As we celebrate April fool’s day, why not take a look at how the baby products industry manages to fool parents into thinking they need things they’d probably be better off without. Here is a quick little interview on Salon.com with Pamela Paul, author of "Parenting, Inc.," a book aimed at exposing the madness behind modern parents’ desires to buy “the best thing for my child” – including flashy “educational” toys that do more to thwart learning than enhance it; posh $800 luxury strollers; and baby classes that Paul said should really be dubbed “child classes for parents” (since they’re unnecessary for the child but a fine way for moms to connect).
And speaking of spending a lot on your little ones, the latest government estimate as to how much you’re likely to spend feeding, housing and schooling a child born in 2007 from birth until their 18th birthday is $204,060. That’s before college tuition, of course. So it probably wouldn’t to hurt to cut some of the fluff out of your baby budget anyway. See the full story here.
Showing posts with label in the news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label in the news. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Fats and fertility
Rob and I decided a while back to retire from the baby-making business. We’re content with our cozy family of four. But for all of you out there who are still interested in getting pregnant – or who have friends who are struggling on that point, here is an article worth reading. Granted I’m a month and a half late sharing it and some of you probably already read it, but I didn’t get to it until this week.
It was the December 6 Newsweek cover story, which reviewed a bunch of the key findings presented in The Fertility Diet, a Harvard Medical Book that offers strategies for increasing your fertility odds simply by eating healthfully -- based on data from 18,000 women who took part in a long-term research project called the Nurse’s Health Study (which examined how diet and other factors affected a broad range of chronic conditions including heart disease and cancer). So there’s implications for how to stay healthy for those of us not personally vested in fertility probabilities anymore.
And for the thousands of women who consider fertility treatment every year, it would be nice to know that just some basic dietary manipulations might solve the problem naturally. Of course it’s not a panacea. The recommendations are aimed at preventing and reversing ovulatory infertility, which they say accounts for one quarter or more of all cases of infertility. And I’m sure there are plenty of causes of ovulatory infertility that are beyond the realm of a dietary fix.
One interesting finding though: “The more low-fat dairy products in a woman's diet, the more likely she was to have had trouble getting pregnant. The more full-fat dairy products in a woman's diet, the less likely she was to have had problems getting pregnant.” The authors don’t recommend consuming pints of ice cream at a time. They say “aim for one to two servings of dairy products a day, both of them full fat.” And they advise switching back to lowfat once you’re no longer pregnant. But I wonder about the broader implications for how whole fats consumed in moderation might be generally healthier for our bodies than they are generally given credit for.
(We’re still drinking whole milk and eating butter in moderation in our house after my interview with Sally Fallon of the Weston A. Price Foundation. I don't know if we’ve chosen the right path, but we’re at least enjoying the flavors. If you're interested in the whole saturated-fat-as-good-or-evil debate, this is another very interesting and fairly comprehensive article on the subject -- entitled "What if bad fat isn't so bad?" -- at msnbc.com.)
Highlights of the strategies outlined in "The Fertility Diet," according to the Web site for the book, include:
*Avoiding trans-fats, the artery-clogging fats found in many commercial products and fast foods
*Eating more vegetable protein, like beans and nuts, and less animal protein
*Drinking a glass of whole milk or having a small dish of ice cream or full-fat yogurt every day; temporarily trading in skim milk and low or no-fat dairy products for their full-fat versions
*Getting into the "fertility zones" for weight and physical activity.
It was the December 6 Newsweek cover story, which reviewed a bunch of the key findings presented in The Fertility Diet, a Harvard Medical Book that offers strategies for increasing your fertility odds simply by eating healthfully -- based on data from 18,000 women who took part in a long-term research project called the Nurse’s Health Study (which examined how diet and other factors affected a broad range of chronic conditions including heart disease and cancer). So there’s implications for how to stay healthy for those of us not personally vested in fertility probabilities anymore.
And for the thousands of women who consider fertility treatment every year, it would be nice to know that just some basic dietary manipulations might solve the problem naturally. Of course it’s not a panacea. The recommendations are aimed at preventing and reversing ovulatory infertility, which they say accounts for one quarter or more of all cases of infertility. And I’m sure there are plenty of causes of ovulatory infertility that are beyond the realm of a dietary fix.
One interesting finding though: “The more low-fat dairy products in a woman's diet, the more likely she was to have had trouble getting pregnant. The more full-fat dairy products in a woman's diet, the less likely she was to have had problems getting pregnant.” The authors don’t recommend consuming pints of ice cream at a time. They say “aim for one to two servings of dairy products a day, both of them full fat.” And they advise switching back to lowfat once you’re no longer pregnant. But I wonder about the broader implications for how whole fats consumed in moderation might be generally healthier for our bodies than they are generally given credit for.
(We’re still drinking whole milk and eating butter in moderation in our house after my interview with Sally Fallon of the Weston A. Price Foundation. I don't know if we’ve chosen the right path, but we’re at least enjoying the flavors. If you're interested in the whole saturated-fat-as-good-or-evil debate, this is another very interesting and fairly comprehensive article on the subject -- entitled "What if bad fat isn't so bad?" -- at msnbc.com.)
Highlights of the strategies outlined in "The Fertility Diet," according to the Web site for the book, include:
*Avoiding trans-fats, the artery-clogging fats found in many commercial products and fast foods
*Eating more vegetable protein, like beans and nuts, and less animal protein
*Drinking a glass of whole milk or having a small dish of ice cream or full-fat yogurt every day; temporarily trading in skim milk and low or no-fat dairy products for their full-fat versions
*Getting into the "fertility zones" for weight and physical activity.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Boys -- they take their toll
Here’s how our day with the boys began: 6:35 a.m. A far-off noise wakes Rob off. Soon we discover it’s Will crying from the kitchen. He got up and rather than coming to wake us up, decided to be self-sufficient and strap himself into the booster chair where he eats his oatmeal. (We still haven’t graduated him from the thing because he’s a bit short and he prefers the seat to perching on phone books or encyclopedias.) But then he was trapped – stuck in his chair with no parents and no oatmeal. So he had to cry and cry until we were roused from our sleepiness. Might have been a few minutes, might have been twenty. Either way, self-imprisoned red-eyed Will was a rather pathetic sight.
And this is how our day ended: After an hour of quiet time but no nap, Will suffered through a series of meltdowns from 5:30 pm. to 6:30, at which point we tried to corral him toward bed but had to deal with more meltdowns on the way. (I never realized how much I loved Will’s nap until he stopped taking it.) Finally at 7:30 we had both Owen and Will down so I snuck off for an hour to visit a friend who’s been ill. On my way home, I answered the cell phone to hear both boys crying in the background. Overtired Will was having trouble sleeping and had been up three times since I’d been gone and Owen was crying inconsolably.
Sure having kids is a joyous life-giving experience, but days like these make you wonder if it’s also life-draining. Here’s some evidence from Finland suggesting that having boys, in particular, takes a toll – almost a year off your life compared to having girls, in fact.
(Evolutionary biologist Virpi Lummaa argues that birth weight (male babies are usually larger) and testosterone (which can compromise mother’s immune system) are the main reasons for the difference. Plenty of moms out there might suspect the general rambunctiousness and recklessness of boys – and the stress they cause their moms -- as factors as well.
And yeah, I’m feeling drained tonight, but I’d gladly exchange the last withering year or two of my life for my two little bundles of testosterone.
And this is how our day ended: After an hour of quiet time but no nap, Will suffered through a series of meltdowns from 5:30 pm. to 6:30, at which point we tried to corral him toward bed but had to deal with more meltdowns on the way. (I never realized how much I loved Will’s nap until he stopped taking it.) Finally at 7:30 we had both Owen and Will down so I snuck off for an hour to visit a friend who’s been ill. On my way home, I answered the cell phone to hear both boys crying in the background. Overtired Will was having trouble sleeping and had been up three times since I’d been gone and Owen was crying inconsolably.
Sure having kids is a joyous life-giving experience, but days like these make you wonder if it’s also life-draining. Here’s some evidence from Finland suggesting that having boys, in particular, takes a toll – almost a year off your life compared to having girls, in fact.
(Evolutionary biologist Virpi Lummaa argues that birth weight (male babies are usually larger) and testosterone (which can compromise mother’s immune system) are the main reasons for the difference. Plenty of moms out there might suspect the general rambunctiousness and recklessness of boys – and the stress they cause their moms -- as factors as well.
And yeah, I’m feeling drained tonight, but I’d gladly exchange the last withering year or two of my life for my two little bundles of testosterone.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
The news on colic
I finally got a chance to read the September 17 New Yorker article, “Crybabies: Solving the colic conundrum,” which is definitely worth a look, even if the title is somewhat misleading. The colic conundrum is by no means solved in this article (the cause and the cure remain as elusive as ever) but the primary researcher featured in the article does provide some advice about dealing with colicky babies. Barry Lester, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University, suggests that while in the past people regarded colic as a physical or medical problem, he regards it as a behavioral disorder that affects “not just the baby but the parent-infant relationship.” You can read an abstract of the article here.
Since colic is still largely a mystery to physicians too, you might as well diagnose it yourself using criteria developed in 1954 by Yale pediatrician Morris Wessel: crying by an otherwise healthy infant that lasts more than three hours a day more than three days a week, for more than three weeks.
Lester hypothesizes that some infants who suffer from colic are “hypersensitive to normal stimuli” and that even physical contact with their parents is unlikely to soothe them. He suggests that parents of colicky babies need to refrain from going to their babies each time they cry so that the babies can learn to soothe themselves.
Lester’s advice might fly in the face of attachment parenting gurus, but after you read the anecdote about Juliana, whose 8-week-old daughter cried 15 hours a day and allowed her mother about an hour and a half of sleep each night, it seems reasonable to let the baby do some solo crying too. (In the article, Pamela High, another professor of pediatrics at Brown advised Julianna to first try to determine if her baby was hungry or wet or wanted to suck or be cuddled. But after she’d done all that, High suggested putting the baby down “in a safe place for 5 or 10 minutes so she can learn to calm herself.”)
I can’t imagine having to leave an under-three-month-old to cry for any length of time, but if we were facing round two with a super colicky baby I'd be tempted to give the self-soothing thing a try.
In one of Lester’s studies 75 percent of colicky babies later suffered from behavioral problems, "including limited attention span, tantrums, and irritation after being touched or coming in contact with particular fabrics or tags in their clothing.” Lester says the way parents interact with colicky infants can exacerbate the problem: "Colic threatens to cause problems in the child's ability to form relationships, because the child doesn't learn behavioral regulation and develops problems with impulse control."
We never got around to labeling Will as colicky – but looking back he probably did cry for something close to a total of three hours a day for a few days of the week for a few of the worst weeks (the first three months felt like a struggle and they make life with Owen feel like a walk in the park). Whether or not he had colic, Will definitely got constant attention from us as he cried in those early months, so maybe there is something linking that early lack of self-soothing to his periodic tantrums today. (It also seems plausible that kids born with super-sensitive temperaments simply continue to have super-sensitive temperaments as toddlers and so get unreasonably upset when things don’t fit their super-sensitive ideas about what they want and need).
If Will did have colic, it was a mild version of it. As I read about mothers of constantly crying babies, it’s no wonder to me that so many of them wind up depressed (another study mentioned in the article points out that maternal depression and colicky infants were high predictors of one another). How terrible to feel that you can almost never be of comfort to your tiny baby.
The good news if you got one of those colicky baby/tantruming toddler packages? By the time they are adults, they don’t tend to exhibit behavioral problems. So at some point, maybe right around the time they’re packing up for college???, all will be peaceful once again.
Were your tantruming toddlers colicky babies? Any advice from my-baby-had-colic-but-I-survived mothers out there?
Since colic is still largely a mystery to physicians too, you might as well diagnose it yourself using criteria developed in 1954 by Yale pediatrician Morris Wessel: crying by an otherwise healthy infant that lasts more than three hours a day more than three days a week, for more than three weeks.
Lester hypothesizes that some infants who suffer from colic are “hypersensitive to normal stimuli” and that even physical contact with their parents is unlikely to soothe them. He suggests that parents of colicky babies need to refrain from going to their babies each time they cry so that the babies can learn to soothe themselves.
Lester’s advice might fly in the face of attachment parenting gurus, but after you read the anecdote about Juliana, whose 8-week-old daughter cried 15 hours a day and allowed her mother about an hour and a half of sleep each night, it seems reasonable to let the baby do some solo crying too. (In the article, Pamela High, another professor of pediatrics at Brown advised Julianna to first try to determine if her baby was hungry or wet or wanted to suck or be cuddled. But after she’d done all that, High suggested putting the baby down “in a safe place for 5 or 10 minutes so she can learn to calm herself.”)
I can’t imagine having to leave an under-three-month-old to cry for any length of time, but if we were facing round two with a super colicky baby I'd be tempted to give the self-soothing thing a try.
In one of Lester’s studies 75 percent of colicky babies later suffered from behavioral problems, "including limited attention span, tantrums, and irritation after being touched or coming in contact with particular fabrics or tags in their clothing.” Lester says the way parents interact with colicky infants can exacerbate the problem: "Colic threatens to cause problems in the child's ability to form relationships, because the child doesn't learn behavioral regulation and develops problems with impulse control."
We never got around to labeling Will as colicky – but looking back he probably did cry for something close to a total of three hours a day for a few days of the week for a few of the worst weeks (the first three months felt like a struggle and they make life with Owen feel like a walk in the park). Whether or not he had colic, Will definitely got constant attention from us as he cried in those early months, so maybe there is something linking that early lack of self-soothing to his periodic tantrums today. (It also seems plausible that kids born with super-sensitive temperaments simply continue to have super-sensitive temperaments as toddlers and so get unreasonably upset when things don’t fit their super-sensitive ideas about what they want and need).
If Will did have colic, it was a mild version of it. As I read about mothers of constantly crying babies, it’s no wonder to me that so many of them wind up depressed (another study mentioned in the article points out that maternal depression and colicky infants were high predictors of one another). How terrible to feel that you can almost never be of comfort to your tiny baby.
The good news if you got one of those colicky baby/tantruming toddler packages? By the time they are adults, they don’t tend to exhibit behavioral problems. So at some point, maybe right around the time they’re packing up for college???, all will be peaceful once again.
Were your tantruming toddlers colicky babies? Any advice from my-baby-had-colic-but-I-survived mothers out there?
Monday, September 24, 2007
Play by yourself, kid
Here’s an interesting article about why overly conscientious middle-class parents with too much time on their hands maybe don’t need to be doing so much sitting on the floor and playing with their young kids in the hopes of teaching them more. I was such mom for a good year and a half with Will. Played with him and read to him all the time. I thought I was teaching him. Really I was probably just over-stimulating him and interfering with his innate creativity and inquisitiveness. I remember back before Will could talk I’d find myself commenting on his play with the idea that I was helping him with language development etc. I’d even harass Rob and tell him to interact more with Will, a bit of advice we’ve both come to regret.
Then I wised up and realized that my work was housework and writing and such, and that Will’s work was his independent play and I think we both got a lot happier at home together. I really believe that children are their own best teachers. Will still often says he “needs” me to help him put together a puzzle or to draw a whale for him or build a city out of blocks, but lo and behold if I persuade him to do it himself, he invariably can – and he learns more that way. I still allow and invite Will to accompany me and to participate in his own way with many of my household chores (like cooking and laundry) and I still read to him and listen to his stories and ask questions, but other than some occasional ball-tossing I’ve pretty well weaned myself of the block-building, puzzle-doing, car-pushing thing. Now Rob still struggles to not become the after-work playmate since Will has missed him all day and since Rob actually enjoys some of the play. (They made a very snazzy tractor with Tinkertoys the other day – but in a way it was a great case in point. Now Will thinks he NEEDS Rob in order to make cool Tinkertoy creations.)
We also still haven’t figured out how to deal with the fact that anyone who comes over is, in Will’s eyes, a permanent playmate. I need to work harder to help Will understand that adults need to talk to one another too, without constant Will stories and interjections and requests for play (however cheerful and endearing they might be). It’s my next project: helping our poor relatives and visitors evade Will’s persistent “play with me” traps -- at least some of the time.
Then I wised up and realized that my work was housework and writing and such, and that Will’s work was his independent play and I think we both got a lot happier at home together. I really believe that children are their own best teachers. Will still often says he “needs” me to help him put together a puzzle or to draw a whale for him or build a city out of blocks, but lo and behold if I persuade him to do it himself, he invariably can – and he learns more that way. I still allow and invite Will to accompany me and to participate in his own way with many of my household chores (like cooking and laundry) and I still read to him and listen to his stories and ask questions, but other than some occasional ball-tossing I’ve pretty well weaned myself of the block-building, puzzle-doing, car-pushing thing. Now Rob still struggles to not become the after-work playmate since Will has missed him all day and since Rob actually enjoys some of the play. (They made a very snazzy tractor with Tinkertoys the other day – but in a way it was a great case in point. Now Will thinks he NEEDS Rob in order to make cool Tinkertoy creations.)
We also still haven’t figured out how to deal with the fact that anyone who comes over is, in Will’s eyes, a permanent playmate. I need to work harder to help Will understand that adults need to talk to one another too, without constant Will stories and interjections and requests for play (however cheerful and endearing they might be). It’s my next project: helping our poor relatives and visitors evade Will’s persistent “play with me” traps -- at least some of the time.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Background noise (TV time, take two)
Since I’m always obsessing about how to handle television in our house now that we have kids, I found this salon.com article interesting. It’s an interview with journalist Lisa Guernsey, about her new book, "Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children From Birth to Age Five.”
The whole article’s worth a read, but these things got me thinking about our own TV/radio time:
Background noise: Guernsey talks about the ill-effects of background television, which some research shows affects the way children play (they're less focused in their play, going from one toy to another rather than spending more time exploring each toy); the way parents interact with their children (this is a no-brainer; it’s easy to forget to engage with your kids when you get sucked into some show you love); and children’s language development (since studies of infants and toddlers show that they have a hard time hearing the words in speech when they have background noise to compete with).
We don’t do much TV in the house (except when Rob’s watching a small dose of sports on the weekends or some nighttime TV after Will’s in bed), but we do listen to some NPR. And it’s interesting to me to wonder about radio and children’s language development. Sometimes I”ll have NPR on while Will’s eating breakfast and he’ll shout out “California! They said California. That’s where Uncle Graham lives.” Or “ocean! They said ocean!” etc. Maybe this as a good exercise in word recognition? Or maybe it’s just a bunch of adult-level interference in Will’s natural thought processes? For Owen’s sake, anyway, I think I’ll start turning the radio off during those times when I’m really not attending to it anyway and it has just become background noise for me as well as for the boys.
The need for completion: Guernsey talks about how toddlers “want to see how a show ends, and they'll become very upset if you try to turn off 'Dora the Explorer' in the middle of the show. They can get that Dora is on a journey to a place, or she's trying to solve a puzzle, and they need to see what happens next.”
Of course this isn’t just a toddler thing; no adult wants to watch only the first half of a sitcom or TV drama. But I was foolish enough to try to do it with Will as a way to give him a tad bit of television. It’s been a month or so since we caved and instituted 15 minutes a day TV viewing for Will. It worked okay for a couple weeks, but I’ve been recognizing more and more the idiocy of that plan. Since no video or children’s program on the planet is only 15 minutes in length, of course we wind up having to cut Will off mid-story. And he’s at an age where he hates that. Since we succumbed to TV in the first place, we need to go ahead and respect the integrity of a story and his desperate toddler need to see something through to the finish. (He got to where he never chose 15 minutes of Muzzy, continuing with the next segment the next morning – and instead always opted for a short 20-minute Winnie the Pooh video, probably because we tend to let him watch the whole thing.) So now I’m planning to go looking for the shortest videos out there, because I still don’t feel like letting him get sucked in for more than 30 minutes a day. I predicted we’d be doubling the limit soon, and here we are…
The whole article’s worth a read, but these things got me thinking about our own TV/radio time:
Background noise: Guernsey talks about the ill-effects of background television, which some research shows affects the way children play (they're less focused in their play, going from one toy to another rather than spending more time exploring each toy); the way parents interact with their children (this is a no-brainer; it’s easy to forget to engage with your kids when you get sucked into some show you love); and children’s language development (since studies of infants and toddlers show that they have a hard time hearing the words in speech when they have background noise to compete with).
We don’t do much TV in the house (except when Rob’s watching a small dose of sports on the weekends or some nighttime TV after Will’s in bed), but we do listen to some NPR. And it’s interesting to me to wonder about radio and children’s language development. Sometimes I”ll have NPR on while Will’s eating breakfast and he’ll shout out “California! They said California. That’s where Uncle Graham lives.” Or “ocean! They said ocean!” etc. Maybe this as a good exercise in word recognition? Or maybe it’s just a bunch of adult-level interference in Will’s natural thought processes? For Owen’s sake, anyway, I think I’ll start turning the radio off during those times when I’m really not attending to it anyway and it has just become background noise for me as well as for the boys.
The need for completion: Guernsey talks about how toddlers “want to see how a show ends, and they'll become very upset if you try to turn off 'Dora the Explorer' in the middle of the show. They can get that Dora is on a journey to a place, or she's trying to solve a puzzle, and they need to see what happens next.”
Of course this isn’t just a toddler thing; no adult wants to watch only the first half of a sitcom or TV drama. But I was foolish enough to try to do it with Will as a way to give him a tad bit of television. It’s been a month or so since we caved and instituted 15 minutes a day TV viewing for Will. It worked okay for a couple weeks, but I’ve been recognizing more and more the idiocy of that plan. Since no video or children’s program on the planet is only 15 minutes in length, of course we wind up having to cut Will off mid-story. And he’s at an age where he hates that. Since we succumbed to TV in the first place, we need to go ahead and respect the integrity of a story and his desperate toddler need to see something through to the finish. (He got to where he never chose 15 minutes of Muzzy, continuing with the next segment the next morning – and instead always opted for a short 20-minute Winnie the Pooh video, probably because we tend to let him watch the whole thing.) So now I’m planning to go looking for the shortest videos out there, because I still don’t feel like letting him get sucked in for more than 30 minutes a day. I predicted we’d be doubling the limit soon, and here we are…
When to watch: Guernsey recommends having an encapsulated time for television viewing (assuming you’re doing some TV with your kids). Will always likes to get his fix immediately after breakfast and we’ve found that works well. Since that’s the only time he ever watches a show or video we don’t have many battles at other times of the day about wanting to watch more.
Well-made shows?
Guernsey mentions “Blues Clues” as a “really well made” show that helps children “have more flexible thinking.” Since I’ll be prowling at the library for shortest-ever videos, let me know if you have other recommendations of shows that seem well designed for children. And what do you think of repeat viewing of videos vs. watching shows on TV?
Guernsey mentions “Blues Clues” as a “really well made” show that helps children “have more flexible thinking.” Since I’ll be prowling at the library for shortest-ever videos, let me know if you have other recommendations of shows that seem well designed for children. And what do you think of repeat viewing of videos vs. watching shows on TV?
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Big-money formula industry has its sway
Check out this article from Friday’s Washington Post about how the big-money formula industry worked behind the scenes to dramatically alter a Health and Human Services Department ad campaign originally designed to vividly illustrate the increased risks for infants who are not breastfed. Those television ads would have reached mothers less likely to be reading about the benefits of breastfeeding, and the less informative ads that replaced them were predicted by advertising agents to have little impact on the decision to breastfeed . And so far the watered-down ads, which aired from 2003 to 2005, seem to have made little difference. Sad to think that industry big-wigs and lobbyists and their government cronies are willing to bury the truth even when the victims of their subtle dishonesty are our very smallest, most vulnerable children. There are plenty of disturbing details in the article, so take a look…
Friday, August 24, 2007
The spanking debate
I was disheartened to read in today’s Ledger-Enquirer, that corporal punishment is still used in Georgia and Alabama schools. Somehow I was thinking by now it was illegal here. You can read Wednesday’s story about a Harris County boy who was suspended (after his parents opted against a spanking or paddling) for throwing grapes in the cafeteria and other misbehavior, along with today’s story, which spells out policies for various school districts around here (all of which allow limited use of corporal punishment) and includes a chorus of comments from readers expressing approval for paddling in schools.
While I’ll be the first to admit that I’m often lost as to how to best discipline our willful Will, Rob and I have made a very deliberate decision not to hit him. On occasion when Will gets in a resistant mode he will start flailing his arms, and hitting at our legs or arms. We remove him from the scene and then talk about hitting. One of the first things I point out is how it hurt me to be hit and how no matter how frustrated we get, mommy and daddy never hit. We use our words.
I’ll admit that we might be able to scare Will out of hitting in the short term if we wailed on him every time he started to hit. But in the long term we would be teaching him a lesson: It’s okay to use physical force when you don’t like someone’s behavior. It would be a lot more difficult to explain to Will a year from now why it’s not okay to hit little brother Owen when he messes up your railroad track or your block tower. I know Will’s going to work through some aggression as a toddler trapped in that primitive state where you aren’t able to do many things for yourself and yet desperately want to assert your independence. But I want to model nonviolent ways of coping with frustration so that as he matures we can build toward a peaceful house. It may require some creative approaches for venting frustration (I have a friend whose father insisted that his sons could only wrestle, not hit each other, when they were angry. So they wrestled through their younger years, then tired of it and just got along like great friends for the rest of their years in the same house.)
A hitting-free household may sound like a pipe-dream for a mom facing life with two testosterone-filled siblings. We’re not there yet, but I like the challenge and I’m hoping with some deliberate, loving discipline we can make it happen.
Check out this website to find out which states have banned corporal punishment (I counted 29 of them) and for statistics about how frequently it is used in states that permit it.
Here are a couple quotes from this American Academy of Pediatrics article entitled “Guidance for Effective Discipline”:
“Spanking models aggressive behavior as a solution to conflict and has been associated with increased aggression in preschool and school children.”
“Although spanking may result in a reaction of shock by the child and cessation of the undesired behavior, repeated spanking may cause agitated, aggressive behavior in the child that may lead to physical altercation between parent and child.”
“Spanking is not more effective as a long-term strategy than other approaches, and reliance on spanking as a discipline approach makes other discipline strategies less effective to use.”
And for some insight on alternatives to punishment, check out this book by Alfie Kohn: "Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason." (It's influenced my parenting, although we still resort to carrots and sticks some of the time.)
What do you think? Is it ever appropriate to spank or paddle a child – and should school administrators be allowed to use corporal punishment as one among many discipline tools?
While I’ll be the first to admit that I’m often lost as to how to best discipline our willful Will, Rob and I have made a very deliberate decision not to hit him. On occasion when Will gets in a resistant mode he will start flailing his arms, and hitting at our legs or arms. We remove him from the scene and then talk about hitting. One of the first things I point out is how it hurt me to be hit and how no matter how frustrated we get, mommy and daddy never hit. We use our words.
I’ll admit that we might be able to scare Will out of hitting in the short term if we wailed on him every time he started to hit. But in the long term we would be teaching him a lesson: It’s okay to use physical force when you don’t like someone’s behavior. It would be a lot more difficult to explain to Will a year from now why it’s not okay to hit little brother Owen when he messes up your railroad track or your block tower. I know Will’s going to work through some aggression as a toddler trapped in that primitive state where you aren’t able to do many things for yourself and yet desperately want to assert your independence. But I want to model nonviolent ways of coping with frustration so that as he matures we can build toward a peaceful house. It may require some creative approaches for venting frustration (I have a friend whose father insisted that his sons could only wrestle, not hit each other, when they were angry. So they wrestled through their younger years, then tired of it and just got along like great friends for the rest of their years in the same house.)
A hitting-free household may sound like a pipe-dream for a mom facing life with two testosterone-filled siblings. We’re not there yet, but I like the challenge and I’m hoping with some deliberate, loving discipline we can make it happen.
Check out this website to find out which states have banned corporal punishment (I counted 29 of them) and for statistics about how frequently it is used in states that permit it.
Here are a couple quotes from this American Academy of Pediatrics article entitled “Guidance for Effective Discipline”:
“Spanking models aggressive behavior as a solution to conflict and has been associated with increased aggression in preschool and school children.”
“Although spanking may result in a reaction of shock by the child and cessation of the undesired behavior, repeated spanking may cause agitated, aggressive behavior in the child that may lead to physical altercation between parent and child.”
“Spanking is not more effective as a long-term strategy than other approaches, and reliance on spanking as a discipline approach makes other discipline strategies less effective to use.”
And for some insight on alternatives to punishment, check out this book by Alfie Kohn: "Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason." (It's influenced my parenting, although we still resort to carrots and sticks some of the time.)
What do you think? Is it ever appropriate to spank or paddle a child – and should school administrators be allowed to use corporal punishment as one among many discipline tools?
Monday, August 6, 2007
Baby talk: What makes the words boom?
Here’s the news on baby talk: There’s a lot less magic involved in how children master language than you might think. As described in this article, researchers have recognized for quite a while that the word acquisition of the average baby and toddler follows a pattern something like this: Sometime before the first birthday baby produces that first word – “dada” perhaps. A month or so later comes a second word. And then up to age 14 months words pop out here and there. (Remember when you were still able to keep track of your little toddler’s new words in her baby book?) Then there’s an acceleration of words and after your tiny talker is saying about 50 words – BAM, a language explosion hits, sometime around 18 months. (By the way, these are all averages so if you’ve got a stubbornly quiet 2-year-old, don’t worry. You might even have a genius on your hands. Many sources report that Albert Einstein didn’t start talking until 3 and was still speaking hesitantly at age 9. So what’s coming out of the mouth is not necessarily an indicator of what’s inside the noggin.)
Scientists used to hypothesize that there might be some special brain mechanism that triggered the word spurt. Not so, says University of Iowa psychology professor Bob McMurray. He argues that the language boom is just the result of a lot of quiet, under-the-radar work your toddler has been doing to learn word meanings ever since he was a baby. (He’s basing his theory on some fancy computer modeling that seems to help us realize what should have been obvious all along: Kids are learning all the time but not all of that learning is immediately evident to us as observers – and listeners.)
The implication for parents: Talk and read as much as possible with your little ones (no Baby Einstein videos necessary) starting from a very early age. And go ahead and put your adult vocabulary (minus the profanity) to practice with your kids. As McMurray says: “Children are soaking up everything. You might use ‘serendipity’ to a child. It will take that child maybe hundreds of exposures, or thousands, to learn what ‘serendipity’ means. So why not start early?”
Although I assume 3-week-old Owen isn’t really working on word comprehension much at this point, he and I both seem to enjoy our days together more when I talk about what I’m doing. There’s at least a connection through the sound of my voice. And it makes some of the chores of newborn-raising and general housekeeping feel less like monotony to me.
For Will, who has hit the “why?” phase and become an incessant questioner about all details of life, long-winded, happy-to-explain answers are the best medicine. And when he wants it, which is most of the time, we repeat those answers and elaborate on them for as long as he remains curious --or until we’re able to steer him toward yet another topic. I’m learning from him what it means to love learning, all over again.
Any insights on the langauge learning or the general jabbering of your own children? Or stories from your own childhood?
Scientists used to hypothesize that there might be some special brain mechanism that triggered the word spurt. Not so, says University of Iowa psychology professor Bob McMurray. He argues that the language boom is just the result of a lot of quiet, under-the-radar work your toddler has been doing to learn word meanings ever since he was a baby. (He’s basing his theory on some fancy computer modeling that seems to help us realize what should have been obvious all along: Kids are learning all the time but not all of that learning is immediately evident to us as observers – and listeners.)
The implication for parents: Talk and read as much as possible with your little ones (no Baby Einstein videos necessary) starting from a very early age. And go ahead and put your adult vocabulary (minus the profanity) to practice with your kids. As McMurray says: “Children are soaking up everything. You might use ‘serendipity’ to a child. It will take that child maybe hundreds of exposures, or thousands, to learn what ‘serendipity’ means. So why not start early?”
Although I assume 3-week-old Owen isn’t really working on word comprehension much at this point, he and I both seem to enjoy our days together more when I talk about what I’m doing. There’s at least a connection through the sound of my voice. And it makes some of the chores of newborn-raising and general housekeeping feel less like monotony to me.
For Will, who has hit the “why?” phase and become an incessant questioner about all details of life, long-winded, happy-to-explain answers are the best medicine. And when he wants it, which is most of the time, we repeat those answers and elaborate on them for as long as he remains curious --or until we’re able to steer him toward yet another topic. I’m learning from him what it means to love learning, all over again.
Any insights on the langauge learning or the general jabbering of your own children? Or stories from your own childhood?
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