I thought for Earth Day 2010, I’d highlight some of our previous reviews and posts having to do with living greener. If you’re looking for more ideas on how to live greener, check out my 15 easy tips for going green and saving money.  I’d also like to recommend a couple of books for newbies (more experienced environmentalists will probably not get a lot out of these books, but they are nice to have as a reference):

• Do One Green Thing: Saving the Earth Through Simple, Everyday Choices - this is a good book if you’re new to green living and aren’t sure where to start.
• Easy Green Living: The Ultimate Guide to Simple, Eco-Friendly Choices for You and Your Home - this book introduced me to cleaning with essential oils.  It has great tips, but you can also find these tips on the internet.
• If you live in Germany like me, I’d recommend 50 einfache Dinge, die Sie tun können, um die Welt zu retten und wie Sie dabei Geld sparen, which gives lots of tips that are more geared towards life in Germany.

And now, here are some of our past posts:

• Book Review: Maybe One - on the case for having smaller family sizes
• Magic Nuudles - Toys made from cornstarch
• Green Toys - A San Fransisco-based eco-friendly toy company
• Eco-Paint - Eco-friendly fingerpaints
• Eco-dough is an Eco-do! - Eco-friendly play dough
• The Mooncup Reusable Menstrual Cup - a way to stop contributing tampons and pads to landfills
• Crayon Rocks rock our world! -easy to hold, edible,  soy crayons
• Goldi pacifier - a pacifier made of pure, renewable rubber that is toxin-free

Do you have any tips you’d like to share?

You may also be interested in reading:

• Book Review – Maybe One (2)
• Magic Nuudles (2)
• Green Toys (1)
• Goldi Pacifier (5)
• Finding an acceptable balance bike (9)

I’m not really a chick-lit fan, but when this book came up on offer in our reading group, something about it clicked with me and I decided to give it a try.  Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner is about four new moms adjusting to life with newborns.

I loved that the moms were dedicated to breastfeeding and had a tough time getting started.  Breastfeeding is difficult at first and nobody seems to want to tell pregnant women this.  I remember thinking that I would just know what to do when the baby was there and everything would be perfect.  Wrong.  This book doesn’t perpetuate that myth.  The women struggle and are ultimately successful.  There is also baby-wearing by several of the characters and one co-sleeps.

The moms struggle with what it means to be a mom, and with the readjustment needed when your family goes from two to three, and how that can grow (or cause difficulties with) your relationship with your spouse.  While none of their lives were wholly realistic (this is chick-lit, afterall), I found aspects of all their lives that I could relate to, or knew people who were in similar situations.

It’s not great literature, but I found it to be an entertaining, quick, summer read.  I enjoyed it so much I immediately ordered Jennifer Weiner’s first novel, Good in Bed, about a plus-size woman whose ex-boyfriend starts writing a column for a women’s magazine about his sex life with a “larger” woman.  I was disappointed, it was really far-fetched, but fans of chick-lit may like it.

Do you have any suggestions of a good novel involving parenting?

A warning for some readers, there are situations in the book that some people may not want to read about…*SPOILER ALERT*…the death of a child and infidelity by a spouse.

You may also be interested in reading:

• Cultural Differences in Parenting (15)
• Book Review: Punished by Rewards (4)
• Book Review – Maybe One (2)
• What’s your mothering style? (2)
• The SAH vs. working parent debate (18)

Being an only child requires patience. There’s a lot of explaining about not having siblings, and about whether that was “strange” and about how Disneyland might have been more fun with a sibling but if I’d had a sibling my parents couldn’t have afforded to take me to Disneyland. It requires listening to people talk about how only children are terribly spoiled and trying to decide whether to enlighten them or not. It means I frequently listen out-loud ruminations on why anyone would ever choose to have just one. I’ve never minded the questions, but I’ve also never had much of substance to say, besides that my life seems to have turned out OK so far. But now I’ve got a few more answers.

Bill McKibben, environmental author and educator, wrote Maybe One after he and his wife made the decision to have only one child. It is, as the subtitle describes, a case for smaller families. He is a brave writer, and one of the few I’ve read who states directly that having more babies leads to overpopulation and therefore damage to the earth. That’s sort of a no-brainer, but it’s a controversial statement. Americans, as we know, are locked in a war over reproductive rights and responsibilities. China’s one child policy remains controversial. But it’s a highly relevant discussion topic, and he handles it gracefully.

Beginning with a chapter full of research on why the stigma of being an only child is undeserved, the book brings together a bevy of facts and clinical studies along with anecdotes on small and large families. As an only, I’m biased toward the idea that having a brother or sister doesn’t create a “better” person, but it was nice to read some data that backs up my hunch. And, speaking of his bravery, McKibben brings up religion early in the book as well. He argues that the commandment to “be fruitful and multiply” and “populate the earth” is as much an order to care for those we’ve produced as it is to have babies. And, in possibly my favorite line from the book, he notes that we can probably check “populate the earth” off our to-do list. Mission: Accomplished.

The largest portion of Maybe One is devoted to environmental issues. This section wasn’t the most compelling to me, for a couple of reasons. One: Like most Americans, I will consider environmental concerns as I choose my family size, but they won’t be the sole deciding factor. I care about population density, but I care about my child and my family’s immediate happiness more (a bit of a humbling admission, but I’m doing my best to be honest). Two: I only discovered this book recently, but it was published in the late 90’s. Many of the issues discussed are either in much worse or somewhat better shape than they were ten years ago, so it seemed a bit dated. But I got the point: family size (yes, even, and sometimes especially, in Western countries) has a huge impact on the long-term health of our planet and the human race.

The book ends with the acknowledgment that this decision is as much about parents’ emotions and beliefs and hopes as it is about our planet. McKibben has kind words for large families as well as small, and strives not to alienate those who choose to have a bunch of kids. He asks only that we think carefully about it first.

You may also be interested in reading:

• The SAH vs. working parent debate (18)
• Pedipeds Shoes – Review and Giveaway! (34)
• HABA Toy Food (4)
• Book Review: The Parking Lot Rules (6)
• Book Review: The No-Cry Nap Solution (2)

As the mixed race child of an Asian woman who married a caucasian American man and immigrated to the United States, who then herself married a German and moved to Germany (still with me?), I’ve been aware of cultural differences in parenting styles most of my life. I never really stopped to examine what role cultures play in parenting until reading the book Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent.  I could not put this book down.  I’d say this is hands down the best parenting book I’ve read so far (and there’s been quite a few), and if you were to only read one parenting book, I would recommend it be this one.

In this book, the author first discusses the biological needs of babies, namely, how babies evolved.  Why do babies cry?  What biological reasons lie behind crying?  Crying babies got the attention and nutrition they needed to survive.

The baby’s crying is not pathological—all infants around the world do this at two months.  Waking up several times a night is not strange—this is what babies are designed to do.  Constantly demanding interaction and attention is not the sign of a hyperactive infant—this is what babies need as social animals.

The author cites a researcher who recorded the amount of crying babies did in a famine struck country.  When the researcher returned several months later to do follow up, the babies who cried more were more likely to still be alive, while many of the quieter babies had died.  So the next time you’re sleepless, pacing the hall with an inconsolable infant, maybe it will help to keep in mind that this was a survival mechanism that we in the industrialized world have outgrown the need for, but our biology has not quite caught up to this fact.

The author goes on to present parenting styles of different types of societies.  Hunter-gatherer, nomad, horticulturalist and urban parenting styles are described, along with the styles of different ethnicities.  The author discusses how middle class American parents often cite fostering independence as their number one goal, while most other culture make no mention of independence as a goal at all.

Americans try to instill self-esteem in their children; self-esteem is a word not easily translated into other languages because the trait is not part of the cultural milieu of other groups—it is of import only in a competive self-achieving society.  The Dutch, in contrast, believe that regularity, rest, and cleanliness promote intelligent development, so much so that when children throw tantrums, as they do all over the world, parents assume there has been a break in the child’s routine that has caused the episode.

An especially interesting section of this book was about how people bring the parenting style of their cultures or ethnicities with them when they move to other areas of their country or the world.  I realized through this section that I was in many ways raised in an Asian style of child-rearing, and not so much in the middle class American style.  I can’t count how many times I said to my mother, “But this isn’t Thailand, this is American.  We don’t do things like that here.” (I know I’m going to be paid back for every time I said that though, now that I’m raising a child in Germany.

I also know now that I am raising my son in a hybrid Asian-American style.  Perhaps some of the reason attachment parenting seemed so natural to me (I was doing it before I knew it had a name), is that many AP techniques are practiced by Asians.  Reading this section also reminded me of how we should be open to the parenting choices other parents make.  No one style is right and no one style is wrong.

In one very telling study of Lebanese mothers transplanted to Australia, for example, the clash of cultures was clearly illustrated by how the women approached parenting.  The Australian mothers expected their preschoolers to be highly verbal and to be prepared for the rigors of school.  The Australian mothers also felt that certain developmental tasks have only a small window of opportunity during which a child can acquire those skills, and that if kids are not poked and prodded they will fall behind and be losers.  The Lebanese mothers, in contrast, felt no urge to teach their children any particular skills before they went to school and felt kids would learn skills as they needed them; there was no sense of “it’s too late.”  In addition, the Lebanese mothers were much more concerned about their children’s welfare at school.  As a result, Australian teachers labeled the Lebanese kids as unprepared for school and overprotected, but the Lebanese mothers felt they were doing what was expected of any mother…

Imagine the Cambodian woman new to America who is told by her physician to make sure the baby sleeps in his own bed.  Or imagine the Guatemalan woman who is confused by all the toys her new culture says she must buy for her baby’s happiness.  Or what about the British woman who looks in disdain at the Nigerian woman breast-feeding in public.  Now, more that ever, we need to understand how culture molds what we do and what others do.  By comparing ourselves with others, and comparing each group with yet another, we also obliterate any notions of “normal.”

A somewhat sensitive subject is discussed, the subject of not breastfeeding due to low milk supply:

Lack of milk is, in fact, an urban phenomenon—women in rural areas rarely if ever report that they have stopped breast-feeding because of lack of milk.  Some women may be rationalizing their desire to switch to formula.  It might also be that stress and anxiety in the urban environment contribute to the failure of the natural system.  For example, urban women often lack the multigenerational female support system to help teach them about breast-feeding.  Also, by definition, the urban environment means an emphasis on work that is physically and emotionally separated from home life; breast-feeding, or any kind of child care, is sequestered from the rest of urban daily life, unlike the environments of hunters and gatherers, nomadic herders, and horticulturalists.  In fact, the urban and Western styles of caretaking make breastfeeding particularly challenging; it is therefore not surprising that mothers in these environments give up.

No style is presented as perfect.  While the hunter-gatherer model is the model we had for much of human existence, and thus what children are perhaps most biologically set up for, it is not as a whole ideal for the life we live now.

There is no “perfect” way to care for babies, only trade-offs in which parents weigh the needs of the infant against the constraints of daily life.  Babies are clearly adaptable, at least within the parameters of their most basic organic needs.

What works for one set of parents may not work for another, and what is considered normal is only a cultural definition.  Kids the world over grow into healthy adults.  Sure, we need to take into account what the culture we live in considers “normal,” but we can also learn about the parenting styles of other cultures and peoples and consider if perhaps there aren’t things we can do differently.

Have you noticed differences in parenting between cultures and ethnicities?  What have you experienced?

You may also be interested in reading:

• My thoughts on being a stay at home mom (8)
• Breastfeeding After Reduction: One Year In (13)
• Breastfeeding After Reduction Surgery – 19 months and counting (5)
• Book Review: The Parking Lot Rules (6)
• Book Review: Punished by Rewards (4)

While browsing in a bookstore back in the US last November, I came upon the book Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn.  It sounded pretty interesting so I purchased it and pretty much devoured it.  Before writing a review, I figured I better read it again a little more slowly, which is why I’m just now getting a review out to you.

In this book, the author discusses the science of applied behaviorism (the use of praise/rewards and punishments to control behaviors) and how, when applied to humans as a motivational technique, it doesn’t work.  According to Kohn, this is pretty accepted in the psychological community, with applied behaviorists even offering only that applied behaviorism probably doesn’t hurt motivation.

The book then goes on to describe how rewards have become commonplace in the business world, the classroom, and in parenting.  A couple of examples he describes: Employees get bonuses, and eventually they’ll come to expect them and feel punished if they don’t receive a bonus anymore, or don’t get as high a bonus as they were expecting.  I can’t count the number of friends and family members who’ve complained and considered quitting because their bonus wasn’t high enough and the department idiot got X much more than them.  Kids are graded (he’s against this) and often children with the highest grade on a test will get an award like Student of the Week (I got it once in 7th grade French class), setting them up as competitors instead of fostering team work and collaboration.  On this subject, he writes:

Everyone else is a potential obstacle to one’s own success.  If the reward system sets people up as one another’s rivals, the predictable result is that each will view the others with suspicion and hostility and, depending on their relative status, perhaps with contempt or envy as well.

Why do we use rewards?

Because they’re easier — in the short term.  Here is a longer excerpt addressing this question:

Rewards do not require any attention to the reasons that the trouble developed in the first place. You don’t have to ask why the child is screaming, why the student is ignoring his homework, why the employee is doing an indifferent job.  All you have to do is bribe or threaten that person into shaping up…

A mother in Virginia wrote to me not too long ago to challenge my criticism of behavioral manipulation.  “If I cannot either punish (or allow consequences) or reward (bribe) my children… what do I do when my almost three year old… wanders out of her room again and again at bedtime?” she asked.  Fair enough: let us consider three possible ways of dealing with a child who will not stay in bed.  Behaviorist A favors “consequences”: “If you’re not back in that bed by the time I count to three, young lady, you won’t be watching television for a week!” Behaviorist B favors rewards: “If you stay in bed until morning for the next three nights, honey, I’ll buy you that teddy bear you wanted.”

But the nonbehaviorist wonders how anyone could propose a solution without knowing why the child keeps popping out of bed.  With very little effort we can imagine several possible reasons for this behavior.  Maybe she’s being put to bed too early and simply isn’t sleepy yet.  Maybe she feels deprived of quiet time with her parents, and the evening offers the best opportunity for her to cuddle or talk with them.  Maybe she’s still wound up from what happened a few hours earlier and needs to rehearse and clarify the day’s events to try to make sense of what happened.  Maybe there are monsters under her bed.  Or maybe she can just hear people talking in the living room.  (Is there anyone too old to remember how all the excitement seemed to start after we were put to bed?)

The point is we don’t yet know what’s really going on… Each of the possible explanations for why this girl doesn’t stay in bed at night would seem to call for a different solution. (This is one of the reasons it is difficult to give a simple reply to people who demand to know what “the alternative” is to using rewards.) Rewards are not actually solutions at all; they are gimmicks, shortcuts, quick fixes that mask the problems and ignore reasons.  They never look below the surface.

Rewards don’t really work

Kohn explains that rewards and punishments are controls used to try to manipulate the behavior of others, and no one likes to be on the receiving end of manipulation.  I sure don’t.  And while they might work in the short term, in the long term they tend to have either no, or the opposite, effect.  He cites studies that found that kids told they were toy testers and given incentives to play with certain toys did not play with them after their “test-periods” were over, while kids in control groups not given incentives played just as much with the toys afterwards.  In another study he cites, kids given tutoring and money for good grades performed more poorly academically than kids just given tutoring.  In the Afterword, Kohn writes about rewards in business:

Not a single controlled study has ever found that the use of rewards produces long-term improvement in the quality of work.  In fact, experimental simulations continue to suggest that the opposite is true.

Rewards in schools:

In 1995 two researchers… designed a two year experiment in which “adolescent girls at risk of school failure” were offered financial incentives for improving performance.  The result: contrary to the experimenters’ prediction, these students ended up doing worse with respect to both grades and school absences than did girls who received social and educational services without any rewards.  More remarkably, they also did worse than the control group — that is, the girls who were just left alone! As we’ve seen in other studies, offering rewards proved to be not merely ineffective but actually counterproductive.

And on reward use in parenting:

We live in a culture where the highest compliment a parent can receive is that his or her kid is “well behaved” (read: docile).  When strangers in restaurants tell us how “good” our daughter is, they don’t mean that she is admirable in an ethical sense but merely that she hasn’t been a nuisance to them.  No wonder people declare matter-of-factly that it’s simply unrealistic to do without treats and threats: these tactics may indeed be necessary if our goal is to produce children who spend their lives just doing what they’re told.

Final thoughts

This book really resonated with me.  I did poorly in school and absolutely hated controlling teachers.  I figured out the absolute minimum it took for me to pass a class and that’s all I would do.  My high school GPA upon graduation was 2.7 out of 4.0.  I would just pass any course that was required, then ace my electives. And I’m not talking electives like art, I went to a total nerd school.  I got a D in English, in History, in Calculus, in Physics, then got As in classes like Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and AP Government.

I went to college at VCU, a lower ranked state school, because of this, and my undergraduate work was only slightly better (mainly because the coursework was a lot easier).  It wasn’t until graduate school that I cared about studying.  Once I was fully in charge of picking my coursework, I didn’t have any problems with grades anymore.  My Masters GPA at VCU was 3.8 and my GPA while I was a PhD student in statistics at Duke University was a 4.0.

The chores my parents paid me to do while I was growing up are the chores I absolutely hate doing now.  They’re the ones I’ll do dead last, the ones I’ll leave till they are past being an absolute necessity.  I have no problem scrubbing the bathroom and mopping the floors, but washing the dishes?  Vacuuming?  NO WAY!

What the author said about using rewards really made sense to me.  Before reading this book, anytime Oliver did anything good, I’d praise him enthusiastically, “Wow!  That’s so great!  What a good boy you are!”  Now, if I’m really amazed, I’ll praise him, but if he’s building a tower for the hundredth time, I’ll just do as Kohn suggests and say, “You did it!”, letting him make his own judgment about what he did.

The author has also written a book Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason, which focuses more on the parenting aspect.  I’ve been told it’s a good read, but is more theory than practical advice.  It’s on my wishlist now anyways, so maybe later on this year you’ll get a review of that book.

What are your thoughts on using praise and rewards?

You may also be interested in reading:

• Book Review: The Parking Lot Rules (6)
• Book Review: The No-Cry Nap Solution (2)
• Book Review: Parent Effectiveness Training (2)
• Book Review – Maybe One (2)
• The SAH vs. working parent debate (18)

I’m a fan of Elizabeth Pantley and her No-Cry series of books.  Her book, The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night, helped give me the courage to listen to my heart.  So many people would ask me if Oliver was sleeping through the night, that I started worrying that he didn’t and began looking for solutions.  Her book gave gentle methods to help get your child to sleep and to sleep through the night, if that’s what you wanted, but she also wrote that if you and your family are all fine with the situation, there is no need to make a change.  I didn’t mind waking, and I still don’t, but now I don’t worry about it when people ask me.

When I got a chance to review a copy of Elizabeth Pantley’s new book, The No-Cry Nap Solution: Guaranteed Gentle Ways to Solve All Your Naptime Problems, I was happy to.

This book is broken down into three parts:

1. Nap Magic - This section discusses the importance of naps, the biological effect of naps and sleep on both children and adults, what happens during napping and sleep, and how to make a sleep log and a nap plan.
2. Newborn Babies - Discusses the biological needs of babies and how they sleep, then gives options to try to help your baby nap better.
3. Solving Napping Problems: Customized Solutions for Your Family - In this section, common napping problems, like catnapping (taking too short naps), nap resisting, changing napping schedules and frequency, are defined, and different styles of sleepers are discussed (in-arm sleepers, naptime nurslings).  Then there are suggestions to help you find the right solutions for your family.

I guess it’s becoming a common theme, but I was worried about Oliver’s napping.  He’s a night owl, often not falling asleep until 10 or 11 pm, and nap and sleeptime routines have never seemed to work for us.  I thought, maybe I’m just not someone who can do routines, I have enough trouble sticking to them myself, how can I implement them for Oliver?  But after reading this book, I’ve discovered that Oliver is a naptime nursling - he nurses to sleep at bedtime and naptime - and Pantley had this to say:

Very often, naptime nurslings do not have a specific nap schedule.  When they are fussy, they are breastfed or given a bottle or pacifier and if the fussiness was cause by tiredness, they fall asleep.

She goes on to give tips to try to “wean” your naptime nursling off nursing to sleep, but at the beginning of the section, she also says:

There are parents who put their children down for a nap this way from birth through toddlerhood.  So, if it works for you, consider yourself lucky that you have a wonderful way to help your child fall asleep.  On the other hand, if you wish to change this pattern or if your child only catnaps once you put him in bed, you can use the ideas in this chapter to gently change your routine.

Just like before, I realized that I’m happy with nursing Oliver to sleep, and I shouldn’t let external opinions affect how my husband and I choose to raise Oliver.  This is how she approaches all the different problems covered in the book.  First, they’re only a problem if you and your family think they’re a problem, and if you do, then she offers possible solutions to try out, letting you find the right one for your family.

I recommend this book for anyone responsible for putting newborns through young children down for naps.  She even says it’s okay (even good) for adults to nap.  So there’s also no need for me to feel guilty on those days when I lay down to sleep with Oliver in the middle of the day.  Reading this book was a good reminder of what I think is the most important thing we can do as parents: listen to our instincts over the advice of others.

You may also be interested in reading:

• The SAH vs. working parent debate (18)
• See Kai Run shoes (4)
• Pedipeds Shoes – Review and Giveaway! (34)
• Odenwaelder Babynest (0)
• Discount shoes and handbags at 6pm.com (1)

I’m not really sure what led me to buy Parking Lot Rules & 75 Other Ideas for Raising Amazing Children.  I guess it was the glowing Editorial Reviews on Amazon.com, as I bought it a couple months ago and as of today, there are only five customer reviews (4 of which gave 5 stars).

When it arrived, I eagerly started reading, and after only a couple rules, closed it up and placed it on my bookshelf.  I could tell almost immediately that this book was not for me.  I finally decided to pick it up again and read it all the way through to provide you with a review.

My opinion: it is not for parents practicing attachment parenting.  It may be useful to Ferberizer/Baby-Trainer parents.

Here are some of the rules that I most had something to say about:

#7 Almost Always Skip The First Thing That Comes To Mind

As parents, when we see our children falter, so often the first thing that comes to mind is a harsh or judgmental comment.

Oliver is only 17 months, so maybe I’m just too new a parent, but harsh and judgmental things don’t jump into my mind when he falters.  They don’t generally jump into my mind when people around me falter unless I’m already in a pretty foul mood.  I think perhaps it would be better, if this happens to you, to reflect on why criticism is the first thing that comes to mind.  I suggest that the next time it happens to you, try to examine what it is you yourself are feeling, and once you recognize what you are going through, maybe this will help you feel less critical in the future.

#10 Every Day Stay Healthy, Techniques to Avoid the Common Cold

This is one of many rules obsessed with germs and cleanliness.  While I agree that hand washing is important, I’m not going to have my child gargle with mouthwash every time he brushes his teeth (this does not reduce the chance of getting a cold anyways, and if you are using mouthwash with alcohol, could even encourage the growth of more aggressive bacteria in your child’s mouth), I’m not going to turn away another child with a cough or sniffle by giving them a cookie and sending them on their way until they “feel better,” nor will I instruct him to “blow, cough, spit, snort, tongue-scrap, whatever,” all extra mucus from his body as it is “a harbinger of ill health and an enemy of your child’s good health.”  If his nose is running, I’ll wipe it, but this other advice just seems a tad extreme.  Nor will I instruct him, as described in rule #12 No Hands To The Face or rule #13 Why Germs Love Money, that he should stay healthy by never touching his face or handling money.  Kids need to be exposed to some germs in order to develop healthy immune systems.  I believe that a harsh, anti-germ, philosophy of child-rearing is what has led in recent years to the increase in allergies, as the immune system starts attacking the allergens due to a lack of anything real to fight.

#15 The Excellent Question Game

I was driving my son Thomas to baseball practice a few years ago.  He was digging around the backseat of the car for change among the cookie crumbs and finally he asked me how much money I thought he had found.

Not intending to be mean or diminishing, I responded, “Well, that’s not really an excellent question, is it?”  He asked me, “Why not?”  I said, “Because you already know the answer.  An excellent question would be one where you do not know the answer.”

The author goes on to describe a game played with his extended family where the children asked questions and he would rate them as “Okay, Good, Great, or the ultimate ‘Excellent question!’”

While I think it’s great to encourage your children to be curious and question things, something about this rule rubs me the wrong way.  Maybe it’s that I’d like my child to come to his own conclusion about his questions, in his own time.

#23 Kids Court

Kids Court should be run like a real court.  Be incredibly just with your questions as well as your verdicts.  Be formal and respectful.

Kids court makes you the judge and jury in your children’s disagreements.  I don’t like the encouragement of adversarial roles nor the placement of the parent as the authority over the children.  This is because I believe in attachment parenting and that children and parents should work for a compromise together.  Solutions should be something all parties agree to, rather than there being a judgment on a winner and a loser.  That’s my philosophy and I’m not saying it’s right for everyone, but it is for my family.

#25 The Other Side Of The Freeway

This rule tries to teach your child to measure feelings.  One example the author offers is the day that he needed to drop his son off for a sleepover at a friends and there was a traffic jam on the other side of the freeway:

Knowing that I was now going to be very late for an appointment back at the office, I sighed and leaned over to my Sam.  “You see that mess over there?  I have to drive back in all that—just to get back to the office.”  He looked over at the backed-up freeway and said, “I’m so sorry, Dad.  You don’t have to take me…”  I smiled and said he could measure my love for him by looking at all those stoped cars.

After his son threw a Hooked on Phonics card at his face:

I did not say the first thing that came to my mind.  I did not say anything for ten seconds.  I did not raise my voice.  When I dabbed a spot of blood from my face, I looked over at him and whispered, “If I was a hitting daddy, I would be hitting you right now.”

While I like the idea of trying to give your children an idea of the size of your love, I find the freeway example loaded with guilt.  And the second example, I just find downright threatening.  I would respond in this situation by saying, “OW! That really hurts!  I don’t like it when things are thrown at me, it really hurts to get hit in the face.”  Instead of focusing on what could be happening to them, they are forced to focus on how their actions are making you feel, which is an important lesson, I think.

#27 First Bite/Last Bite

In this rule, the child is asked to take one bite of everything on offer, in reward for doing this, they get to take the last bite of anything on your plate that they wish to.  I disagree with rewarding a child with food.  We just enjoy our meals, escargot, goose liver pate, and Thai red curry included, and if Oliver wants to try them, he can, if he doesn’t, we don’t make him.  More often than not, he’s happy to eat everything we do.

#56 Five Very Effective Nonviolent Punishments

1. The Silent Treatment - child should be forbidden to talk or communicate in any way

2. Do NOT go to your room - make her room off limits

3. The writing punishment - have him write [a brief sentence] over and over and over

4. Make him apologize to the whole family

5. Have your child run laps

Social ostracism, drilling, embarrassment and corporal punishment do not fit into my philosophy of discipline.

What do you think of these rules?  Do you disagree with me?  I’m still a fairly new parent, so I’d love to hear your take.

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• Book Review: Parent Effectiveness Training (2)
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Tove Jansson was the author of the Finnish Moomin series of children’s books that include her beautiful, unique illustrations.  The books were originally written in Swedish, as she was part of the minority of Swedish-descended Finns.  She published the first Moomins book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, in 1945 during WWII.  Despite their age, these books hold up well to time and are just as interesting for adults as for kids.  They are recommended for children 7 and up.

The Finn Family Moomintroll is a collection of short stories and is a good place to start with this wonderful series.  Here’s an excerpt to get you started:

Chapter 1

In which Moomintroll, Snufkin, and Sniff find the Hobgoblin’s Hat; how five small clouds unexpectedly appear, and how the Hemulen finds himself a new hobby.

One spring morning at four o’clock the first cuckoo arrived in the Valley of the Moomins.  He perched on the blue roof of Moominhouse and cuckooed eight times—rather hoarsely to be sure, for it was still a bit early in the spring.

Then he flew away to the east.

Moomintroll woke up and lay a long time looking at the ceiling before he realized where he was.  He had slept a hundred nights and a hundred days, and his dreams still thronged about his head trying to coax him back to sleep.

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While I’m not working towards becoming a group leader for an Attachment Parenting International Support Group (at least not until I have a lot more parenting experience), I did find their required reading list interesting and immediately picked a book that I want to read from each of the categories.  I ordered a couple of them, and the first I have read is Good Nights by Jay Gordon, M.D. and Maria Goodavage.

Good Nights: The Happy Parents’ Guide to the Family Bed (and a Peaceful Night’s Sleep!) is about co-sleeping, aka bed-sharing, sleep-sharing, and the family bed.  We didn’t always co-sleep with Oliver.  He started out in a crib, it was only three feet away from me, and I’m such a light sleep that I’d wake as soon as he stirred, but it was still a separate bed.  When he needed to nurse, I would get up and bring him to my nursing station in the living room.  It wasn’t until we went to visit my in-laws for Oliver’s first Christmas and, due to an overloaded car, chose not to bring the travel crib, that we co-slept.  Oliver was about six months old at the time, and it was wonderful.  We never looked back.

The book, Good Nights, discusses the many, many benefits of co-sleeping, and the history of the practice.  It wasn’t until recently, history-wise, that we, in the west, put babies in cribs in separate rooms.  And even calling it a western practice doesn’t really fit.  Almost every parent I’ve met here in Germany co-sleeps.  In the US, it’s also more prevalent than many think.  When a child starts out in their own bed, but joins the parents during the night, that is one style of co-sleeping.

But I digress.  The book goes over things you should do to safely co-sleep, like stop smoking, don’t drink heavily or take drugs, and baby-safe your bed and bedroom.  It gives love life advice in a chapter entitled “Love in the Laundry Room” (basically, get creative outside of the bedroom).  It discusses why the “cry it out” methods aren’t ideal (would you let your husband cry out for you in the next room night after night and just ignore him?  So why is it okay to do this with your defenseless baby?). It gives advice for dealing with naysayers, nosy neighbors and pestering in-laws.  And finally, gives advice for weaning your child from the family bed, should you choose not to let him/her leave on their own.

This book is really great.  I sped through it in two days, neglecting things like housecleaning to keep reading (much to my hubby’s dismay).  I highly recommend it for parents planning on co-sleeping.  If you’re on the fence about co-sleeping, it’s a good read.  If you’re dead set against it, this book is probably not for you, but I’d ask you to look over the information on the Natural Family site and  Dr. Jay Gordon’s website, just to make sure it’s not right for you.

Finally, I leave with a quote from the book: “More than 60 percent of Americans allow their pets to sleep in bed with them on a regular basis, according to an extensive national survey.  If only our babies were lucky enough to be treated like the majority of our pets!” I’m not into sleeping with pets (not that there’s anything wrong with it), but I think a good retort if someone who sleeps with a pet is bugging you about co-sleeping is, “Dude, you sleep with your dog, don’t you?”

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I’m not sure how we discovered the Maisy books by Lucy Cousins, I was probably just browsing Amazon.co.uk, but somehow I ran across the Maisy mouse series of books and ordered one.  Oliver just loves them.  The lift-the-flap books are made of seemingly very lightweight cardboard, but are sturdy enough to handle toddler abuse without even a hint of damage, unlike most lift-the-flap books that die within a few days of arrival at our home.

The illustrations are cute and the books don’t get on my nerves if I have to read them for the 100th time… again.  If you haven’t already, check them out.  Heck, there’s even a Maisy fun club site for when your little one graduates to the internet.

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