Chapter 13: THE DANCE OF SEPARATION
One of the most critical aspects of a successful relationship between a child and a caregiver is the bond we, as parents, form with the caregiver. The more connected we feel, the more of a sense we have that we're on the same team, pulling together for our child, the more successful that caregiver can be with our child. Here are some keys to forming a strong connection with your child's caregiver:
In their lives together, parents and children experience many leave-takings and many reunions. The bonds of attachment are stretched for moments as a child crawls into the other room, for hours as children skip off to child care, for days as parents leave for a weekend, and finally for months or years as children mature into young adults and move out into the world. In a lifetime of comings and goings, we explore our separateness, discover the depth of our connections, and learn to trust our love. For more dealing with separation, see "Separation Trauma."
Sleep is a core issue in parenting. It is one of the first areas where we grapple with the reality that there are things about our children that we cannot control. As parents, we can set the stage for relaxation, but we cannot force children to sleep. For many of us, this fact comes as a surprising realization. For more on sleep, see "Sleepless Nights."
What is our goal in feeding children? On the most obvious level, it is to see that they are well-nourished. But it's also important for parents to take their job a step further — to help their children build a healthy relationship to their appetites and to food.
Many of us, who have confidence in our children as learners in every other area, feel nervous and unsure when it comes to their use of the toilet. If we are dealing with our first child, we may never have seen a child successfully make the transition from diapers to the toilet, and may wonder how it's ever going to happen. Yet there is no reason that process should be any different from any of the other developmental tasks children master.
Why It's Hard for Children to Say Goodbye: A Developmental Perspective · Why It's Hard for Parents to Say Goodbye · Daily Separations · Strategies for Dealing with Daily Separations · Strategies for Coming Home at the End of the Day · Coming Home: Paula's Story · Longer Separations and Reunions · Things You and Your Caregiver Can Do While You're Away · Things to Be Aware of When You Come Back · Building a Bridge to Child Care · Choosing a Caregiver · Supporting Your Child's Transition to Child Care · Building a Relationship With Your Child's Caregiver · Finding Quality Child Care Programs · Changing Child Care · The Dance of Separation ·
Building a Relationship With Your Child's Caregiver
. Communicate. Good two-way communication is essential to a positive parent-caregiver relationship. Both of you should feel free to bring up concerns, problems or issues, as well as joys and accomplishments. Each of you should feel that your perspective is being understood and valued. Having a chance to talk to your child's caregiver at the beginning and end of each day is extremely beneficial. For those situations in which this is not possible, communication can happen through notes or regular check-ins by phone. Individual "parent conferences," time set aside for parents and caregivers to talk without other distractions or responsibilities, also offer important opportunities for communication. These should happen at least twice a year.
. Take care of your caregiver. One obvious way to take care of your caregiver is by paying as much as you can afford, but money alone is not enough to compensate caregivers for what they provide to our families. Acknowledging and appreciating your caregiver's work, caring about her life, and valuing her point of view are important elements in building a mutually respectful relationship.
. Let them love the one they're with. Children need to know that we feel good about the people we're leaving them with: "This is someone my family has embraced. This is someone they say can be trusted." Parents need to let children know that it's okay for them to bond with their caregivers, to depend on them, enjoy them, and ultimately, to love them. Ironically, part of establishing a successful child care arrangement is getting out of the way.
Yet some parents find it extremely difficult to let their child love someone else. They feel threatened when their child cares deeply for someone outside of the family, as if that love might in some way diminish their own relationship with their child. But teaching children that the world is full of safe, loving people, that there are safe harbors on many shores, is an important place of opening up the world for them.
The Dance of Separation
Chapter 14: HELPING CHIDREN SLEEP
Sleep: An Introduction · Sleep: A Developmental Overview · Babies and Sleep · Toddlers and Sleep · Preschoolers and Sleep · The Role of Temperament in Children's Sleep · Sleep in Families: Issues for Parents · Concerns of Parents of Babies and Toddlers · Issues for Parents of Older Toddlers and Preschoolers · In The Middle of the Night: Laura's Story · What Families Have Done: Sleeping Arrangements · Children Learn Independence In Many Ways · Figuring Out What Works In Your Family · When You Want to Make a Change · Babies and Sleep: What Parents Can Do · Toddlers and Preschoolers:When You Want to Move Children Toward Independent Sleep · Special Stories at Bedtime · Recommended Bedtime Books · Helping Children Who Are Having Nightmares · Eventually, We All Find Sleep ·
Sleep: An Introduction
There's a range of roles that parents play in getting their children to sleep -- on one hand, rocking children, singing to children, cuddling or nursing them until they fall asleep, and on the other, establishing a goodnight ritual and then leaving children to find sleep themselves. In most families, there's a gradual shift between parents easing children into sleep and children learning to do it on their own, some time during a child's first five years of life. When that transition occurs and where parents are on the continuum of participation has a lot to do with parent's needs and expectations, their availability, the pressures they're under, their particular child, their perspective on children's independence, and the eventual goals they're working toward.
Sorting out these things is not an easy task, especially in the middle of the night when your thinking may be dulled by a lack of sleep. Even in the light of day, figuring out solutions to sleep problems is not always a clear-cut proposition. Parents don't always agree and families' needs vary. Finding comfortable sleep routines and determining the right level of adult participation in children's sleep is an ever-changing process.
What is important for your family's success is that you do what is comfortable for you and what works for your children, not that you use one particular system or another. In some families, getting children to sleep through the night on their own holds a very high priority. Other parents enjoy an extended nighttime ritual with their child, as well as check-ins in the middle of the night. This works as long as both parents and children feel comfortable with the system and are getting the rest they need.
However, even if your family comes up with a sleep solution that works for you, one system probably won't last through your child's whole childhood. What parents are willing to do when their child is three months old, they may feel less willing to do when the child is one or two years old. As the balance of needs shifts in the family, new solutions need to be found.
Families find themselves looking again and again at where children sleep, when they sleep, how they get to sleep, and what to do when children wake up. When your child is sick, has nightmares, when you travel, or when a new sibling is born, sleep patterns change, and you will be faced with these questions anew.
For more on having a family bed, click here.
Chapter 15: CHILDREN AND EATING: BUILDING A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP TO FOOD
In Our Family, We Always... · You Provide the Food, Your Child Decides What to Eat · Trusting Children's Food Choices: Issues for Parents · "But He Eats More Than A Truck Driver" · Infants, Young Babies and Food: A Developmental Overview · Foods For Your Baby's First Year · Infants and Young Babies: Developing a Healthy Relationship to Food · The Importance of Self-Feeding · Infants and Young Babies: Developing a Healthy Relationship to Food · The Evolution of Self-Feeding · Weaning From the Breast or Bottle · Weaning Strategies · The Role of Temperament and Metabolism in Children's Eating · Toddlers, Preschoolers and Food: A Developmental Overview · Toddlers and Preschoolers: Encouraging a Healthy Relationship to Food · The Trap of Special Meals · What About Sweets? · Helping Children Develop a Healthy Relationship to Sweets · Cooking With Children · Our Daily Bread ·
You Provide the Food, Your Child Decides What to Eat
What does this mean? Ideally, having a healthy relationship to food means being able to recognize your hunger, identify what you need to eat, enjoy your food, and stop eating when you've had enough.
Ellyn Satter, a contemporary nutritionist who's worked extensively with children with eating disorders, has defined the roles parents and children should play in ensuring that children eat well. In her book, Child of Mine: Feeding With Love and Good Sense, she outlines a "division of responsibility in feeding." She writes, "To be successful in feeding your child, you have to be able to share responsibility with him: You, the parent, are responsible for what he is offered to eat. But he is responsible for how much of it he eats."
More specifically, she writes, parents are responsible for "selecting and buying food, making and presenting meals, regulating the timing of meals and snacks, presenting foods in a form the child can handle, allowing eating methods a child can master, making family mealtimes pleasant, helping the child participate in family meals, helping the child focus on his eating, and maintaining standards of behavior at the table." They are not, however, responsible for "how much a child eats, whether he eats or how his body turns out."
Chapter 16: FROM TOILET TRAINING TO TOILET LEARNING
An Introduction · Readiness for Toilet Learning: A Developmental Overview · Toilet Learning Begins With Diapering · The Three Areas of Readiness · Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back · Children's Toilet Learning: Issues for Parents · Voices From the Past, Pressures In the Present · Big Boy Underwear? · What Is The Adult Role In Toilet Learning? · Ready: Building a Foundation · Set: When Children Start Using the Potty · Go: Supporting Independent Toileting · Bedwetting and Nighttime Dryness · Foibles of Newly Independent Toileters · Recommended Books About Poop · Toileting As a Metaphor for Learning ·
Toilet Learning: An Introduction
Many parents have erroneously been taught that it's their job to "toilet train" children; that they're are the ones who should be in charge of this important transition in children's lives. However, since most children give up their diapers during their toddler years -- a time when they are programmed to balk at our ideas -- it can be helpful, both for us and for our children, if we shift our thinking from "toilet training" in which children are passive participants to "toilet learning," in which children are the ones taking the lead.
Being a facilitator, rather than a "trainer," means setting the stage for the learning to happen and providing the necessary information and resources, but leaving the timing and rhythm up to the child. This approach provides our children with needed autonomy and independence, eliminates unnecessary toileting battles, and clears the way for their eventual mastery.
Excerpted from Becoming the Parent You Want to Be: A Sourcebook of Strategies for the First Five Years by Laura Davis and Janis Keyser.
Copyright © 1997 by Laura Davis and Janis Keyser. Excerpted by permission of Broadway Books, a division of the Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.