Friday, January 30, 2009

Another Lap

Here are a few tips that I picked up today at my M.O.P.S meeting (mothers of pre-schoolers). The lady who spoke was a specialist in child behavior and development. She was a bundle of energy and was very hard to follow at first.  Kind of the typical global thinker type, jumping from big idea to big idea.  Anyways after getting into the groove of her message I ended up picking up some wonderful and inspiring ways of dealing with my spunky two year old.
Here are the three that I'll be taking with me.



1. Make a heart with your hands and look at your child through it. In other words block out what others are saying, or any other distraction and just look at your child through a small hole. This will narrow down what he/she really needs.

2. Realize that it is our job to help and guide our child through developmental stages. For example if your child is a "sniffer" give them lots of interesting things to smell if your child is an "oral learner" use flavors and cooking or give them chew friendly objects etc.... Most importantly don't try and make them stop just because it's inconvenient.

3. If you notice a problem with your child and his/her development God always gives us another chance to work with them through the issue. She called it "another lap".


This lesson came just in time for me. Lately I have been feeling very frustrated with mothering and have been losing my patience more and more often. Anders is a classic two year old. He's asserting himself, testing the boundaries and doesn't seem to hear me much of the time.  I have felt "pushed around" by a two year old and I have been losing ground. Instead of going the extra mile to challenge and stimulate his little mind and body I have been avoiding doing extra work with him. In turn he has been showing me that he needs more by acting out and pushing back. He is telling me he needs more creativity, more patience and more understanding. 

So, after nap time we are going to have a dance party and then break out the clay that Grandma J. gave him at Christmas. And then I'll take a few ideas from my "play-group handbook". 

Here's to another lap.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Sounds good, Gretchen! I think there is a big flaw in the child-rearing philosophy that it is parent-against-child, and that the parent must win. How sad! I noticed that Adventures in Mercy is a blog you read, and I love her parenting posts about grace and gentleness-- what a breath of fresh air!

Anonymous said...

Gretchen, it's good to see that she discussed different learning styles, especially since some public school teachers are not even aware of them.... Identifying which modality of learning a child is early on can really help improve learning skills (and behavior too!); the modalities of learning are: auditory, visual, tactual, and kinesthetic
(http://www.pbs.org/teachers/earlychildhood/articles/learningmodalities.html and also, http://readingtokids.org/ReadingClubs/TipLearningModalities.php).

On a different subject, I recently read a "Dennis the Menace" comic strip (that I might post next week) that made me think about proper restroom etiquette for parents of toddlers, and I thought of a question to ask you, even though it might sound like a really lame question; nevertheless, when a mother is out and about with her male toddler who is fully potty trained, yet too young to go into a men’s restroom by himself----which restroom is she suppose to take him into---the men's or the lady’s? (In the Dennis the Menace comic strip he walks into a lady’s restroom, which I suppose is where his mother always used to take him....)