Your Child's Journey

wisdom for the big steps little children take

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You Are Invited!

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Youre Invited

All moms want to give their babies and children the best possible care. But research takes more time than you have.

First Steps is a helpful bulletin for moms with children from birth to 3 years. Each monthly bulletin will have the information you most need for that month of your baby’s development. These bulletins were carefully assembled from the best information available and compiled in a brief, readable style. They will help you learn the usual developmental mile markers for that month. Also, you will see what to expect next and the best ideas to help your baby get there. Other short articles of interest for parents with children that age are included.

Learn more about me and Your Child’s Journey at About.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Blessings!
Diane

Ways to Encourage Honesty

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I read an article this month by Amy McCready, writing for Positive Parenting Solutions . In her article on seven steps to encourage honesty, she reported that lying is a developmental mile marker. “When your preschooler starts lying, it’s simply a new developmental milestone, according to research by Kang Lee, a University of Toronto professor and director of the Institute of Child Study. This shift signifies changes in the way your child organizes information. It’s a normal step, so you don’t need to worry about your little one becoming a pathological liar.

Though it’s a normal stage of development, we still want to know how best to deal with this misbehavior so that it doesn’t continue. Amy says, “[Children] want to avoid punishment, disappointing their parents or an unpleasant outcome. Would you be honest if you knew it would cause you humiliation, a lecture, a punishment or being yelled at?

“And naturally, when our kids blatantly lie to us, we want to punish them to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happens – when we punish kids for lying, they’ll keep doing it in the hopes of avoiding any future punishment. So if we can’t punish them, how do we put a stop to the lies? Keeping in mind the reasons why kids lie, we can create an environment where they feel safe telling the truth. The following seven tips can help you make your home a more honest place.”

Here are her seven steps. To read the entire article go to: Seven Steps to Encourage Honesty in our Kids and Put an End to Lying.

  1. Keep calm and parent on. If your kids worry about being yelled at or punished when they mess up, they won’t want to come to you with the truth. Focus on using a calm voice. That doesn’t mean kids are off the hook for lying. But instead of getting angry and assigning blame, discuss solutions to the problem with your child.
  2. Don’t set up a lie. When we ask questions to which we already know the answer, we’re giving our children the opportunity to tell a lie. Instead, emphasize ways to address the situation. Ask questions like: “What are your plans for finishing your work?” and “What can we do to clean this up and make sure it doesn’t happen next time?” This can help head off a power struggle and allows your child to save face by focusing on a plan of action instead of fabricating an excuse.
  3. Get the whole truth. Get to the root of the problem and why she couldn’t be honest. Open up a conversation gently, saying, “That sounds like a story to me. You must be worried about something and afraid to tell the truth. Let’s talk about that. What would help you be honest?”
  4. Celebrate honest. Say something like: “I really appreciate you telling me what really happened. That must have been difficult for you, but I really appreciate you telling the truth and taking responsibility.”
  5. Delight in do-overs. Turn the mistake into a learning opportunity. Ask, “If you could have a do-over, what would you do differently?” and brainstorm different ideas.
  6. Show the love. Let your kids know you love them unconditionally, even when they make mistakes. Make sure they know that while you don’t like their poor behavior, you will never love them any less because of the mistakes they might make. This helps your kids feel safe opening up to you.
  7. Walk the talk. Remember that your kids are always looking to you and learning from your actions. Those little white lies we tell, whether it’s to get out of dog sitting for the neighbors or helping with the school fundraiser, aren’t harmless – they’re showing your kids that it’s okay to lie.

Some of these principles we have highlighted many times before. But it is always good to review them in light of specific parenting situations we face.

Many of your children are not yet to the stage where they lie, for you, being forewarned may keep you from increasing the likelihood of more lying when it begins. For those of you who have already detected your children in lies, hopefully this and other articles will help you to discover the root cause of the lies your children tell.

A Better Way to Stop Lying is a previously published article on Your Child’s Journey that you may find helpful too.

Importance of Strong Foundations

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This article was written by: Amanda Morgan. Please visit her site to read more of this article and see others she has written at: NotJustCute.com

Why Early Learning Matters!

Passionate about early education and child development, I find foundations to be particularly interesting.  Their function is critical. They’re carefully designed, prepared, inspected, formed, poured, reinforced, inspected again, sealed….. and then, after all of that, almost totally covered back up with dirt.

I am anxious to see a home standing in that spot of dirt. Not lines of cement. I want a home I can cook in, sleep in, gather in, live in. And I’d love to see that home spring up right now.

But not so much that I’d skip building the foundation.

The foundation is what keeps us firmly planted. A house doesn’t just sit on the foundation, it’s securely attached. Every 18 inches around the perimeter of the house there’s a large bolt embedded in the cement that affixes to the floor of the house.  In addition to that, there are multiple steel straps, each of them several feet long, that are also embedded in the cement foundation and later attached to the walls of the house with an almost ridiculous number of fasteners.

All of this connection keeps the home safe when the wind and rain come (and boy do they come!) or should an earthquake ever surface.

Like the foundation for our homes, the early years of a child’s development are a critical time of preparation.

The tasks of early development are often unseen or unrecognized by others. More commonly identified as play, this work of singing, climbing, running, pretending, painting, talking, and listening, is more powerful than its simplicity implies. Each activity is laying the foundation for future learning.

Children singing songs and listening to stories are building critical pre-reading skills — skills that are not just nice, but necessary for them to become readers. Little fingers lining up cars on a mat are building the fine motor skills that will allow them later to hold pencils and master keystrokes. At the same time, this play-work is also helping them build concepts of numeracy, such as a one-to-one ratio as they move cars one by one, or the ability to sort by attributes as red cars and blue cars find separate parking lots, or the ability to compare quantities as they realize their friends have more or less cars piled up than do they. All of these skills need practice and hands-on construction before we introduce the later math concepts that often play out on grade-school worksheets.

In addition to all of that, this foundation of play and exploration prepares children with the gifts of wonder and social problem-solving. These are gifts that are built through experience, not by lecture. And it is these gifts that open the door to all later learning.

Those unable to see the foundation of early learning for what it is are often eager to plop something down that’s more rewarding.  Just as I may be happy to skip right to the home I can see, they want to go directly to the seen skills like reading rather than pre-literacy skills and mathematical computations instead of early numeracy. This is the learning that “counts”, after all.

But just as our framers needed the assurance of a well-prepared foundation, our young children need a solid, deep foundation in hands-on exploration and play to prepare them for later skills.  As I’ve said before, watching a child take words from a page and turn them into a spoken story is magical to watch — like seeing a house come up where there was once nothing — but before you can put the work and effort into decoding, you have to build the foundation with things like language, phonemic awareness, and  concepts of print.

As literacy experts, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, stated in their book, Literacy Beginnings: A Prekindergarten Handbook:

“The knowledge that forms the foundation for reading and writing is built throughout early childhood through play, language, and literary experiences.”

Learning foundations are built through play and experience. And we can’t afford to skip that.  A push-down curriculum isn’t helping kids to get ahead, it’s simply ignoring the critical role of the foundation.

The metal straps and bolts of the foundation secure our home and keep it firm in the face of storms and tremors, and a strong foundation does the same for our young learners. A lack of foundational skills weakens our learners as they move on to more and more challenging work. Often, those who struggle in later grades with reading, do so because they lack foundational skills that begin early on like phonemic awareness or story comprehension. Math woes begin when we fail to start with a foundation of number sense and numeracy through hands-on activities.   (The Number Bag is one of my favorite techniques to use in the preK classroom.)

Those straps and bolts are also a reminder that a house isn’t built in independent levels. There’s an interconnection. The house isn’t just set down onto the foundation, it grows out of it. Likewise, strong foundational learning gives root to later learning as basic concepts create connections necessary for inquiry and growth.

When children are allowed the time and space to build strong foundations, the skills built later on come more easily and solidly.  We owe children the opportunity to build strong foundations in ways that are developmentally appropriate. Let’s reject the notion that we have to leave childhood behind in order to get ahead.  Let’s be builders.

A Handful of Fun

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Why Sensory Play is Important for Preschoolers

This article is by Amanda Morgan. She has her masters degree in early childhood development and trains parents and teachers. But she also is a mom with four sons who teach her something new every day. Please stop by her site:  www.notjustcute.com.  You can also sign up for her monthly newsletter.

Think of your average preschooler. How long has this child been proficient with language? Depending on the age, the child may not really be too proficient yet!  Others seem to have been talking non-stop since 2 1/2, but that means they’ve been talking now for all of…..about a year! Now think of how long these children have been seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling, and tasting.  Their whole lives! Children are wired to receive and utilize sensory input from day one. This is why children will dive in hands first, exploring a new substance. The senses are their most familiar, most basic way to explore, process, and come to understand new information.

This is why we must allow young children to learn through experience, not just lecture. These children need to use their senses and be engaged in meaningful experiences. As we talk with them about what they are observing and sensing, we give them new language tools to connect with these more familiar sensory tools, building language as well as supporting cognitive concepts specific to the experience.

Now, the flip side to this equation is important to remember as well. Just as children learn through their senses, they also are developing the ability to use those senses and are building the neurological pathways associated with each one. With added sensory experiences, combined with the scaffolding of adults and peers, children become more perceptive. Their sensory intake and processing becomes more acute. As they are better able to use their senses, they are then better able to learn through their senses.

Sensory play is really part of the scientific process. Whether out loud or within the internal dialogue of the mind, children have developed a question, leading them to investigate-by grabbing, smelling, listening, rubbing, staring, licking , what have you! They are using their senses to collect data and from that, attempt to answer their own questions. Whether or not young children are always able to verbally communicate this process, it is still a valid exercise in scientific inquiry.

[Read more…]

Happiest Families

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I read Eric Barker’s post 6 Things the Happiest Families Have in Common. I’d like to take his ideas and personalize them.

Have a mission statement

The happiest families have a mission statement. Another way to describe a mission statement is a set of goals the family is reaching for. It is very hard to know if we have done well, if we don’t know what the goal is. Having goals, we can periodically assess our progress and make adjustments to more nearly meet our goals. Or we may decide a goal has been reached or is no longer important and make some new goals.

You may need to take some time as parents to think and pray about what are your values and what goals you want for your family. You may make several goals as your mission statement. To help you get started, try completing the following statements.

  • “We want our family to be. . .”
  • “We want to be a family that. . .”

You may decide you want your family to be supportive of each member developing their talents. Or, you want to be a family that reaches out to those less fortunate than you are.

Share your family history

The happiest families tell and retell the family history. Grandparents and aunts and uncles tell stories from their childhood and even what they heard from their grandparents. Tell the good things to instill hope for success. But also share the tough times and how the family came through the crises. What did family members do that was praiseworthy? What has set your family apart from others?

When children know they are part of a family with a history, it can give them confidence to stand in times when they have to be different than the culture around them. They can say, “I’m a famly name, and our family doesn’t do things like that!”

Weekly family meetings

Many of you don’t have children old enough to have a family meeting. For you, it might be wise as parents to have a weekly meeting together and answer these questions for yourselves and with your little children in mind.

For those of you with children old enough to take part, set aside about 20 minutes once a week to give everyone a chance to answer these questions.

  • What worked well this week?
  • What didn’t work well this week?
  • What will we agree to work on in the coming week?

If the kids met the previous week’s goal, they get to pick a reward (with parent’s approval). If they did not meet their goal, they get to pick from previously agreed upon punishments.

Following this plan helps keep the goal before everyone’s minds. It also means you’re keeping short accounts and not adding to the list of failures week after week. There is much better chance of success if things are dealt with quickly and rewarded fairly.

How to fight right

Since no family can always escape fights between members, here’s a way to deal with fights where each one feels it is fair. When a fight breaks out:

  • Separate everybody to think about what just happened. This reduces the emotions that boiled over.
  • They get back together and come up with three alternatives. There must be three choices of resolutions.
  • They pick the one they like the best. This way everyone has a say and they have agreed on the solution. This keeps the parents from being dictators.

Family Dinner

With our busy schedules dinnertime may not work to get everyone together. You may choose any meal of the day when everyone should be present nearly every day. In most family dinners the amount of time for ‘real’ talk is only about 10 minutes when “pass the salt” and “get your elbows off the table” are excluded. In most families, the parents talk at least 2/3 of that 10 minutes. The happiest families turn it upside down and the children are the ones who talk 2/3 of the time.

Make sure everyone has a chance to say something to the whole family. They may tell about something that happened during the day, some news that others should know, or why they feel happy or sad.

Parents should teach one new word each day. Children who eat a meal each day with their parents are less likely to drink, smoke, do drugs, get pregnant, commit suicide, or develop eating disorders than kids who don’t eat with their family. They also have better academic achievement and fewer behavioral problems. So it is worth rearranging your schedule to include one family meal everyday.

Just Try!

Everyone wants a happier family. These are things that the happiest families all do. Will you succeed at all of them? Probably not, at least not all the time. But if you want to have a happier family, try to include these strategies into your family’s life. Just try! If you can’t do all of them, start with one of them. When you see that you can do that, try adding another.

Remember to pray for each member of your family every day. Bless your children as they begin and end their day. God will help you to set good goals and give you the wisdom you need to help your children grow to be the best possible version of themselves.

Eric Barker compiles information from many reputable sources to answer questions many of us have. You can receive his emails by requesting them at his blog, Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

For another article on finding fun in marriage see, Have Fun or Else!