Strange Machines

Another case for unschooling and attachment parenting: The attachment you have with your child will determine their future ability to have and sustain healthy and happy relationships.

So forget about the reading and throw away the TV. Have some one on one time, cuddle time, or eye to eye time with baby instead. Show your baby he or she matters.

From Psychology Today (bold emphases mine, bold and italics from the original article):

First and foremost: The fundamental task of early childhood isn’t learning to read, or to “get ahead” for school, or to impress the neighbors, or to give the folks something to brag about. Encouraging children to surge ahead beyond their real developmental needs leaves them with some really sludgy clean-up to grapple with later on.

What kids need from the get-go is a parent who “gets” them, who pays attention to what’s going on inside them, and who responds to them in a way that’s actually related to what the kid is feeling.

The research on attachment shows that there are a number of benefits which last a lifetime, including but not limited to at least the following dozen:

1. The ability to sustain attention
2. Better management of physical reactions to emotions – leading to improved immunity and fewer stress-related illnesses
3. Less anxiety
4. Better relationships with childhood peers, and healthier relationships as adults
5. Fewer behavioral problems
6. Increased capacity for empathy
7. Greater ability to regulate mood (for example, calming down from excitement, or not getting caught up in frustration)
8. Enhanced skills in communicating emotions in healthy ways
9. Greater confidence and self-esteem (and it isn’t just based on performance and grades, but rather a sense of abiding and healthy self-worth)
10. Better able to generate alternative solutions to interpersonal conflict
11. Enhanced insight into themselves, and others
12. Better modulation of fear, allowing for a willingness to explore and take on growthful challenges

“Well,” a parent (or a video marketer) might say, “letting a baby or a toddler watch an educational video to help them read earlier won’t interfere with healthy attachment.”

Actually, it can. As a psychologist/neuropsychologist who has been practicing psychotherapy and conducting cognitive evaluations for nearly twenty years, as well as having researched the relationship between brain and behavior in both infants and adults — I believe that using television to “teach” young children is a big mistake, with significant costs down the road.

(I’ll say here that reading with your child is a solid, helpful, wonderful thing to do. Explicitly teaching them to read, especially by video, is what I’m grousing about here.)

I’d love it if parents who feel they’re giving their child a “gift” with an early reading DVD would consider the following questions:

• What’s the message when (by offering your child a mesmerizing “educational” DVD, and also showing them your pleasure at their achievements) you emphasize the value of learning to read extra early, over time spent with siblings, parents, or friends?

• What might your child be learning from developing the habit of spending time in front of a “worthwhile” or “engaging” video, rather than with someone who loves him or her?

• What are you telling your child when you’re putting them in front of the TV instead of showing them that you value interacting with them and want to be with them?

• How does it help a child to see a screen as their teacher, rather than a real person — what do they do when they have a problem they need to solve, and they don’t have the early, repeated experiences of asking an adult to help them?

• What are you saying to your child about the value of learning if you can’t spend the time yourself to do it with them? (In the commercial for Your Baby Can Read, the announcer asks one thrilled parent of three early readers, “And did you have to do anything?” The mother replies with joy, “I didn’t have to do a thing!”)

And another thing: Early reading doesn’t do much for your child’s success in school, and there’s evidence that it may even be detrimental.

Let’s take a look at a few points in that regard – and note that this list is only a few of many reasons why early reading is a lousy deal for your child.

• Louise Bates Ames, PhD, a superstar in child development and the director of research at the world-renowned Gesell Institute of Child Development, stated that “a delay in reading instruction would be a preventative measure in avoiding nearly all reading failure.” Leapfrogging necessary cognitive developmental skills — and asking a young brain to do tasks for which it isn’t truly ready — is asking for trouble with learning.

• The brains of young children aren’t yet developed enough to read without it costing them in the organization and “wiring” of their brain. The areas involved in language and reading aren’t fully online — and aren’t connected — until age seven or eight. If we’re teaching children to do tasks which their brains are not yet developed to do via the “normal” (and most efficient) pathways, the brain will stumble upon other, less efficient ways to accomplish the tasks — which lays down wiring in some funky ways — and can lead to later learning disabilities, including visual-processing deficits.

• The description of brain development on which the “Your Baby Can Read” program rests its questionable claims is remarkably flawed, confusing language acquisition with reading. They state: “A baby’s brain thrives on stimulation and develops at a phenomenal pace…nearly 90% during the first five years of life! The best and easiest time to learn a language is during the infant and toddler years, when the brain is creating thousands of synapses every second — allowing a child to learn both the written word and spoken word simultaneously, and with much more ease….” There is a huge and unsupported leap here from language acquisition – which is definitely an important developmental task, necessary for connecting to one’s outer world – and reading, which is a very different neurological and cognitive task, and one which is not developmentally appropriate for a baby or toddler’s brain.

• Does early training really get you anywhere? There is a classic study of twins which was done by another pioneer in child development, Arnold Gesell, PhD, MD. He studied a pair of toddler twins, who were not yet able to climb stairs. For the study, one of the twins was given daily practice and encouragement to climb stairs, and the other twin had no stairs to practice on. After six weeks of practice, the “trained” twin could climb the stairs, and the “untrained” twin could not. However, within one week of being given the opportunity to climb stairs, the untrained twin completely caught up with the trained twin’s stair-climbing ability.

• The whole idea that learning to read early gives children — or our educational system, or our economy — an “advantage” is not based on empirical evidence. If you look at the US and Britain, you see the trends toward earlier reading and increasingly less successful educational systems. On the other hand, the majority of children in Finland begin instruction in reading at age seven – two years later than here in the US (and even later than the folks at “Your Baby Can Read” would have you start). The outcome? Finnish students not only catch up to their earlier-starting counterparts, but they surpass the United States, other European countries, and Asian countries as well, with top overall scores in the world in reading, science, and math. Oh, and the Finnish do attend preschool, but it isn’t “academic” in nature — it emphasizes social development and exploration.

I’ve always been lazy about the teaching. I love reading books with the kids but I don’t force them to remember the words. They will learn on their own. I did.

When I was 7 (the proper developmental age for reading), I suddenly picked up a book and began to read. Within months I devoured all of Enid Blyton’s books and then moved to Carolyn Keene. I never stopped.

I believe kids will learn in their own time, as unschooling parents do. Bear potty trained himself on his own time, and he is learning to count, in his own time. He rarely nurses in public anymore and some days never even nurses at all till bedtime.

It is tempting (and I do too for some quiet) to let Bear watch a video on the iPod (since we have no TV). This article reminds me about the message I am giving him. Not a good one. I need to reframe my thoughts and yes, I need my downtime, but perhaps there is something we can do together that we both love, like look at dinosaur books.

(Just had an idea to sit with him and print out his fave dinosaur pictures, then cut and paste them into a notebook that we can read together. Yay activity!)

Most importantly, I want my children to love learning. They can’t do it if we keep shoving learning down their throats, years before the schools start.

I remember losing my love for learning when I entered school. But thankfully, my first 5 years at home gave me a strong foundation of that love and after I finally finished school, I began teaching myself again: to fix things, to write code, to sew.

That is the gift I want to give my children.

The years pass too quickly. I must remember to cherish every moment.

I must confess first. I was a TV addict.

After work, dear hubby and I would cuddle up in from of ole Faithful and watch our fave programs like CSI and munch on junk food. I could not live without TV.

Fast forward to year 2006 and Bear was born. I read that the cost of watching TV was the opportunity lost spent on other more creative and productive things like reading, playing, or talking to Mom. According to many peer-reviewed studies, kids who watch TV have less vocabulary than kids who don’t, and the latter are more sociable.

I was sold. I swore my kid would never watch television. Ever. And I had to set an example. The TV became a glorified plant holder and took up half the space of the living room. Surprisingly I found life without TV pretty alright, since we were busy with the kids and really have no more free time. I do fantasize about the days when the kids are off to college and I can finally turn on my 35″ TV and watch all the dramas I missed in the last 18 years.

As for the old clunker, we gave it away to an elderly neighbour who was thrilled to have it. She was retired and watching TV every day on a tiny 20″. We figured that by the time the kids were old enough to watch TV, our CRT would have decomposed and we could get a brand new plasma t.v. for $200. And let’s make it a Samsung plasma tv or a Panasonic plasma tv.

And is there credence to all the reports about increased sociability and higher vocabulary? According to people who have met Bear, he is very sociable with people of all ages and speaks non-stop like a Duracell bunny.

I don’t know about other children, but after 3.5 years of no TV, Bear isn’t fond of watching it and he would prefer to play or read than watch TV. He went through a brief phase of TV phobia, probably from something he saw on it at Grandma’s house. But he sat through The Lion King (his cousin was watching at Grandma’s) just last week (which from a child’s eyes, seems awfully negative about brotherhood and rather pro-revenge and violence). His first actually.

According to the scientifically-based Nurtureshock, kids pick up extracts from a story, so even if a story with conflict that gets resolved at the end, the child may simply pick up the conflict and not the resolution.

We can’t shelter our children from the media – heck I want my TV back one day – but the first few years are crucial to protect them from the effects of the media, much of which we as adults are already immune to or unaffected by. But children are vulnerable and judging from our viewing of the “children’s movie” The Lion King, I won’t be letting Bear watch any more till he is much older.

A fascinating piece, peer-researched on how we love and discipline and how it affects our children. What most parents do actually is conditional parenting, whether or not we realise it:

Conditional parenting isn’t limited to old-school authoritarians. Some people who wouldn’t dream of spanking choose instead to discipline their young children by forcibly isolating them, a tactic we prefer to call “time out.” Conversely, “positive reinforcement” teaches children that they are loved, and lovable, only when they do whatever we decide is a “good job.”

This raises the intriguing possibility that the problem with praise isn’t that it is done the wrong way — or handed out too easily, as social conservatives insist. Rather, it might be just another method of control, analogous to punishment. The primary message of all types of conditional parenting is that children must earn a parent’s love. A steady diet of that, Rogers warned, and children might eventually need a therapist to provide the unconditional acceptance they didn’t get when it counted.

What can we do then? The take away from the article is:

In practice, according to an impressive collection of data by Dr. Deci and others, unconditional acceptance by parents as well as teachers should be accompanied by “autonomy support”: explaining reasons for requests, maximizing opportunities for the child to participate in making decisions, being encouraging without manipulating, and actively imagining how things look from the child’s point of view.

The last of these features is important with respect to unconditional parenting itself. Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children — whether they feel just as loved when they mess up or fall short.

(Source: When a Parent’s ‘I Love You’ Means ‘Do as I Say’ by Alfie Kohn in the NY Times)

In a few days, my sweet son will be 2. Looking back, he’s achieved so much.

Today he mastered 3-puzzle jigsaws. At the last United Square toy fair, I bought him a wooden box full of lovely animal jigsaws. Only today did he bring it out to play and in a blink, he mastered them all.

His vocabulary is increasing exponentially. Today he learnt the phrase “hold the bar” (while coming down stairs). He can easily say complete sentences by himself, but even with new phrases, I don’t need to say 2-3 words at a time. He can copy half sentences after hearing them once.

It has been frequently commented that he is thin. Let’s just say it is genetic and from my side of the family. With double dominant thin genes from his maternal grandparents, it is a slam dunk. He grows proportionally. Today his Dryper XL seems to be getting tighter so I know he is growing. Just a few months ago he was wearing L!

He is 90th percentile for his age group in terms of height at 88-90cm. At 12kg he is 50th percentile for his weight.

He eats all day and I feed him healthy organic fruit and vegetables. He loves blueberries and can say hello to the nice Aunty Nancy at Why Yogurt over in Great World City there, tell her his favourite 3 berries, and remind me that the blue and pink cups that used to be displayed in the glass case are gone.

He loves playing with his cars, puzzles, reading his books, and most sweetly, is most fond of the stuffed cotton rabbit and cat I made him. He hugs them and tells everyone, “Mama made”.

At the toy store, he is happy to just browse and not buy, a habit formed from early days of “looking trips” and the very rare “buying trip”. He is happy with the toys he has at home. Even for his birthday, he just wants another of his favourite car. I was so proud.

He is loving and affectionate, showing kisses and hugs to his grandma, grandpa, mom, and dad. He is very sociable, and readily waves hello and goodbye to people we meet, lending a smile to those he favours.

He greets me every morning with a grin, saying “Good Morning!” and then “Wake up, Mama!” What a fabulous way to wake up.

It has been a happy, sleepy, and wonderful 2 years with this joyful, sweet, delightful little boy. I am glad I stuck by the tenets of attachment parenting, pretty much the only parenting method supported by science and 30 years of peer-reviewed research.

The breastfeeding, co-sleeping (no cry-it-out), babywearing (no pram; sling or carrier only), and focus on positivity (no “you can’t do that”) and encouragement has been a breeze compared to others who complained about what a hassle it is to go out with so much to carry, disobedient kids. It is instant calm when Bear is nursing and his close bond to me has allowed him the security to be one of the most independent kids I know.

Attachment parenting builds a strong bond between mother and child, and equips a child with confidence, love, security, and a helluva lot of smarts.

First of all, no TV. All the studies agree it is harmful. It is common sense that a child spending one hour playing with his toys or running around in the park is learning more than a child passively watching TV, yes, even the “educational” programs. We, as humans, learn best by example, in the real world.

We choose our battles. By allowing him to win the small battles, such as choosing the clothes he’d like to wear, and what toys to play, he allows us to win the big ones, such as when it is time to go (we rarely have a problem with that, after giving him 5 minutes grace then he waves bye bye) and when it is bedtime.

Today he can readily say he is ready to sleep. With the former, he has grown confident of his choices and truly, he has great taste in clothes.

His artwork is all over our home, the prized ones hung in the bedroom. He loves drawing and we regard each piece as a work of art. Just in 3 months, his work has evolved so much. And he is very proud of it.

We negotiate now. I believe it is an important skill he needs in life. He wants to go out to the park. I say okay, after your meal. He thinks about it then looks at me and says ok. And we eat, then we go out. I keep all my promises to him and so does his dad.

Integrity is something so important and yet so overlooked. I was truly blessed to have a father who keeps his word to me every single time since the day I was born. If he says he will bring the newspaper, yes even something as trivial as that, he will. And he has never forgotten. That is how I learnt integrity.

And so I plan to teach it to Bear. For him to become the man I want him to be, I must become the person I want him to be.

More evidence surfaces to reinforce the fact that:

1. We mirror the people we are with.
2. Angry and negative people sap the happiness out of you.

I’ve read about toxic relationships years ago and make it a point to avoid them.

So what are toxic relationships? Basically they are one-sided, negative relationships where there is little or no reciprocity, and which serve to make you feel bad about yourself or the things you care about. And they bring you down.

This doesn’t mean we’re not there for friends who are sad or having a bad time. That’s the basis of friendship. But when they resolutely want you to be unhappy by their words and actions, that is the time to cut all ties, albeit gradually and gently.

I have made it a resolution to be happy and positive and be a joy to the people around me (and if I fail, do let me know). Everything is about perspective. I choose to see things in a positive light. Note that even the title of this post focuses on the positive.

Life is too short to dwell on unhappiness. Find a solution and work through it if you are. How happy you are is really up to you. Remember, you can’t please everyone. Sit up, smell the roses, and hug your pet, baby, or parent today.

(Source: Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain)

Because I usually work late at night, sometimes I hear Bear crying for me from the next room. Now the interesting thing is, out of every 5 times, at least twice it is just my imagination. I definitely have baby on the brain…

If you’re feeling down or sad for apparently no reason, look around and see if the negativity is coming from somewhere nearby. Is it a well-meaning relative commenting on the neatness of your home, or your neighbour wondering about your ability to parent? All these gentle put-downs can be detrimental to your confidence as a mother and set you on the road to depression.

When this happens, identify the toxic comments and acknowledge them for what they are: someone’s opinion. You cannot change the words people choose to spew from their mouths but you can choose not to be physically close enough to hear them, or if it is not possible, choose to mark that person’s word as invalid (mind exercise: imagine everytime that person talks, place a mental stamp across his or her forehead).

You are your child’s best mother and you should not allow anyone to spoil that relationship. It is easy to believe someone else when you’re unsure, tired, and simply exhausted from parenting, whether or not you are working. If you allow that person to destroy your confidence as a mother, only you and your child will suffer for it. Not the commentor.

So give yourself a pat on the shoulder for being a great Mom. Trust your Mommy instincts. Yes, your Mommy radar is tuned. You know what your baby needs and you are confident to provide him with what he needs: love, food, warmth, comfort, and play. Your baby agrees too. Just look at his face light up when he sees you.

I’ve been thinking a lot about flow lately and what sort of activities I do get immersed in, some practical, some not, and that explains why sometimes I get annoyed when interrupted midway of the activity.

* Organising pix of my cats and Bear
* Meddling with my blog or website
* Playing any RPG
* Oil painting
* Reading an engaging book
* Watching an engaging movie
* Watching a happy scene in my mind’s eye

Flow is a sort of play for adults and kids alike which has been proven to bring happiness and fulfillment.

One route to more happiness is called “flow,” an engrossing state that comes during creative or playful activity, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has found. Athletes, musicians, writers, gamers, and religious adherents know the feeling. It comes less from what you’re doing than from how you do it.

(Source: The Keys to Happiness, and Why We Don’t Use Them)

For me, it is very therapeutic to immerse myself into something for a while.

Happiness is within our reach. We just have to stretch out and grasp it.