Parenting & New Baby Advice Blog

Archive for February, 2008

Of particular importance, but sometimes overlooked, is talking to your children about how they feel. By the age of three, children have a wide range of emotions available to them: they feel afraid, mad, sad, and glad. While children may not have exactly the same meanings for these feelings as adults do, children can learn to label and identify “good” and “bad” feelings. Don’t underestimate their capacity for understanding emotions and feelings.

Parents can help their children develop a language for expressing and dealing with feelings by giving the feelings names. While doing so, parents have a responsibility to manage their own feelings to help children deal with theirs. Sometimes our own childhood experiences creep into how we handle emotions with our children. For all of us, there are some feelings that give us trouble. For instance, difficulties with such feelings as anger and aggression may spill into our parenting. If we cannot tolerate angry feelings, we might try to prevent our children from displaying anger by saying “That’s no reason to be angry!” when in fact a child may have good reason to be angry. Through the use of play, you can provide children with some emotional avenues for anger, fear, and anxiety.

A Self-Concept Emerges

Between their second and third birthdays most children become fairly competent language users. They readily use the personal pronouns “I,” “me,” and “mine,” particularly to defend ownership of their toys and possessions. They have great difficulty letting anyone else play with something that is theirs.

Around this time, your toddler can refer to himself by his own name. Sometimes, when playing with dolls or superheroes, your toddler may reenact earlier events. Different roles may even be assigned to the dolls. If you sit down and play directly with your toddler, you can get a glimpse of the inner workings of his mind. This glimpse may be both delightful and unnerving, since you may observe firsthand how your child views your parenting style. Many parents have heard their sweet little girl harshly send her favorite doll to her room because she didn’t “behave.”

By three years of age, your child has a good sense of “me” and “you” and of “self’ versus “non-self.” With better cognitive capabilities and a wider repertoire of experiences, the three year old has internalized memories of the significant people in his life-his parents. As their sense of self grows, children’s personalities become more representative of what they will be like as they grow older. Preferences and dislikes are readily displayed in how they react with the world: for example, some children already prefer very physical activities, while others choose quiet, sedentary play.

By three years of age, your child is likely to have a number of relationships with people other than his parents. He may have a favorite babysitter, a good friend or just a baby blanket. He will prefer to play with children his own age rather than to play with you, though he still enjoys and needs you. Long periods of time can be spent in play without any fighting and with some sharing of toys. As your child’s world expands- for example, when he goes to a daycare center or nursery school- the influences on your child’s self-esteem will also include new people’s attitudes toward him.

As parents it’s essential to provide him with the security he needs so he can go out and explore his surroundings. While your child may be quite ready to go off to nursery school, once in a while he may slip back to his less-sure former self and not want to leave your side. These are considered to be normal separation reactions. His going to nursery school is a big emotional step for both of you. Here is an example of a three year old boy we knew.

It was the first week of nursery school. Everyday the boy’s mother walked him to the classroom, gave him a hug and a kiss, and said goodbye. Each time the boy cried uncontrollably, refusing to take his jacket off for the whole day. Knowingly, the teachers respected the child’s need to hold onto his jacket. For this child, removing his jacket meant that he was going to stay at this place without his mother. In a way, he was unsure he was ready for all this independence. Both mother and child benefited from the teacher’s warm assurance that everything would be all right. Gradually, the teachers enticed the child into the fun the others were having. Some nursery schools are quite aware of children’s difficulties with separation and build this into their programs by slowly introducing children into the classroom. For some children, nursery school is the first time to be on their own. It is, on the one hand, an obvious milestone, but on the other hand, it is just one of many steps that take your baby gradually toward independence.

Imagination is especially wonderful and exciting to watch develop in your child. Through the windows of your child’s play and the talking he does to himself, you can actually follow your child, the “movie director,” casting a set of characters into their various roles. Fantasy develops along with your child’s more sophisticated knowledge of the world, although he cannot yet differentiate fantasy from reality.

Some children have such great imaginations that they tell the most unbelievable stories - and sometimes get in trouble for doing so. And no, we're not talking about the stories they'd get from their baby board books.

One child we know had an imaginary friend; whenever he did something really bad that he didn’t want to catch the blame for, his imaginary friend was there to cover for him. Usually, the presence of an imaginary friend is just a sign of a healthy, imaginative child. But imaginary friends can become too powerful; they can interfere with your child’s ability to accept responsibility, can be present to the exclusion of other friends, and can do all your child’s talking. Luckily, this doesn’t happen very often. If you are concerned about your child’s imaginary companion, you may want to consult with a professional.

By three, your child has internal pictures of the people in his world. The television shows he watches, and daytime events. The world is no longer viewed as a place as filled with magical powers: cause and effect relationships are becoming explainable to him. Earlier, his parents were omnipotent; now there are some chinks in their armor. Before your child was able to connect cause and effect relationships, he thought things happened because of the things he did. Imagine how powerful and scared a two year old might feel if he thought he caused lightening to appear. This kind of thinking takes years to change into the logical form it will acquire in adulthood.

Myths about giftedness permeate our culture. The prevalence of these myths can result in a variety of problems for you as the parent of a gifted child and for your child. Among the most common myths are the following;

1. "Every child is gifted"
2. "Gifted children are easy to raise"
3. "Gifted children are nerds and geeks"
4. "Gifted children are strangely manipulative and grow up to be white-collar criminals"
5. "Gifted children are so intensely emotional that they cannot exist in the real world. Often they commit suicide because they feel so tortured"

Society flourishes and moves forward because of individuals who have a vision, genius, or talent that enhances or improves our understanding of ourselves and of the world. To create a context where this can happen, it is imperative that talent, creativity, and genius be discovered and nurtured in our children. Schooling and the understanding of child development are the keys to developing gifted potential. Unfortunately, gifted education is neglected. The development of gifted children puzzles and concerns parents, educators, psychologists, and other mental health professionals.

General confusion about which children are really gifted stems from both the prevalent myths and the fact that there is no working definition of giftedness. Clearly, and unequivocally, giftedness is today misunderstood misused as a psychological educational construct by parents and educators.

A General Definition of Giftedness

Since psychology became recognized as a science in the 1850's, psychologists have tried to demonstrate the existence of giftedness as a psychological phenomenon. Researchers have used twin studies for more than 150 years to prove that giftedness not only exists, but that intellectual potential is genetically determined. Although there are flaws in this genetic research, there are nonetheless conclusive indications that intellectual potential has roots in the child's genetic endowment. Culture, environment, and parenting, contribute significantly to the giftedness laid down in the child's genetic makeup.

You cannot just hand a child a book basket and expect them to thrive on their own. They need to be taught, coached, and nurtured.

Just as researchers disagree about what makes a child gifted, so do parents and educators. When I talk to persuasive and positive parents, I can totally understand why some have difficulty getting a grip on what is distinctive about a gifted child.

Only the top 2 percent of children on the bell curve qualify as gifted, while only 1 in 100 is considered highly gifted. But another part of me, the "grandmom about town," knows that her words have a ring of truth if you hear them through the perspective of positive or naïve parents.

Why do most parents want to believe their child or children are gifted? This leap of faith is natural, healthy, and well meaning. Parents should believe in their children. From a psychological perspective, our children represent our hopes and dreams. By believing in your child, in essence, you believe in yourself and your capacity to create and nurture. Effective parents will at different times, see their son or daughter as talented, capable, brilliant, charming, and able to accomplish he or she wants to do.

Fighting usually centers on wanting to have a baby teddy bear that someone else has. Aggression is a normal part of growing up and may be related to our survival instincts. Most children are fairly aggressive when trying to defend their belongings and themselves.

There are no easy answers for how to handle excessive aggression. However, it certainly doesn’t make sense to the child or to the parent to handle aggression with aggression. Imagine this scenario: Two sisters are fighting over a toy. One parent comes in and yells at them to stop fighting, and hits one of them because the child won’t give the toy back. What does this teach the children? There’s quite a mixed message here-it’s all right to fight and to hit, but only if you are bigger and more powerful than your adversary.

Parental handling does influence how aggressive a child will be. Children in families where physical violence, such as hitting or spanking, is used as punishment generally turn out to be more aggressive than other children. The least aggressive children come from families that are non-punitive, non-permissive, and non-rejecting. The parents in such families are consistent in their handling of aggression. They don’t use physical punishment or unnecessarily harsh language. They set firm and clear limits as to what is expected of their children, and they are accepting of their children.

Consistency is important in whatever intervention techniques you use in dealing with your child’s aggression. A useful technique is to remove the child from the fight and isolate her for a few minutes. Quick handling of the situation, before the fighting gets out of hand is helpful. Once your two year old can talk, asking her to talk about how she feels or what she wants will help her learn to express herself verbally instead of physically.

Sometimes providing your child with an outlet foe her pent-up energy helps reduce the level of her aggression. Particularly in wintertime, just as with adults, active physical exercise will help release the tension and reduce the level of stress. Imaginative play also helps to work through aggressive tendencies. The age old fairy tales can be used to work through some anxieties. Parents can capitalize on the child’s imagination to help work out conflicts.