Last years conversation

Last year at Halloween there was a party organised here, which I attended. I was pregnant at the time and this resulted in a couple of interesting conversations.

One of the topics was co-sleeping. I was told that it was not good to do that as one of people the at the party had done that with her youngest son and now he was not able to live alone, so when he had to go to another country with the military he took his girlfriend alone.
After a bit of talking I realized that this whole issue had nothing to do with the co-sleeping. The mother of this child had worked full-time as she was a single mother and the little boy only had his mother at night. Therefore it was the best thing she could have done for him considering the circumstances. This had made him to be quite a stable and healthy adult. The only thing was that he preferred not being alone, which is not that strange, as humans aren't made to be alone, they are supposed to live in groups anyway. So definitely this could not have been attributed to co-sleeping and considered unhealthy. Unfortunately his mother did not agree with me.

The other topic was dummies and blankies. I do not want my children to be attached to a dummy or a blanky, as these are substitutes for a non-present mother. I want my children to be attached to me. The reasons for that are that I want them to be able to build up healthy relationships with humans and not have them have relationships with plastic or fabric, as we are humans, so the most healthy relationship is to have one with a human.

The next topic was carrying my baby and the way I parent. I could not continue doing that I was told, I wondered why. Well.... a young baby needs to have a room of its own and sleep on its own and needs silence to sleep and stuff.
Well... not my baby, my baby is going to be part of our family. My baby can sleep in a carrier or on the bed or in the livingroom or so. Wherever we are. There is no need to all of a sudden send my children to school because there is new baby or so. I was very very surprised by the thought that I would have to all of a sudden change my parenting style, just because there is a 4th coming, when I have managed with 1, 2 and 3 children I surely can manage to keep doing what works for us with 4 :-)

And to be honest, it has worked out very well.

Waiting till the next meal.....

we don't do that either. Gives too much stress in the house because the low blood sugar gets the emotions into high. Useless.

So what do we do instead?

We always have finger foods ready. Fruit, veg., bread, pieces of cheese. Stuff like that. We keep it on the lower shelf of the fridge and whenever someone wants something they take something without restrictions.

I do announce when I start making lunch or dinner, so that they can choose to hold out a bit until that is ready, or just take a few bites so that they can hold out until the meal is ready.

If you don't finish...

... your meal, you will not get any dessert!

So what is wrong with this statement?
Everything!
Dessert is used as a reward, which means that getting no desert is a punishment. Useless & respectless.
Why force a child to eat more than the child feels comfortable with in the first place, that in itself can breed obesity, which I doubt any parent wants that.
Besides, what's the beef anyway?
Why not take dessert for starters?
Why not make dessert the most important meal?
If you make sure dessert is about as healthy as the meal there is no issue with it at all.
I refuse to use that. My children eat from each course what they want, sometimes they skip dessert as they prefer the starter or the main course.
We don't need that type of stress at our dining table.

Sceptical? Why not try it for a few weeks and see if they still feel dessert is the most important?

That actually only happens when its used as a reward, then the focus goes to the dessert, not the rest, it all of a sudden makes the rest of the meal totally uninteresting, while when there is no stress about it, the whole meal is interesting. Really, just give it a try.

Have fun!

Household and the family

After reading a thread on an online board recently I have been giving this whole topic some thought and the following is how I feel about it.

When your family grows it can be difficult to find the right way of keeping it up to your standards while the rest of the family has to live there as well.
What would be the most respectful way for all family members to be able to live together.

One thing is for sure, there should be no coercion or pushing or threatening to help out with it. Of course parents can ask for help when things need to be done. And when the family takes the children seriously and respects them they will help. Freedom does a lot of a human being, no matter how small.

In our house there is actually an agreement, not a pushed down their throat type of situation, that after dinner we all take stuff to the kitchen so it gets cleaned up fast. Its pretty cool how this goes and it means within 5 minutes we all can have fun again.
It took time and discussion to get there of course, it didn't go overnight, like it would have when we would have pushed it down their throat.
Simply explaining that everybody likes to go have fun and that we are a small community where we all can help out each other to make the less fun tasks take as little time as possible so we all have time for fun stuff after that made it quite easy. They like playing board games with us, or just simply do math with my partner in the evenings, but when we are cleaning or so we don't have the time for that, when everybody chips in a bit, its a job of minutes and there we go, be there for them.
There is no nagging, rewards, punishments or so necessary to get that fixed, just simple life examples.

Observations in the pool

Yesterday we went swimming with the whole family. All of the girls always love going to swimming, so we try to do this regularly.
Yesterday was particularly interesting as I was focussed on unconditional parenting as I was re-reading in the book by Alfie Kohn the night before.
I have also been reading more of Alice Miller recently again.
So I ended up viewing the parenting styles of the people around us.
It was very disturbing to see a couple with their 3yo child. The girl obviously loved the water and loved her parents. It was pretty odd to watch how the mother was particularly bullying the child, by pushing it with the head under water, when the child clearly did not want that and then laughing very loudly afterwards. It was obvious that it was only clear to me, not to the mother, who thought it was lots of fun, nor the father who was not paying any attention to the scene at all.
When the child openly tried to object the father called the girl a spoil sport and the game just continued.
Later on the couple threw a kiddy life jacket to the other side of the toddler pool and the girl was supposed to go fetch, which the little girl did tirelessly. Every time she turned her face away from her mother to go get the jacket, the mother pushed her and the little girl fell and had to get back up and go to the other side to get the jacket. The water was fairly deep for the little girl, as it was almost as high as her neck.
At some point the girl didn't go fetch very easily, she was really struggling to get up and get there, so the father went there, got the jacket and hid it behind his back and told the girl it was at the mother, so there the girl went again. The father then threw it to the mother, who threw it back again when the girl was there and on it went.
The parents obviously thought it was all fun and games, the girl did keep on smiling, but it was a totally disrespectful way the way it went.
The whole scene gave me a very uneasy feeling, the total lack of being able to see that the little girl didn't like it and was struggling to keep up a happy face.
At some point as I was wondering if I was the only one who noticed, but I wasn't, my own children also noticed.

Later, short before we left there was a girl who wasn't willing to do certain swim exercises, that the mother wanted the girl to do, she was around 7 I would say.
This resulted in the threat of the mother that if the girl wouldn't do that, she wouldn't go swimming of the next month.

Both those scenes made me wonder how things could have been different.
The game of throwing the jacket back and forth could have been played, but without pushing the little girl under water and pushing her all the time. I think the girl would have had fun if it had been that kind of way. Or maybe a totally different game.
I do think both those parents could do with some counselling as they were totally oblivious to their own child's needs.

The second scene didn't make sense to me at all. A child who obviously loves swimming can be left alone to do her thing in a fun pool. And the threat of the mother only made it seem that the girl was doomed if she did, because then she would have to keep doing all kinds of exercises in the pool and doomed if she didn't, because then she was not allowed to go swimming anymore for a month. Either way, the joy in swimming is gone.
It really does not make any sense to me, when a child has fun in the water, let it be. There is no need to push for special exercises.

Teaching to say sorry, do we need to?

My answer would be no.

Why you ask?

I think that children will learn what they need to learn in this world without being explicitly taught to do so. Unschooled children learn to read and write without being explicitly taught to do so, just by wanting to. Sure, they will ask questions, but when they get those answered, they will learn it. My own children are just an example of that. My 11yo daughter is speaking, reading and writing in three languages. She has started messing around with the fourth in the meantime. When an average child can learn that, just on their own, then I do think people can really trust their children to learn to learn the correct word use of the society as well.
I think it would be quite an insult to their intelligence to think they wouldn't learn to use simple words like that when they can learn whole languages, don't you? Besides it also shows no faith in your own child to be able to learn as it is.

I have read about the Yequana, there people do not consciously teach children stuff. They expect children to just grow up and do their thing within the tribe. Obviously it has worked for a very long time, because they haven't changed their ways. It has made me wonder why the ways have changed in our society. I don't think it has much to do with whether children learned or not, probably more with a certain way of not trusting children to learn. These ways are on in the western civilized countries this bad, not in others. I guess people don't have time there to bother with these things, they have more important things to do, like make sure they get food.

Babies don't keep

I just love this poem:

Babies Don't Keep
By Ruth Hulbert Hamilton

Mother, O Mother, come shake out your cloth,
Empty the dustpan, poison the moth,
Hang out the washing, make up the bed,
Sew on a button and butter the bread.
Where is the mother whose house is so shocking?
She's up in the nursery, blissfully rocking.

Oh, I've grown as shiftless as Little Boy Blue,
Lullabye, rockabye, lullabye loo.
Dishes are waiting and bills are past due,
Lullabye, rockaby, lullabye loo.
The shopping's not done and there's nothing for stew
And out in the yard there's a hullabaloo,
But I'm playing Kanga and this is my Roo,
Lullabye, rockaby lullabye loo.

The cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow
But children grow up as I've learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down cobwebs;
Dust go to sleep!
I'm rocking my baby and babies don't kee

You gotta love Hathor

Hathor the Cow Goddess