Connect before you direct

 Who here has a hard time getting their children ready in the morning?

[I'm imagining every parent raising their hand, except that one annoyingly perfect parent whose children are ready 15 minutes early every day, whose children *never* fight, whose children never eat with their fingers, and whose children never joke incessantly about poop and pee and farts at the dinner table.*]

I have a certain 8-year-old girl (cough cough Zari cough) who has such a hard time getting ready in the morning. She's easily distracted despite multiple warnings and reminders and timers and escalating consequences. All too often I'm still pushing her out the door 1 minute before school starts. At school, she's a very good student, enjoys pleasing her teachers, and has no problem following directions. At home...it's like I am the Invisible Woman and my words just pass right through her.

Here's advice from one Canadian mom I know. I'm really interested in trying it out.

Two things work really well for us.

1) "Connect before you direct": We are wired to only take instruction from those we feel either a) emotionally connected to or b) fearful of. Since your daughter probably doesn't fear you (this is a good thing), she needs to feel connected to you, and that feeling of connection is pretty short-lived. I find I have to "collect" my kids All.Day.Long but when I do, things are much smoother.

Instead of basically pulling teeth to try and get my oldest to put on clothes, we spend a little bit of time on his level, reading, singing, listening to him tell me a story, cuddling, etc. Only after he feels "filled up," I will give him instruction ("I really loved reading this book with you. I'd like to do that again. Right now we need to put on our socks and shoes and get out the door. Please get a pair of socks and your shoes.")

I seriously think this is a parenting secret weapon. It works. Like, seriously.

Instead of trying to convince her to get out of bed in the morning when she's lying there, try climbing in with her and talking for a few minutes about how she slept, what activities will happen throughout the day, if she had any dreams in her sleep, etc.

After you've filled her love tank, give her instructions on what to do next and go from there. It sounds like a lot of time and energy but I seriously find this takes soooooo much less time than trying to basically pull teeth to get my eldest to do things.

The concept for "connect before you direct" comes from Gordon Neufeld's book Hold On To Your Kids.

2) Routine Charts. I don't really like to add rewards or incentives to these because I don't think they work, but especially for visual kids, having something they can look and some sort of physical marker of being "finished" can be really helpful.

Don't you love that routine chart? Now I have to make one for each of the kids!

So please help me oh wise women (and men) of the internet.
We scrape by most mornings because we live 1 minute away from school. Next year, when we're back in the States, school starts earlier and each child goes to a different school (some several kilometers away) and I teach an 8 am MWF class. HOW are we going to get everyone out the door on time? 

* We have a rule: bathroom words have to stay in the bathroom. If the kids want to talk about pee or poop or make fart noises, they can do it all they want--as long as they're in the bathroom.

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A somewhat melancholy post

Ivy and I have lots of one-on-one time during school days. During the mornings I can pretend that I'm a mom of just one child instead of four. We go on long walks, run errands, clean the house, go to the park, or just side by side as I read and she plays with toys.

Ivy is little enough that I can pretend she's still a baby. She will be our last--barring some extraordinary circumstance--and I am already mourning the loss of her babyhood. It's more than that, really; it's the end of a stage of my life as a young mother. As long as I have one baby, I still feel like I am in that group. But it's coming to an end. I'm not sure if I'm ready for the next stage of my life. I keep thinking of what's coming and honestly I don't know if I'm very excited.

Parenting keeps getting more complicated as my kids get older, and I miss the sheer joy and simplicity of raising babies. I don't have much to look forward to once I no longer have a baby underfoot. Teenagers? Bleh. My kids turning into adults and leaving me alone? Sob.

So tell me I have something to look forward to. Because I thinking of growing older and aging and getting wrinkles and health problems (okay, maybe some of this is a long way off!) and my kids getting bigger and none of it seems interesting. What I'm trying to say is: having newborns and babies has been, for me, the Best Thing Ever and I don't know if anything else can make up for the loss of that part of my life.

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Make your own TIME Magazine cover!

It's time to make your own "Are You Mom Enough?"covers. I did some Photoshop magic and turned everything into layers. You can insert your own pictures and edit all of the cover text. Let's see what Stand and Deliver readers can come up with!

Click on the image to download.

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Talking to your kids about sex

Have you had The Talk with your children yet? It's supposed to happen some time in early grade school, before their peers have time to (mis)inform them about what sex is all about. Having The Talk is a ritual many of us go through, first as children and then as parents. I still remember my parents sitting us down. I don't remember much of the details, although some kind of illustrated book was involved.

But what if you never had to give The Big Talk? Here at the Freeze household, reproduction is a matter-of-fact part of everyday discussions. I don't think I'll ever need to officially sit my children down and explain the facts of life, because they will already know them from numerous conversations.

Here's an example of a conversation between me and the kids while I was driving to visit my younger sister, who's pregnant with her second and due this summer:

Dio: Is aunt B going to have another baby? (in a super excited voice)

Me: Yes, she has another baby inside her belly.

Dio: And is the baby going to crack open?! (probably thinking of how he pretends to be a dinosaur egg after baths and cracks open out of his towel)

Me: No, the baby won't crack open out of her belly! Remember, the baby is born out of a special hole called a vagina.

Zari: I know that! (in a know-it-all voice)

Dio: And can I be pregnant and have a baby?

Me: No, only mamas can get pregnant and have babies. But papas can help the mamas get pregnant. (Zari and I have talked about this on other occasions, and I've briefly explained the basics of sex and fertilization.)

Dio: Oh.

Me: And did you know that when the baby is inside the mama's belly, it lives inside a special muscle called a uterus. It's like a balloon and stretches bigger and bigger when the baby grows.

Dio: Oh.

Me: And when the baby is ready to be born, the uterus squeezes really tight and helps push the baby out.

Dio: Oh.

Me: And did you know that when the baby is inside the uterus, it lives inside a bag of salty water? It's like being inside of a swimming pool! The baby swims around, kicks, and splashes. When you and Zari and Inga were babies, you swam inside this salty water the whole time you were in my belly. This salty water is called amniotic fluid.

Dio: Why is the baby in the water?

Me: Because it doesn't need to breathe inside its mama's belly. The baby has an umbilical cord attached to the placenta, so it doesn't breathe air until it is born. 

Dio: Oh.

Me: And guess what? When the baby is ready to be born and the uterus is squeezing really tight, sometimes the bag of water breaks and splashes all over!

Dio and Zari: Hahahaha!

How do you talk to your kids about sex?
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I don't know much, but what I know works

The longer I am a parent, the less I claim to know about raising children. But I have figured out a few things:

1. Wear them out. We talk frequently about the importance of exercising and "getting our energy out." Most days we go on at least one walk. When it's too icky to be outside, we go upstairs into our attic. It has a huge playroom with a swing, rope ladder, gymnastic rings, poor man's trampoline (twin mattress on the floor), old couch, foosball table, pool table, and all of the kids' toys. The kids are encouraged to jump on the bed and couch. They sometimes run laps for minutes at a time around the pool table.

2. Send them outside. Besides tiring their little bodies out, playing outside is marvelous because I hardly have to do any parenting. They play with rocks, sticks, dirt, and bugs and are occupied for hours. Once we fence in our yard--hopefully this summer--I can send everyone outside without having to be out there every second supervising.

3. Let them "help." Nothing is as fun for kids as mopping the floor or washing windows or scrubbing toilets. It will probably take you longer, but your kids will be happy and will learn valuable skills. (I have met teenagers who have never cleaned a toilet! Seriously, what is wrong with their parents??)

4. Give them responsibilities early on. My 5-year-old now plans and cooks dinner once a week. I tell her what to do next and help with tricky tasks such as splitting large vegetables or turning on the gas burners. Otherwise she does everything from start to finish: peeling, chopping, measuring, stirring, sauteeing. She is so proud of herself.

5. Don't expect a 2-year-old to act like an adult. Little children's brains are wired differently than adults'. And a 2-year-old's brain functions much differently than a 6-year-old's. Tantrums, meltdowns, and other big emotions are a normal part of childhood. I love the book The Science of Parenting for explaining age-appropriate responses to children's behavior.

6. Turn off the TV. We're working on this one. I sometimes use movies to keep the kids occupied during the "witching hour" of 4 pm until dinnertime. Eric likes to turn on a movie in the mornings when I'm teaching and he wants extra sleep. As a result, our screen time has been creeping up and up. I'm resolved to bring it back down, though, after watching this pediatrician's TEDx talk about media exposure. It is definitely worth viewing.



7. Set boundaries and stick to them. Children crave structure and consistent boundaries. I'll refer you to this excellent post by a mother of five and former elementary school teacher: Don't ask, tell. Don't follow, lead (Au lieu de demander, dire. Au lieu de suivre, mener). Her post arose after she read this Wall Street Journal essay about French parenting styles.

8. Help them get enough sleep. This seems like a no-brainer, but many North American children are sleep-deprived. If you want to know why, for example, Dutch children sleep 1-2 hours more per day than their American counterparts, read Sleepless in America. 

9. Give them constructive outlets for their emotions. We practice making mad, sad, and happy faces. We show them how to hit pillows instead of each other when they're mad. (it doesn't always work, but we keep trying!) We draw how we feel. We teach our children that it's okay--even good--to feel emotions, but they can't hurt other people in the process.

10. Love, touch, cuddle, and kiss your children. No further commentary needed!

Eric and 1-day-old Zari

Please share your best parenting techniques!
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Sunday School blues

Zari got kicked out of Sunday School today.

I love saying that. And it's true. So here's the back story: we go to a 3-hour block of meetings on Sundays. The first hour is the main worship service, called "Sacrament Meeting." The second and third hours are various Sunday school classes; children go to "Primary" classes. 

Anyway, Zari had been really restless and difficult all during Sacrament Meeting. She went off to Primary, and I played hooky from Sunday School and sat in the lobby with Inga. (Sometimes I just need a break after shepherding all three kids during the worship service.) About ten minutes later, I heard loud moans coming down the hallway. Zari was being carried--rather ungracefully, since she's quite tall--by one of the teachers. Apparently she had been acting out repeatedly. Finally they gave her a choice: settle down or leave. It's obvious what her choice was!

She wasn't happy about being kicked out. For about fifteen minutes, she moaned and cried: "I want to go to Primary! I want to go to Primary!" I laid her on the couch, covered her with a blanket, and waited until she began to quiet down. Then I told her she could go back if she was ready to calm herself down and be helpful in class. We took a few deep breaths together. She wiped her tears off and put on a cheerful face. She was ready. We walked down the hall holding hands, and she went right to her teacher's lap for some extra hugs and snuggles. All was well again.

I'm glad that she was kicked out. She deserved it! Now she knows that certain behaviors are not appropriate and that her teachers won't take any nonsense. 

Sometimes, your kids just need to cry. Sometimes, they need to be kicked out of class, even if it's just Sunday School.

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Let your kids cry

Last summer, we traveled to Park City, Utah for a family reunion. The return flight from Salt Lake City was overbooked. We volunteered to be bumped (in exchange for $900 in airline vouchers!). The next flight didn't leave until the following day, so we spent the day in downtown SLC.

All of this doesn't really matter, except as the backdrop for the rest of the story. Eric wanted to see one of his college roommates who worked downtown. "Back in 10 minutes!" he told me. I had Dio (1 year old) and Zari (3 1/2). We waited...and waited...for him to return.

Finally we took a bathroom break in the basement of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. Something upset Zari, and she refused to move. I had to pull her up the entire flight of stairs (while carrying Dio and being newly pregnant with Inga). Her tantrum continued unabated. I dragged her outside to a nearby park. I still couldn't get her to calm down. I probably could have, if I hadn't also had Dio to take care of and if I hadn't been frustrated by a missing husband. I was fed up with her behavior.

So I just left her there.

I sat down with Dio about thirty feet away. Zari continued throwing a tantrum. I played with Dio and kept an eye on her. Some of the other park-goers threw questioning glances at me. "Yes, she's mine," I would shrug and smile.

I've occasionally wondered if I should have done more to calm Zari down. I did get some nasty looks from other park-goers (as well as people telling me how calmly I was handling the situation!). But I read an article today that confirmed what I believe--that your children need to be allowed to feel sad, frustrated, angry, or disappointed. In How to Land Your Kid in Therapy, clinical psychologist Lori Gottlieb urges parents to back off. By being overly attuned to our children, by working so hard to ensure they are always happy and successful, we're actually doing them harm. In her practice, she encountered growing numbers of young adults who felt depressed, adrift, and unhappy, despite loving, engaged parents:

They truly did seem to have caring and loving parents, parents who gave them the freedom to “find themselves” and the encouragement to do anything they wanted in life. Parents who had driven carpools, and helped with homework each night, and intervened when there was a bully at school or a birthday invitation not received, and had gotten them tutors when they struggled in math, and music lessons when they expressed an interest in guitar (but let them quit when they lost that interest), and talked through their feelings when they broke the rules, instead of punishing them (“logical consequences” always stood in for punishment). In short, these were parents who had always been “attuned,” as we therapists like to say, and had made sure to guide my patients through any and all trials and tribulations of childhood. As an overwhelmed parent myself, I’d sit in session and secretly wonder how these fabulous parents had done it all.

Until, one day, another question occurred to me: Was it possible these parents had done too much?....

“Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing,” Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory at Swarthmore College, told me. “But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.” It’s precisely this goal, though, that many modern parents focus on obsessively—only to see it backfire. Observing this phenomenon, my colleagues and I began to wonder: Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?

Paul Bohn, a psychiatrist at UCLA who came to speak at my clinic, says the answer may be yes. Based on what he sees in his practice, Bohn believes many parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment—“anything less than pleasant,” as he puts it—with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong.

When your child throws a tantrum, scrapes a knee, or fights over a toy and loses, give her some time to cry and feel entirely frustrated with the unfairness of the universe. It won't kill her. In fact, it will do her some good.

And next time you see a parent with a tantruming child, doing nothing about it, give her a sympathetic smile. It might be me.

Thanks to cjane for the heads-up.

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Draw how you feel

I haven't read a lot of parenting books. But I really like Siblings Without Rivalry and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, both by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. Their writing style is a bit contrived and hokey, but their advice is spot-on. One of their suggestions in helping young children deal with their feelings without hurting other people is having them draw how they feel. Drawing gives children a creative outlet for feelings of anger, fear, frustration, or sadness. It also validates their emotions.

I tried this the other week with Zari. She and Dio were sitting at the kitchen island eating pretzel sticks. I think Dio grabbed Zari's pretzel and broke it. She got very very mad at him and was gearing up for a temper tantrum. I quickly diverted her anger away from Dio by saying, "Zari, run get a piece of paper and draw how mad you feel!" She disappeared into the dining room and came out a few minutes later with this:

She explained the scene to me. You can see the island, Dio's step-stool, Dio holding the pretzel, and Zari looking quite unhappy with Dio. Her anger was successfully defused, I had acknowledged how upset she was by looking at and talking about the picture, and best of yet, Dio emerged without being hit or pushed.

Success!

What are some of your favorite parenting books or tips?

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Children in public spaces

One of the comments about our museum day yesterday got me thinking about how children are expected to, and realistically act, in public spaces. The commenter wrote:

why do you think children running through museums is acceptable, let alone laudable, behaviour? Museums are not parks for children to run in, nor for them to tantrum in.

Before I get started on the main topic, I want to first say that I used "running around" as a figure of speech equvialent to exploring, rather than running at breakneck pace and being totally wild and crazy. Dio can't even run yet. He's still figuring out the walking part!
 
Another aside: I wonder what it is about the internet that lets people write things they would never say face-to-face...
 
Anyway, back on topic...children in public spaces. If children are ever going to be in public spaces--grocery stores, parks, museums, churches, theaters--they will need practice and regular exposure to the norms of public behavior and interaction. In other words, they learn by being and doing and observing others. Not by being kept in the house for the first several years of their life.
 
I'm not saying, of course, that we should let kids do whatever they want in any and all settings. For example, at church, we teach our children that we sit quietly. We bring activites and books and snacks to keep them occupied. And we take them out into the lobby if they're being exceptionally noisy. (Which happens at least once every week!) When I brought Zari to the ballet last week, I explained that we don't talk when the dancers are on the stage and that we clap after they're done dancing.
 
But having children of my own has given me a lot more patience and tolerance for normal kid behavior. Giggles, shrieks of laughter, bumps and falls, cries of fatigue/hunger/boredom, and even temper tantrums are inevitable when you are in public with your children.
 
Over at Womanist Musings, Renee wrote this in My child takes up space:

What really needs to be recognized about children is that they don’t have the capacity to act in the same way that adults do. This does not make them lesser beings and we need to find a way to accommodate them, even when they make drinking a latte a less then comfortable thing.

Renee's post was a response to the Feministe post by Jill called On hating kids. While I don't necessarily agree with Renee's characterization of the Feministe discussion as a "child hate fest," I did find Jill's original post and many of the comments disturbing at heart. The assumption that you can make your children behave a certain way, that you can anticipate temper tantrums and plan your day around accordingly...laughable and totally, entirely not at all realistic. For example, Jill wrote:

And while I don’t think that kids should be categorically barred from restaurants (and even small children from certain types of bars at reasonable hours), I do think that parents have a responsibility to evaluate their own child’s behavior and mood that day and decide whether it makes sense to go to a particular place at a particular time; and parents, ultimately — not everyone else out in public — should bear the burden of making sure that children behave according to the behavioral standard of a particular place, whatever that may be.

Even if I carefully "evaluate my child's behavior and mood," it's prone to change radically about two seconds later. My 13-month-old son, for example, has a super-sensitive trigger. He can be completely calm and happy, then a millisecond later he'll be screaming and shrieking, thrashing around on the floor, totally out of control. Then with a little creative distraction, the tantrum will disappear almost as quickly as it came. I can attempt to assuage the worst of the tantrum, to help him calm down--which is what you see happening in the pictures of our museum day. But "making sure" that he behaves? Nothing short of sedation or anesthetization could "make sure" he never has a meltdown.
 
I found this comment at My child takes up space particularly compelling:

Adding them to the author's original premise, a number of respondents seem to premise their rejection of children, children in public space, and "uncontrolled children" on an unstated assumption of violence or the threat of violence.

A child cannot be “made to behave,” on the spot and in public without violence or the threat of violence. It is force - actual physical force - which undermines the assumption that a parent must publicly control her children.

The immediacy of the child’s moment (especially a young child) is not translatable into an easy solution, especially just so upper middle class complainants don’t have their Sunday brunches interrupted by the intrusion of lesser beings....

The expectation, expressed at Feministe (and I'm sure, elsewhere) that children conform to adult expectations of behavior, or be excluded, really cannot be understood without understanding this as the threat of violence. The belief that parents can control an immediate moment of upset assumes that the parent must intervene to suppress the behavior, to shut the child up, in that very moment - or lose some sort of implied social sanction. It's the expectation that a parent - more often than not, a woman - punish her children so that others don't have to experience inconvenience, making the mother an agent of social repression, inculcating in her own children a fear of women as the proximate agents of suffering.

How we treat children--our own as well as other people's--speaks volumes about our core values as a society. Children are our most vulnerable group, dependent on the adults around them. They deserve to be nurtured, loved, guided, and most of all, accepted as a normal part of what it means to be human. Even if that means they make some noise at museums, at church, or at restaurants.

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Modeling

We've been renovating our upstairs bathroom--something we always intended to do, but a mysterious and worsening water leak compelled us to start on it this month. We ripped everything out: toilet, sink, ugly faux-wood paneling from the 1970s, cheap vinyl tiles, and plywood subfloor. Now we were down to the bones of the room: plaster walls, pink plank subfloors, rough plumbing.

The next step was rebuliding the bathroom, step-by-step. We patched some holes in the floor, changed the heating vent location slightly, then installed a cement board (Hardibacker) subfloor. Zari helped by sweeping the floor. Two days ago, we cut and dry-fit the marble tiles. I was marking the tile locations for some rather tricky cuts, and Zari wanted to be in the middle of the action. She wanted my permanent marker, but I was able to keep her happy with a crayon. She "marked" the floor alongside me. Once the kids were sleeping, I installed the marble tiles by laying a thick bed of mortar over the cement board and squishing the tiles in place, being careful to create a strong suction seal with each tile.

Last night, once the mortar was hardened enough to allow light foot traffic, I applied the grout. I went up this morning to polish off the grout residue while Eric played with Zari and Dio.

The next job was to paint the wainscoting, baseboards, and char rail trim. When Dio was napping in the morning, Zari helped me paint everything down in our basement laundry room (too cold in the garage for painting--it was just 15 degrees F this morning). She really wanted to help paint, but it was getting difficult keeping the paint nice and smooth, not to mention keeping the paint out of her hair and clothes. So I came up with a great idea. I gave her a clean paintbrush and asked her to dust off all of the pieces before I painted them. I leaned them against the washing machine. She meticulously brushed down all of the pieces, carefully following each groove from top to bottom. If her brush went astray, she started over from the top, drawing the brush down in neat parallel lines.

While we were working--me painting and her dusting--she said to me, "Good job, mama! You're doing such a great job." I had said those exact things to her minutes earlier, acknowledging her contribution to the work I was doing. Her comments made me thing how important it is to model behavior and skills to our children. And to let them work alongside us. Children don't make a distinction between work and play like adults do. Everything is play to them: sweeping, cleaning, cooking, painting, loading the dishwasher (all things Zari has helped me do in the past few days). We can come up with creative ways to allow very young children to "help," giving them a sense of purpose, importance, and, of course, enjoyment.

For example, when I'm cleaning the bathroom, nothing makes Zari happier than to give her a bottle of "special spray" (either a dilute vinegar solution or just plain water) and a washcloth and let her go to town. She'll easily spend 30-60 minutes spraying and wiping the sink and shower and floor. She knows that my job is to use the "stinky spray" (bathroom cleaners) for the toilet and mirror.

How have you helped model important life skills with your own children? Or, if you're not yet a parent yourself, what did your parents do when you were young?

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Busy working

It's been busy around here--we're installing a fence in our backyard and getting ready to leave for France next week. We'll be gone until the end of July. We hope that Zari learns lots of home improvement skills from all of the time she spends in the backpack watching us work.

In the meantime, here's a thought-provoking essay for you to read: "Childhood, Industrialized."

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Stay-at-home-parent advice needed

A good friend of mine recently moved to another state and became a full-time SAHM. She has 2 young children and a third on the way. She's finding it challenging at times, and I offered to solicit some advice for her. Here's what she has to say:

SAHM-ing is really tough. I didn't think it would be so hard, but I haven't yet figured out a good system. I get frustrated really quickly, and can't seem to get much done. We usually do some sort of activity (park, zoo) mid-morning -- maybe 3 times a week? But besides that, I'm kind of lost. I think I have to come up with a better routine. It's sad, but I don't actually enjoy my kids right now -- I mean I love them dearly, they amaze me, but I haven't figured out a way to just plain enjoy being with them 24-7. I keep hoping as we get more settled it'll all smooth out.

Please share your wisdom and tricks of the trade!

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