Chapter 17: LEARNING ABOUT BODIES
Children Are Naturally Curious About Their Bodies: A Developmental View · Physical Play and Roughhousing With Children · Helping Children Feel Comfortable and Confident In Their Bodies · Children's Sexual Explorations: A Developmental View · The Continuum of Curiosity · Children's Sexual Explorations: Issues for Parents · Responding When Kids Touch Their Genitals · Responding When Kids Touch Their Genitals · How Can I Know If It's Really Okay? · "But They're Touching Each Other: Responding to Mutual Sex Play" · "I Never Ran Up the Stairs So Fast": Faye's Story · Guidelines for Responding to Mutual Sex Play
Talking to Children About Where Babies Come From
Many children under five, particularly those whose families add younger siblings, have questions about how babies are made and born. Here are some ideas for simple and gradual explanations. As you take cues from your child, you will develop other appropriate ways to respond as well.
As parents of young children, we all encounter frustrating, exasperating, difficult behavior. Children bite, refuse to get dressed, run away from us, yell "no" at everything we suggest, throw food, dart into the street, push other children down, scream at the top of their voices, refuse to go to bed, whine, and delight in using profanities, just to name a few.
Many people automatically associate discipline with punishment. This approach to discipline is tied to an underlying (though often unexplored) assumption that children won't learn unless "they're made to," that they won't cooperate unless they are threatened with unpleasant consequences, and that fear of punishment is an effective and useful modifier of behavior.
Just about the same time children start experimenting with lying, they often try taking things that aren't theirs. For children under five, stealing comes from many of the same healthy impulses as lying.
If your child asks, "How did the baby start growing?' or "How do you get a baby?" You answer could be: "A woman has something special in her body called ovum and a man has something special in his body called sperm. When you put ovum and sperm together a baby starts growing." or "A man puts some sperm in a woman's body and if that sperm finds her ovum, then a baby starts growing." Amazingly, many children won't ask more at this point. Others will. "How does he give it to her?" At at that point, you could say, "He uses his penis to give it to her in her vagina," or "A man and a woman have a special way to get together which helps the sperm go into her body. They get close and hug and when he puts his penis in her vagina, the sperm comes out."
When your child asks, "How does the baby get out?" you could say, "From a special opening between the mother's legs," or "Through the mother's vagina," or "The mother pushes and pushes. Then her vagina slowly opens so the baby can come out," or "After the baby is done growing inside the mother, she gets a special signal called labor. During labor she pushes the baby out of her special opening."
Families in which conception has happened differently can come up with equally simple, developmentally-relevant explanations. Adoptive parents, parents who've used in vitro fertilization or surrogacy, and parents who've used donor insemination will be called upon to respond to their child's question, "Where did I come from?" with their own personalized conception and birth stories.
Chapter 18: UNDERSTANDING DIFFICULT BEHAVIOR
Introduction · Reasons for Difficult Behavior · Developmental Reasons · Got it, Lost it · Responding to Developmentally-Driven Behavior · Unmet Emotional Needs · Lousy Local Conditions · Responding to Lousy Local Conditions · Hasn't Been Taught Yet · So Which One Is It? · A Pair of Paradoxes · Dealing With Difficult Behavior: Issues for Parents ·
Understanding Difficult Behavior: An Introduction
Children's difficult behavior can provide us with important information. It can give us clues about how our children are thinking, what their questions are, and what's hard for them. In figuring out the causes of children's misbehavior, we gain a deeper understanding of them as people.
If our primary goal with children is to help them grow, rather than just to "stop the difficult behavior," it becomes important to address the causes of their behavior as well as its manifestation. When we take the time to explore the reasons, we're more apt to reduce our own sense of anger, frustration, and victimization and better able to respond to our children effectively.
Chapter 19: MOVING BEYOND PUNISHMENT
An Introduction · The Problem With Spanking · To Yell or Not to Yell? · Finding New Ways to Express Your Frustration · What About Time-Outs? · When Are Time-Outs Most Effective? · Time-Out Guidelines · Creating Discipline Together · Twelve Strategies for Cooperative Limit Setting · Honoring the Impulse · What Am I Interfering With?: Leon's Story · Active Listening · Sportscasting · Facilitation · Using "I" Messages · Using Your Voice As A Teaching Tool · Positive Limit Setting · Physical Limit Setting : When You Need to Restrain a Child · Giving A Choice · Giving Information · Natural Consequences · Moving From Enforcer to Ally · Redirection · Inviting Children's Initiative · Setting the Stage for Future Success · Developing a Disciplinary Strategy That Works For You ·
Moving Beyond Punishment: An Introduction
We make different assumptions about children. We see them as highly motivated learners, who despite their needs for testing and autonomy, are eagerly taking in information about how the world responds to their actions. We believe that children can do this critical learning more effectively if they aren't feeling attacked, belittled, manipulated or scared.
The goal of discipline, as we present it here, is for children to learn how to act in situations because they know how to think about them. When children have been helped to make decisions based on empathy, understanding and their own critical thinking skills, rather than on just what the "rule" says, they have a skill they can use in a multitude of different situations and carry with them for the rest of their lives.
Chapter 20: PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: WHEN CHILDREN TEST LIMITS
From One to Five: Why Are Children Always Testing? · Is This An Irritating Noise to You? · Testing As A Way to Show Us They've Changed · Testing As A Way to Explore Safety · Why Do Kids Always Seem to Test the Most When We're Having a Bad Day? · Responding to a Child Who Is Testing · Hair Pulling · Responding to Hair Pulling · Children and Defiance: Why Are They So Demanding and Why Do They Always Say No? · Coping With the No's · "But I Want it NOW!" · The Five Power Words Babies and Toddlers Love The Most · Working With Children Who Bite · Responding to Children Who Bite · Biting: Facilitating Resolution Between Children · When Children Love to Climb · Spitting · Age-Appropriate Responses to Spitting · Whining and Nagging · When Children Whine: What Parents Can Do · Making Successful Transitions · When Children Ignore You · What You Can Do When You're Being Ignored · Swearing: When Children Love to Say the Words We Hate to Hear · Responding to Swearing · Lying and Stealing · Stealing · Responding to Children When They Lie and Steal · Putting It All Together ·
Stealing
Young children are beginning to figure out the systems people use to acquire goods. They often become fascinated with money, which seems magical to them. Being unsophisticated about numbers and quantity, young children are often just as excited about a quarter as they are about a dollar. Being unknowledgeable about the ins and outs of economics, exactly how people get money seems fairly arbitrary to them. They think that adults can get money whenever they want to: "My mom just goes to the cash machine at the bank and gets her money there!" "My grandma just shows the people this little card, draws her name on a piece of paper and she can have all the toys she wants."
Everywhere children look, people are putting things into shopping carts and taking them home. Kids would also like to collect things and take them home, yet they get turned down for 90% of what they ask for, even on a good day.
Children who watch TV are also targets of multi-million dollar advertising campaigns. Bo explains: "My son asks for stuff he's seen on TV and he doesn't even know what it really is, but when he sees it on TV, he wants it. I must say 'no' to him two hundred times a day!"
We live in a consumer-driven society. Given children's interest in acquiring new things, the fact that they are surrounded with people who seem to be able to get what they want, and their inability to understand the more complicated aspects of economics, it makes sense that children would try to figure out a creative system to get what they want on their own.
Karyn remembers the lengths to which Bryan once went to get something he desperately wanted: "When Bryan was five years old, he really wanted he-man action figures. Money was really tight and Bryan rarely got to buy toys. One day he came to me holding a ten dollar bill. He said he'd found it in the street. I said, 'Oh, someone must have dropped it when they opened their car door.' I thought about asking the neighbors if they'd lost a ten, but then I just thought, 'He just got lucky.' So I told him, 'Gee, you were really lucky. I guess the money's yours. What do you want to do with it?' Well, we drove right down to the toy store and Bryan bought an action figure.
"By golly, the next day, he found twenty dollars in the mailbox! It was in an envelope with his first name written on it in childlike letters. There was no address and no stamp. Bryan told me his friend had sent it to him and asked if we could go to the toy store. It was obvious what he had done. Also, I was sure of every cent I had in those days, so I was positive he'd taken it from my wallet. Then I started thinking about the first ten. It had never occurred to me that he could have taken it. I was dumbfounded."
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.