• Young babies (birth to 6 months):

Pictures are a worthy enough substitute for the words your baby cannot yet write. Snap photos of your adorable little one in her grandparent-funded layette.  Your sister-n-law will know that you (and baby) appreciate the cute and useful gift of a teething ring when she sees a pic of your infant happily gnawing away.  Tuck these precious moments into your thank-you notes.

• Older babies and toddlers (6 – 24 months):

More active babies might need a more active medium to convey their delight with a new gift or toy: video.  Smart phones and small recorders make it easy to capture a special moment and email it within minutes.  Older toddlers can talk enough and follow simple directions long enough to participate in the filming — you two can work together to produce a sincere, simple “thank you!” shout-out that will make the recipient’s day.

• Two and Three year olds:

Let the scribbling begin!  Really.  Your youngster can “ready, aim, scribble” on a piece of paper, so let her.  On the first try, a two year-old might approach this task with the grace of Norman Bates, turned loose on another shower curtain; but by age 3, many children will have the muscular control to grasp a kid-sized (washable!) marker  and copy the example circle that you draw.  When she adds eyes and a smile to that circle, she will have written a powerfully accurate chronicle of how someone’s generosity made her feel.

• Preschoolers:

If, at this stage of note-writing, your child asks you to be the scribe, it’s very helpful for you to go along. Just make sure the words are all hers. Kiddie thoughts move much faster than little fingers. Reading back the note you’ve written on behalf of your child reinforces the magical connection between ideas and the words that represent them.

We know that a kid this age isn’t often in touch with her “inner editor.”  And you know what?  She don’t need an external one right now.  Let her experiment with letter-like squiggles, random letters, crooked letters, and invented spellings. That stuff is all developmentally appropriate at this stage.

Thank you for reading.

Some say that play is the work of children.

I agree. Sort of….

The developmental tasks accomplished through playing are what truly matter.

Equally important: What kind of co-worker are you Mommy? The hovering, scampering, secretarial type?  The strict foreman who keeps the trains running on time?  Or are you more of an over-qualified, underpaid, personal assistant to a diva?

Here’s what your kid is working on, and how you can really help:

Birth to First Birthday:

Your super-curious baby spends a lot of her time figuring out her place in the world.

In the first few months of her life, she experiments with causes and effects — everything from what happens when she smiles or cries, to what happens when she kicks her foot at the new crib mobile. In the second half of her first year, she becomes able to direct her curiosity and see it through to a result.  Like that toy you think you hid, or the cup you think you put a lid on…. remember Mommy, it’s her job to discover. It’s your job to control her environment to make sure she learns that life is interesting, comforting, and safe. Besides, within months, she will love imitating you so much that she’ll even help clean up her own splashes. Discipline? Save it for next year.

First Birthday to 2 years old:

Your super-independent baby thinks she’s got it all figured out, doesn’t she?

She walks now (just like you).  She talks now (just like you, she thinks). What does she need you for?  Diaper changes, but she won’t always admit that. At this age, your toddler discovers multiple ways to reach her goals. If she wants her blankie from the laundry pile, she might pull down the whole pile to get it closer to her, or she might climb the furniture to get herself closer to it.  Either way, she’s convinced she doesn’t need your help — except for when she does, right?  It’s your job to be patient for now, and avoid power struggles. Discipline should be about setting and keeping boundaries, not punishment.

2 years old to 3 & 4 years old:

Your super-social kid spends a lot of time figuring out everyone else’s business — even if she has to make some of it up.

At first, your child starts with simple imitation of actions she has seen. By ages 3 and 4, she and her friends will use sociodramatic play (or make-believe) to try on different personalities, and try out different situations. The simple body-oriented play of the first 24 months is expanded to symbolic play, which means that kids this age can hold something in their minds although the object isn’t really there.  You know — they pretend. Mommy’s job: to be a good stage mother.

Unlike talking, testing boundaries, or taming her impulses — falling in love won’t wait.  It’s the first thing she needs to be able to do.

You help your baby learn about love’s prerequisite — trust — when you:

• Provide an emotionally stable environment. If your infant’s human relationships are a source of comfort rather than stress, she learns life’s first love lesson.
• Create predictable care routines. A baby who knows how and when she will be cared for can use her mental energy for curiosity, exploring, smiling — not wondering what will happen next.
• Learn to recognize, then respond to, her cues and cries. For attachment to develop, baby needs protection from the emotional stress of disappointment or neglect.

You’ll know your are getting results from all your consistent, warm, nurturing interactions when you see the following mental and emotional responses:

• Your child begins to show a preference for you, and other familiar faces.
• She seeks out companionship — even before she can use words, she has other strategies for getting your attention.
• You feel connected to your baby when you talk, or play, and also during routine tasks like bathing and diapering.
• You and your baby focus attention together.  If you are engaging her in an activity, she is able to overcome a distraction and refocus on your shared activity.
• You and your baby focus attention on each other.  You make eye contact when you have a “conversation,” you giggle at the same things.

The process of loving and being loved begins with parents and other important people. Offer plenty of attention, and pay plenty of attention to baby’s responses.  Some children take longer to formulate a response, some children need less stimulation than others.

Falling in love truly is for the long-term. Someday you’ll know you have prepared your child well when you see her ability to make and keep friends; maintain a loyalty to herself when inevitable conflicts arise — yet continue to value her relationships; and find comfort in having companionship.

I’m not talking about the genuine awe to which parents (especially brand-new parents) succumb when they take a good, long, contemplative look at their offspring. Because infants come to us equipped engineered with strategies, reflexes, and tools that ensure their survival, they really are fascinating.

No doubt — they’re worthy of our respect, encouragement, understanding.  But daily applause?

Reality check.

The child-coronation movement got its start with the self-esteem literature popularized in the 1970’s, the decade in which most parents of today’s youngsters were born and/or raised.  In 2003, the Association for Psychological Science conducted a reality check on 15,000 scholarly self-esteem studies (as opposed to popular magazine articles or the likely innumerable commercial exploitations of the concept). The team of evaluators found only a tiny percentage of the scholarly articles to be scientifically sound.

From a review of only the reliable research, the team of evaluators concluded that being in possession of high self-esteem did not shore up life skills such as self-regulation, impulse control, resilience, academic achievement or it’s offspring: career success.  The lead researcher did gain an insight to parents’ willingness to provide their children so many self-esteem subsidies: praise for one’s child can also serve as affirmation for oneself.

Another problem with praise is that it’s not widely credible.  Young children hear parents’ praise and easily accept it (which sets up other cycles about achievement and mastery), while school-age children analyze the compliments of teachers for hidden meanings.  By middle-school age, students believe that a teacher’s praise is actually encouragement toward better work rather than accurate assessment of mastery.  To these students, praise signals an inverse relationship between the teachers words and her perception of the student’s ability.

Overpraise under-develops:

Persistence. Babies and toddlers have a lot of work to do.  Things like standing up, handling items, or scaling stairs are motor skills that they have to learn with bodies that change shape quickly.  Ongoing development requires cycles of learning and re-learning. Hold some of the applause for things that are above and beyond normally unfolding development.

Work ethic. Studies have shown that students who received more praise also shortened their time investment in work tasks, but increased reliance on body language and verbal cues to and from their teachers. In Part II of this series, we will look at the difference between praising a trait, and praising an action.

Resilience. Mistakes create a break in the action, a pause. During that pause, there can be acknowledgement of the undesirable outcome (the mistake), reflection on what went wrong, analysis, adjustments to strategy, persistence, and ultimately, correction. Whether the task is the stacking of blocks by a two-year old, or improving the grades of a 17 year-old, the process is the same. The sound of disproportionate praise drowns out that important, often internal process.

Tomorrow:  In Praise of Praise, Part II of a Series

… is to let him undress. Surely you’ve noticed that your kid agrees with me.

I’ll admit (because he won’t) that undressing seems to undo the point of getting dressed in the first place.

But your toddler isn’t confused at all. From his point of view, getting undressed always follows getting dressed.  I know you think the day should elapse before changing outfits, but he thinks an hour is long enough.

Just remember —  you encouraged him.  Do you recall when he was about 12 months old, and began holding out his arm when you approached him with a shirt?  Charming wasn’t it?  You praised him didn’t you? Well, he believed you, and continued developing his self-care skills, especially the part he could, ahem, pull off by himself.

Mixed milestones

Here’s the thing:  Passivity is easier than activity.  Receptive language shows itself sooner than expressive language. Being able to get oneself dressed is more complicated than getting undressed, depending on the garment.

Removing a sock is a snap for a 12 month-old child.  But he typically won’t even try to put socks on for another year.  At 30 months, your child can unbutton or unzip.  But having the dexterity to even get the zipper started is about a year away. Buttoning a real shirt — completely — also emerges around 3 1/2 years of age. What is important about every attempt is that your child wants to learn to take responsibility for himself.

Ways you can help:

• Be patient. As I’ve cautioned before, toddler ambitions often mature before toddler abilities. This frustrates young kids, so they need their big people to be on an even keel.
• Talk about clothing. New words to learn:  socks, hat, plaid, orange, zipper, earmuffs.  Offer new words, offer him a turn to say the names of items, but don’t quiz your toddler.
• Talk about body parts. Socks go on feet, a hat belongs on the head, earmuffs are for ears, orange is …orange-y — you get the idea.
• Perhaps dressing and undressing a doll or stuffed animal will help your child practice the skills he wants to acquire.

Did I mention you should be patient?

You will see outfits that don’t match. Maybe even outfits that don’t fit. There are more worse dilemmas than a 3 year-old who cannot match up clothing — such as a 3 year-old who can.

Take my word for it: that kid will someday turn into a 15 year-old who wants to go to the mall.

Some babies need constant hugs.

And sometimes Mommy just needs baby to sleep.  For a little longer then she did yesterday.  Please?

You and your baby want the same thing: contentment.  For baby, the ultimate contentment, the ultimate hug, was what she experienced when she lived in her own apartment, (aka “the womb”).  Since your newborn can’t go “home” again, her new neighbors (aka “family”) will just have to find ways to help her settle in until she learns how to comfort herself.

Swaddling a baby in a lightweight, preferably 100% natural-fiber blanket or sheet will help you both achieve your goals. Baby will feel safer and self-contained again.  Mom will be able to relax and trust the longer nap that baby drifts into.

As your baby adjusts to daily rhythms, relationships, and your cues (she’ll begin to react to the signals of meal time), she will also learn to associate comfort, then security, then a good sleep, with the very process of having you wrap her snugly.

Babies show up equipped with strategies and tools to help them survive.  Everything from way extra brain cells, to a willingness to suck the milk out a knuckle, to the Moro reflex, a mechanism that causes a new baby to flail her limbs (in search of balance? in an attempt to cling to a big person?) when startled by a feeling of falling or other sudden events.

Like I said, it’s a reflex — therefore, not entirely under your newborn’s control.  Babies have been known to wake themselves from an otherwise successful nap with twitches and involuntary movements.  Parents need to find that delicate balance between a snug swaddle and baby’s personal needs.  Some infants will find it tragically disruptive not to be able to access a hand or thumb for sucking (which is self-soothing, and should be encouraged).

The words “swaddle” and “swath” have the same Old English linguistic roots.  In agriculture, a swath is a strip of land that has been demarcated or cleared.  The ancients used strips of fabric to wrap around newborns, thereby binding babies’ arms to their torsos.  Modern updates of the swaddling method are obviously much safer than the possibilities of loosened fabrics strips and the potential dangers.

For an important list of how-to’s (AND how not-to’s) on swaddling, see the MommyGarten.com blogroll for a link to a site that is all about the swaddle.

to be continued…..

Even our baby’s blankets have to multitask these days.

In addition to providing warmth or comfort for baby, and a pink-blue gender clue for admiring strangers, a baby’s blanket ought to earn its keep.  It should make Mommy’s job easier, and baby’s life a little more interesting.

Like a good toy or book or nanny, a good blankie will meet more than just one of your baby’s developmental needs.

Job 1:  Transitional object

The first year of your child’s life brings rapid, sometimes startling changes.  First there’s that whole relocation thing. She liked her original home just fine, although things were getting a little cramped.  So, she moved out — got evicted, really.

Once unpacked, your newborn worked very hard to get accustomed to her new digs, and all those new faces peering at her.  Much to her dismay, baby discovered that big people like schedules, bright lights, sudden sounds, and removing diapers right after she gets ‘em get nice and warm.  Life-altering events awaited her — milestones like  finding her feet, finding out she could walk on them,  hearing the word “no” a lot, then realizing she could say it too, by golly.

Every transition takes your baby farther from … well, farther from you, Mommy.  A blanket or stuffed friend (or ritual, even) that she can hold onto, when she can’t be held by you, will help her to do some of her own consoling for herself.  An important life skill to learn.

The stability of the transitional object (I really mean “exclusivity” I suppose) is important.  Baby is no longer a part of Mommy, but her blankie or doll can be a part of her life that nobody else controls.  That is why you’ll see the sweetest of babies become lionesses when an unauthorized person (by that I mean anyone in the whole universe — you too, granny) touches, looks at too long, or threatens to wash her blankie.

A blankie with a good work ethic will be employed by your household for a long time, perhaps even longer than you think.  When my teenager recently had wisdom tooth surgery, her conscientious doctor sent her home with antibiotics.  I was particularly relieved to have germ-killers — not for the surgery or the stitches, but for the 16 year-old, too frail to machine-wash, see-through blankie waiting at home to companion her through a difficult day, just as it always had.

to be continued……

Then he’ll follow you with his eyes.  Within a couple of months, he will smile.  At you.  On purpose. While he’s awake.

That is called the “social smile.”  And it’s a big deal when he decides to lay one on you.

The social smile is such a huge milestone because it brings together many other elements of your child’s development.

Cognitive Development and Body Awareness

Let’s review:  Your baby smiles at you, on purpose, while he’s wide awake — he clearly recognizes your visual representation (aka “face”).  He has been carefully observing your mouth and facial expressions, then pairing that information with the sounds of what you say.  The rhythms, too. A baby who smiles socially, or smiles back at you when you smile, knows how to take turns.

Emotional Development

Your prompt, consistent attention to his needs means that as the newborn develops into a settled baby, he can stress less about his problems, and enjoy life, his body, his family, his home a lot more. Your smiling tot with the good memory enjoys the experiences he associates with you, and knows that the love fest goes both ways.  His smile is the product of your investment in plenty of pleasurable face-to-face time.

Social Development

Your amazing baby instinctively knows what adults need to research in order to realize:  that a large part of our communication is non-verbal.   A baby capable of the social smile is a baby who has the maturity to ask for what he wants (more face time!), in a positive way.  He has outgrown his 100% reliance on the earlier strategies of cries and cues.

For babies, “smile” is a big word, and a big part of their growing language and social skills. The baby who learns to take turns will be able to make “conversation.”  The toddler who takes turns will be able to make friends.

Those two things are one and the same for young children.

Efficient little babies like to check things out with the most sensitive, high-precision tools they have: their mouths.

That’s why it is so important to choose durable toys that are not choking hazards, that are not painted with poison (toxic paints), and do not contain lead.

Your baby’s mouth is a versatile tool.

At first her mouth gulped a lungful of air for her first cry, then it gulped nourishment to fuel her first days outside the womb.   One of the first things she could do was search for, and learn the feel of, your nipple — using her mouth.  Before long she began using her mouth to coo with you, soothe herself (hooray for thumbsucking!), and practice an important life-long social skill, the smile.

Your baby’s mouth is an engineering marvel.

She even has extra tastebuds in that busy little mouth of hers.  The tastebuds are distributed in a way that allows your baby to taste more, and enjoy longer, the fluids she takes in she’s in the traditional breastfeeding positions.  Those facts mean that a young child’s mouth will be more sensitive to texture and temperature, as well as taste.

Mouth exploration is a developmental stage.

A valid one.  A necessary one.  The ability to bring hands to her mouth (2 months-ish) combines with the intense interest in bringing objects to her mouth (3 months-ish).  Once she gets the object to her mouth, she will explore it with her tongue and lips.  There is a lot of information that can be gleaned from the munching that babies naturally do to a new object.  At about 5 or 6 months of age, when she’s more mobile, she’s also in more danger.  A thorough saftey-proofing is necessary.  As your older baby learns to eat solids, emerging teeth get in on the action, too.

The Year of the Mouth culminates in indispensable life skills: learning how to pucker up to kiss loved ones, eating, brushing her teeth, and someday, applying lip gloss.

But somebody has to regulate his food.  For the rest of his life.  And if not him, then who?

Like every other life skill discussed on this blog, your child will develop this self-care skill of healthy food intake in stages. There are simple ways to tell when he’s ready for more responsibility.

Watch the way he uses his hands.

Even before baby officially discovers their usefulness as toys, he will suck his hands to comfort himself.  I advise parents to help a young baby find his hands, especially if he will be able to self-comfort as a result.  By 2 months old, he’ll be very good at bringing his empty hands to his mouth while lying on his back. The next skill that will be useful for self-feeding is his ability (at around 3 months of age) to bring an object (that he’s already holding) to his mouth.

Read his lips.

Baby will use his tongue to push out and reject food that doesn’t please him, starting at 5 or 6 months. If you offer a cracker to your 6 or 7 month-old, he will consume it by making a munching action with his mouth.  At 9 months, he will bite at a cookie, but not bite all the way through.  At 12 months, he will be able to complete the biting of a soft cookie.  Because your baby will be able to (and will want to) try out a variety of softer foods, it is crucial that you only offer foods that are not choking hazards.

How does he respond to food tools?

Your infant will recognize bottle or breast at around 3 months old.  By 4-6 months old, he will pat the bottle or breast during mealtimes.  Between the ages of 4 to 7 months, or depending on when you and your pediatrician decide to offer solids, your baby will begin to open his mouth when you present a spoon.   A couple of months after that (9-ish months old), he’ll reach for the spoon. He might want to imitate what you do (not for nutritional purposes, but for the joy of stirring), or he might just bang the spoon on his plate.  His impulse to control food tools (and therefore, what goes into his body) is crucial.  Honor this emerging preference.  Don’t insist on controlling the spoon once he reaches this stage.

Bottoms up!

I’m referring to your child’s use of a cup, not his resistance to early toilet training pressure. At the age of 6 months (ish), your baby will drink from a cup, if you hold it.  A few months later, he will be ready to hold it for himself.  By his first birthday, he will want to attempt holding the cup, and you should let him.  Please expect some spilling.  If you can wipe off those slippery, just-had-lunch hands before he tries, you’ll see more success and less frustration.

Young children’s ambitions often exceed their skills.  If you let your child practice the small skills and the small choices, he will grow more smoothly into the big ones.  And remember — nobody wins a food fight with a baby.