you and play with you no matter what, so you’re going to have to give a little to take a little back.

We played around a lot with eating habits too.  I found that my son would harass me for treats and snacks had he had carbohydrates alone for breakfast.  Instead of bending to this, I offered him just 3 cookies which he could eat at anytime.  We selected the cookies early in the morning and put them in a container.  It was his choice to eat one, two or all three at anytime.  This effort didn’t totally solve the problem, but it did curb his nagging for cookies.  Next I boosted his calories for breakfast by introducing eggs or other protein such as beans along with a carbohydrate such as cereal or toast.  These extra “good” calories meant he wasn’t hungry.  I figured snacking was a function of sugar crashes rather than a raw want for cookies.  Turns out I was right as after a week, he lost his interest in cookies, raisins and other sugary foods.

Your issues might be different than mine.  Maybe you need baby to wake up earlier so you can bring him to daycare – try slowly adding light in the morning to gently rouse him.  Maybe your baby is scared of the dark – try removing light so he doesn’t see shadows!  Odd solution you say?  Not really, children did without nightlights essentially forever.  Maybe your child is afraid of a stuffed animal so ask him what’s bothering him and give him signs for things you think matter to him.  I had to remove a goose ‘book’ after my son was startled by seeing a stuffed goose at an outdoors store!  My son also had night terrors after watching a nature video of lions.  After affirming that he need not worry over and over again and discussing the matter, his night waking’s disappeared altogether.  My son was bothered by ANGRY “Thomas the train” at about 20 months of age.  He told us about this so we just stopped watching Thomas on television – despite him asking to watch it!  Funny kids, huh.  Talking about feelings is very important.  This is working with nature.

With any problem you might have, there is way to work with it.  While you can’t expect life with a child to be perfect, smashing your head against the wall without adjusting to the rules life throws at us, is to act like a spoiled child yourself.  Watch for life’s rules and you can be a highly effective and successful parent.  Rather than complain, you’ll look at life problems as if it was a game where you come out a winner everytime.

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Humans Are Tubes Inside Of Tubes – Ceolomates! ~ Chris

Posted on August 1, 2018 by chris

Signing raises awareness about things around a baby.  As you teach your baby to sign, watch how just by learning a label, that a baby suddenly finds something interesting.  Now imagine suddenly taking this label away from your baby.  What would happen?  Your baby would go back to being blissfully unaware of its importance?  Yes, most likely.

The same happens to adults, but in different ways.  For the most part adults are aware of all the basics in life.  However, when we learn something new, we begin to see things in a much different way.  While at University I studied biology and learned to look at animals in a much different light.  I learned that most complex animals are designed around a “ceolomic cavity.”

Chances are good that you have no idea what a ceolomic cavity is, which is going to help me illustrate my point about baby sign language perfectly.  A ceolomic cavity refers to the tube inside our bodies where organ can freely move and grow independently of the outside body wall.  Essentially, human bodies are tubes inside tubes.  In the animal kingdom there are also animals with pseudocoelmate (not a true ceolom) and also acoelomate (no body cavity).  When you think of the human body, picture an earthworm with arms and legs.  Humans are nothing more than a tube of organs inside an exterior tube.

Having made you aware of the fact that humans are coelomate animals with a true coelom lined by muscle tissue on both sides – for a good long while, you’ll look at people a whole lot differently.  You might find it so fascinating that humans are like giant earthworms who’s guts can be easily squeezed out of your body like a giant earthworm, that you might bring it up in conversation, point this out to your husband, wife or friend or crack a joke about it.  Just by having a label for something you’ve known about and seen in drawings and images, painted in a new light, will spark a curiousity to talk about it in regular conversation.  But even if you won’t talk about it, having the label will let you think about it.

Baby signing for your baby is no different.  I had been feeding my son raisins for a good while and he liked them.  After teaching him to sign RAISIN, he was obsessed with them.  In fact, he would ask for RAISINS several times throughout the day and even bring me over to the pantry to get a refill.  Because he learned the label for it, he learned how he could fit it into his life and what its purpose was.  Also, because we are inherently social animals, we need a vocabulary in order to properly think about something in our lives.  Baby signing gives your baby a head start in thinking about his world and how it relates to him.  Teach him the words for things and he’ll begin to talk about them – it’s as simple as that!  Teach him the words for things and he’ll also begin to think about them too.

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When Does Baby Signing Become Useless? ~ Chris

Posted on July 25, 2018 by chris

The real answer is never, but if you press on for an answer, it’s as soon as your baby can repeat words back to you in an instant.  You might think that as soon as you baby first becomes verbal that signing becomes obsolete, but this isn’t so.  Up until your baby is into his verbal explosion where he’s adding multiple words a day, signing will still play a part in your baby’s life.

As my son neared two, he began to replace many of his signed words with spoken words.  In fact, his signed words were usually the ones he’d speak first over other words, but occasionally he would surprise us with fresh spoken words.  His signs helped him encode the spoken words because he already understood their use all he had to do was wait until his vocal cords caught up to his desire to use them.

A signing child will always use his signing background in language.  This isn’t a direct reference to using signs along with speech or using signs as replacement to speech, but rather a reference to using the framework and experience of signs in his communication development.  Just as a toddler will use play into his adult years, and not for play, but for skills related to life in general, a signing baby will use his signing skills in communication.  All things we do set us up for things later in life.  Take music by example.  It’s been said many times that music helps in mathematics because the mental processing is similar.  One might also look at team sports such as soccer or hockey and see that this sets up cooperation and strategy.  Individual sports like dance and gymnastics help in coordination and helps build confidence.  Over and over again, science tells us that active body produce active minds with the more stimulation a person gets, the more dynamic they can be when novel tasks arise.

So while many parents rest on the theory that signing is temporary, I say it’s not even close.  Signing is something that is going to stay in your child’s brain as a positive learning experience to be drawn on for his entire life.  Baby signing is wiring his brain for communication from a very early age and as no one would deny, communication is vital to getting along in life.

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